If you’re one of our fabulous customers, I’m sure you have noticed that we have lettuce available every week of the season for the CSA shares and our Orono Farmers Market booth. Lettuce is something so basic, so mundane seeming, and so ingrained into our work schedule that I almost take it for granted when we go out to harvest every week.
I figured, what’s mundane to us farmers would be interesting to everyone else, right? On May 26, 2014 I decided to follow a particular weekly lettuce planting from seed to harvest with pictures. Okay, fine, easily done, I thought. Ordinarily the job of nurturing seeds into salads is pretty straightforward and uneventful as it is 99% of the time for us during our lettuce-growing season of April and October. But, this time something amazing happened that I just wish I had gotten a picture of…
May 26: made soil blocks, put seeds in, and set flats in the greenhouse
June 3: Lettuce seeds have put up their first tiny leaves…
June 12: In the warm calm setting of the greenhouse, the first true leaves are starting…
June 18: Moved baby lettuces outside of the greenhouse to "harden off" and prepare to be transplanted into the field… They're getting bigger!
June 21: Graduation: Lettuce's big day! Transplanting into the "real world" of the fields…
June 28: They're settling in to their first week of outdoor growth in the "real world". Can you see the weeds that have sprouted up around the lettuce seedlings?
June 29: Weeding time! Hoing after about a week or so in the ground to keep back the weeds from bullying the lettuce heads…
July 4: Independence Day: our lettuces growing bigger free from the constraints of weeds…
July 14: Happily getting bigger every day…
July 15: Here's where the story gets interesting. We had a severe thunderstorm come through the farm around 6pm and it dropped 2.5 inches of the hardest pounding rain (no hail, though) that we've ever seen in less than one hour. A lot of the soil washed out on our waiting-to-germinate beet and carrot plantings and that was the extent of the damage, we initially thought.
But then we noticed the lettuce in this planting… Here's where I wish I had gotten a photo: The lettuces in this particular planting all looked like they had been bruised by the hard rain, with raised purple, water soaked lesions on the leaves.
In one word: Unsalable.
OH MAN! This was the lettuce planting I was following for my blog and now we would not even be able to harvest it!!
But, I guess I should have a little more faith in the living plants that we take care of as farmers…
July 22: Our lettuces are ready for their first harvest for the CSA!!! Wait, weren't these guys all battered and bruised by the mean thunderstorm last week? Yes they were, but not any more! I couldn't believe my eyes when we went to cut the lettuce for the shares that they had actually healed up their bruises and were as good as new!
July 23, July 25, and July 26: These amazing lettuce heads that came through all of the above are in your CSA shares this week and at the Orono Farmers Market. From seed to salad is truly a remarkable process that I will definitely think about differently in the future.
Speaking of the future, today is Monday so I'm off to seed another batch of lettuce and start all over again! Enjoy your Ripley Farm salads this week and every week for 16 weeks July through October!