We have several varieties of lettuce out here on the plot. Some are supposedly heat hardy, but all lettuce grows best at cooler times of the season, spring and fall. We try to provide our CSA holders with leaf lettuce as often as we can--even in the heat of the summer--so the farm crew and worker shareholders become very familiar with transplanting this particular crop! If you grow lettuce in your home garden, you can harvest a little at a time by snapping off the outermost leaves a little at a time. We harvest by cutting the whole plant from the stem at ground level. This means that, after harvest, the bed gets prepared for another crop, either a cover crop or another vegetable crop. If left alone the bed will sometimes miraculously yield a few second-round heads of lettuce that grew from the first cutting.
Some weeks, our CSA share will include bags of "mixed greens" or baby lettuce leaves harvested from a more densely seeded bed of lettuce seed.
No comments:
Post a Comment