First Boxes

Hope you all are enjoying your first boxes! Apparently it’s monsoon season here. The rain just keeps on coming. All this precipitation has prevented us from getting out to the garden to pull weeds as much as we would like. It has however given us plenty of time to work on building an ark. We may need it…depending on how many more inches of rain we’ll be getting. Last night we received two torrential downpours which caused that song ‘Five Feet High and Rising’ to get stuck in my head, briefly turned the hoophouse into a shallow river and gave the lettuce a good splattering of grit.


Of Lettuce and Grit
Last year we had quite a lot of grit in our lettuce and I spent many hours trying to rinse it out. In an effort to reduce the grit, this year I mulched the lettuce with chopped grass. It worked well and I think you’ll find the lettuce relatively grit-free…unless it rains really hard right before your delivery, as it did last night. This morning when I went to pick lettuce for the St. Paul folks it was definitely gritty. If you find yourself with lettuce in your CSA box after a hard rain you’ll want to degritify. A good way to do this is to fill a large bowl with cool water and dump your lettuce into it. Swish the lettuce around a bit then let it sit. The sand grains should sink to the bottom.