Week 14, Sept 5 - 10, 2011

In your CSA bag

~ Potatoes baby reds (1 quart)
~ Cukes (4 pickling)
~ Kohlrabi (2) or cabbage (1)
~ Corn (4)
~ Bibb Lettuce "Nancy" (1)
~ Onions (1)
~ Peppers (1)
~ Chard (1 bunch)
~ Kale (1 bunch)
~ Tomatoes (1)
~ Flowers U-pick only shades of pink (3-6 stems)

Recipe of the Week
Grilled Chicken with Rice and Fruit in Lettuce Wraps

News from the Field

We are so happy to have lettuce back again.  When it gets too hot, like it did 3 weeks ago, all the lettuce tastes bitter and begins to bolt.  When it bolts it turns from a beautiful head of leaf lettuce into a pointed mini Christmas tree shape and the center core gets really large and it will rot very easily and it tries to make new seeds in an attempt to replace itself.  That's when we plow it under and move to the next planting.

The Lettuce Story

We start lettuce from raw or pelleted seed.  Raw seeds are extremely tiny about half the size of a sesame seed.  This makes them very hard to only plant one seed per cell.  It can be done with tweezers and a lot of patience.  Pelleted seeds have organic clay around each individual seed and ends up being little round balls big enought to pick up one at a time and place in an individual cell.  Jay pushes all the individual seeds into the soil plugs to get them started in the greenhouse.  It only takes a week or two for the lettuce to begin to sprout.  It needs to be in the brightest sun when this happens so it will not strecth for sunlight and get leggy.  It gets watered daily or more if hot out and when the plugs are about 4 inches tall they are transplanted into the fields.

We like to try different varieties.  This year you have had many different kinds of lettuce already.  Several Green Leaf:  Black Seeded Simpson and Tropicana.  Red leaf:  new Red Fire.  Romaine:  Pic 714 and Jericho.  Boston is also known as butter head or Bibb:  Nancy (XL) and deer tongue (pointed and smaller).  Our personal favorites are in the category called Summer Crisp, a cross between leaf lettuce and romaine.  We especially like "Nevada" that has a green whorled shape and "Magenta" with a red tinged edge.  Jay just started a new planting of Magenta that will be transplanted into the greenhouses for fall and early winter.  We will also plant more greens and spinach that will continue to grow inside the greenhouses and also under row covers, hopefully until February.  It's time for salads again before the tomatoes go by.

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Thanks!
Anne