Planting thousands of lettuce and onions

In between last week’s rain and the rain forecasted for tomorrow we’ve only had two days where we were able to transplant in the field.

We took full advantage of the two days to plant over 6,000 seedlings in the field.

The largest portion of what we planted was lettuce for the late winter. It was a wide array of varieties from green little gems to red leaf and red butter.

The cooler weather is perfect for the lettuce as they will not get too stressed out but they will grow slowly over the next couple of months.

We overwinter a portion of the onions that we grow, mainly for spring onions. We grow the very delicious Walla Walla onion to harvest in the spring when it is sweeter along with a red onion that we can harvest fresh or cure.

The Early Red Burger onion we plant in the fall and then we harvest and cure them in June. It is a delicious flattened onion perfect to make even slices.

Additionally we transplanted some shallots as a trial since we haven’t had great harvests when we plant them in the spring. Another farm in the area plants them in the fall so we decided to try it out since our yields have been way too small for what we are planting.

Getting all those plants into the greenhouse emptied about half of what we had in the greenhouse to start the week. There is just a couple of successions of lettuce left in there along with a few trays of spinach.

Last week’s rain on the farm was just under an inch and tomorrow rain it is forecasted to be about an inch over the course of the day.

That amount of rain means we won’t be able to do any field work on Thursday so we are doing as much the last couple of days ahead of the rain. While its raining we will be able to do office work and then be back in the field harvesting Friday for the farmers market.

Coming along with the rain is a couple days with lows in the mid-40s which most likely means the end of the season for the basil as it doesn’t like temperatures under 50 degrees.

Next week we are starting to harvest olives for our 2025 olive oil and we still have a little bit of olive oil from 2024 left so starting today we will be having it on sale at the farmers market. It will be $20 for the 500 mL bottle.

The olive trees look to have a much smaller amount of olives on them compared to last year. A number of other farmers have very light yields as well but some have good crops.

While harvesting the broccolini last Friday we noticed a few crowns of broccoli sized up and harvested them for the farmers market. We should start to have more over the coming weeks.

In addition we are starting to harvest the cone cabbage as they have started to size up and fill out in the last couple of weeks.