200lbs of lettuce - Grown and Gone!

Damian harvesting lettuce

So, we planted a lot of lettuce this season with the hope that we could sell it and we did! So far, we have sold over 200lbs of lettuce to restaurants and farmers markets. It has been a fun challenge!

Planting, watering, and weeding around the lettuce was the easy part. However, harvesting and packaging lettuce was the most difficult part of the process. Head lettuces are fragile creatures. You cannot scrub them like a potato or be rough with them. You have to pick, wash, box them with a gentle touch otherwise leaves will break and the lettuce will be bruised.

Submerging the lettuces in cold water

Another thing is that lettuce has to be stored cool and dry or else it will wilt and become inedible. Lettuce actually "breathes" and has what's called a respiration rate. We need to cool it down immediately after picking it in order for it to maintain its crispness. This posed a problem for us because we don't have a refrigerator or a walk in cooler at the farm. What we do have is cold well water, so we decided to pick it and immediately submerge it in cold water to cool it down. This seemed to work! After cooling the lettuces down in cold water, we gently shook them dry and boxes them up. Once again, we couldn't be rough boxing them up and had to delicately package them so that none of them would be bruised. We did all of this under our canopy tent so that the sun wouldn't heat them up after the cooling process. Finally, Damian quickly puts the boxes in his truck and makes a immediate delivery. We don't want the lettuces sitting outside for too long and we wanted to get them into the walk in coolers at the restaurants or markets that we delivered to.


We have put effort and time into growing the lettuces and want to make sure the final product looks and tastes good as well as holds up over time for our customers. We want to be delivering lettuces that stay fresh for up to 2 weeks not ones that go bad after 3 days. Thankfully, we have been learning the best practices for doing that from workshops, books, and our other farmer friends.  With farming lettuces, we are trying to learn and practice the best ways to do everything with the hope that we will continue to sell more lettuces in the future!

Damian picking off the outer leaves

Me packaging the lettuce

Trying not to squish any of the lettuces

Boxing and weighing the lettuces at the end of the process