We’ve had a great winter Lettuce season at Terra Firma so far, and it looks very likely to continue through the rest of the winter and well into spring — off and on.  That’s pretty rare for us.

Unlike with a winter crops like Broccoli, which almost always grows well here, lettuce success is never a given for us. That’s unfortunate for our farm, as Americans eat more much lettuce than broccoli. It’s the second “most eaten” vegetable aside from the unchallenged king of the produce aisle — tomatoes. Even in a good year like this one, we only manage to plant lettuce on around 5 acres out of the 150 acres we have available for it. If we could reliably grow more, for a longer season,it would really help out both economically and agronomically as a rotation crop.  But it’s a risky crop for us, and we mostly grow for you — our CSA subscribers.

Unfortunately, our climate is often inhospitable for lettuce. First of all, it’s too hot here for half of year, as lettuce leaves become bitter when temperatures approach 100 degrees. The seeds also fail to sprout if the soil is too warm.

That leaves just six months or so of the year when we can even attempt to grow lettuce. Most of those months are in the winter. But many years, it’s also too cold for lettuce at TFF in the winter. Temperatures below 32 degrees when the air is dry cause freeze damage to the leaves. On the other hand, if it’s too wet and warm, fungal diseases attack the plants. We’ve had Winters where we lost most of our lettuce to freezing, or fungus, or a combination of the two.

We can reliably plant lettuce in the fall and harvest in November and December, but after that, it all depends on the weather. We also have a short window to plant again in mid-winter, which gives the crop enough time to grow and mature before summer heat arrives. But many years it never dries out enough during that time period.

As if all of those obstacles were not enough, we also have lettuce predators: Jack Rabbits and Canadian Geese absolutely love the crop, and can completely destroy whole rows of small plants in a single day or night. We have two ranches where we no longer even attempt to grow the crop because of the resident populations of these pests.

So far, though, this has been a “Goldilocks” winter for lettuce production at TFF. It wasn’t hot enough in the fall to cause too many problems, and the coldest weather we had (so far) was immediately after two weeks of storms. When the plants and soil are wet, it keeps the plants from getting as cold as they otherwise might. And the rain, copious as it has been, has been alternating nicely with sunny and dry weather that has been good for harvesting.

There are hundreds of varieties of lettuce seed available to grow, but many of the most common ones are extra-sensitive to the types of weather we have here during the winter. We have identified just a few varieties that grow well here. You are probably pretty familiar with by now: “Little Gem” are the mini-romaine type. We also added a great new Red Oak/Red Butter cross this year that tastes great, looks beautiful, and has been performing fantastically.

Our third main variety of lettuce is a Red Butter variety that was created especially for organic farmers, with great tolerance for both cold and heat as well as disease resistance. You haven’t seen much of it in your boxes yet, because the seed we used in early fall was poor quality and failed to germinate. It took a month to figure that problem out and get replacement seed, but we did finally get some Red Butter planted in October and the first of it is in your boxes today. We’ll be harvesting that plus more of the other two through March.

The weather this year also cooperated for winter planting, so we now have a nice field of lettuce that was seeded in January and are preparing this week to do one more planting. While we may still have a gap between the fall-planted lettuce and those fields, it will likely be a short one.

If you like lettuce, you should be pretty happy with your boxes for the rest of this winter and early spring. We are sure happy to have a relative abundance of it this year, and almost perfect conditions for growing it.

Thanks,

Pablito