We haven't had much lettuce available for the past couple weeks and we thought we’d take a moment to explain the factors that made that happen. We have more lettuce that should be ready very soon!
Not everything we do here on the farm goes 100% according to plan and often times mistakes take a little bit of time to show up. As usual in life there were a confluence of factors that made our lettuce supply low. Let’s go through them.
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The Weather: This is the biggest factor and as you all know, it’s been pretty hot this summer and especially for the last month or so. MPR News reported this morning that we’ve now had 32 days of over 90 degrees this summer and that is the most since the late 1980s. Lettuce doesn’t do well in the heat and although we have varieties and techniques that help us grow lettuce despite the heat this summer proved too much.
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Increased Demand: We’ve been going through our lettuce faster than any year before by a lot. We plant every week to have a continual supply but we’ve been going through it so fast. We’ll plan to plant more next season.
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Watering Mistake: A missed irrigation just after transplanting lettuce in early August set some of our lettuce back by 1-2 weeks. Sometimes mistakes take awhile to show up!
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Disease/Bug Pressure: When the weather isn’t ideal the disease and bug pressure usually ramps up. We’re seeing that now with our current planting of lettuce which reduces our overall availability.
In most cases, our lettuce planting plan would allow us to manage for 1-2 of the above factors at once but with all of them hitting us at once we just don’t have enough lettuce to meet demand until our next planting is ready. That won’t be long and with cooler temps in the forecast the lettuce should grow really quickly!
