A windy time harvesting lettuce
Last Wednedday it appeared that the red butter lettuce was not going to be ready to begin harvesting until this week.
When we went to harvest the other lettuce varieties on friday we noticed that the red butter was ready to be harvested and picked some for market which people loved.
More of that red butter is ready this week along with the green and red leaf that already was ready.
Red butter lettuce is our favorite of the larger lettuces we grow because of the flavor of it and the softness of the leaves. It has its own delicious flavor and even though not as crunchy as the other varieties it melts in your mouth.
It is always so exciting to have all the lettuces back at the market as some people love the larger varieties and others want the smaller leafed little gem lettuce.
Primarily the bronze little gem is the one we are harvesting but we have even begun to harvest a few green ones.
They are growing very well and we are aiming to stay on top of the harvest so none of them bolt and go bad.
This past week we have been doing a lot of planting on the farm of lettuce, bunching greens, broccoli, cabbage, parsley and garlic for green garlic.
Every variety of lettuce grows slightly different so each week we have a different amount of trays of lettuce to plant. The lettuce field is a patchwork of the varieties at different stages of growth.
The bunching greens of chard, dino kale, red russian kale and collards is the second planting of them that won’t be ready until late December likely. The idea of having a second succession is so that when it is ready to harvest we can give the first succession some time off from being harvested to recover.
In the winter when it is colder and there is less daylight the plants grow back slower so we need more plants to harvest the same amount weekly.
We plant garlic twice during the fall with the early planting being what we will harvest in the spring for green garlic. We take the small garlic heads from this summer’s harvest and separate the cloves which we then plant.
In the next couple of weeks we will plant garlic for cured heads which we get through a big order Terra Firma Farm places.
Filling the field with all the fall veggies also means that there is lots of weeds coming in. We have been hard at work weeding in between having to irrigate the crops as the more time the veggie have to compete with the weeds the longer it will take them to grow.
Over the last couple of days the wind has picked up on the farm with Tuesday being up to 23 miles an hour. It is not fun at all to work in the wind especially with the fields around us having been converted from walnut orchards to row crops over the past years.
The field just north of us was sunflowers this year but those were harvest in early September for their seeds so its not able to be a wind break. Right now it is a bare field and will likely stay that way until being planted in the spring.
Wind can stress out the plants by drying them out so we have to keep them watered to allow the roots to pull it up while the leaves are being dried out by the wind.
The seeding in the greenhouse and field is slowing down with only one week left for both of them. The days are getting shorter so to have much growth over the winter getting everything planted in the field by the end of October is crucial.
