How To Grow Lettuce in Summer (No-Till)

hey guys Parma Jesse here so no matter if you're a homesteader or a professional grower growing summer lettuce is always kind of a good idea right like the lettuce tastes delicious in the summer with your tomatoes and your peppers and all those good things but it also sells really well at market so it's worth investing a little time in growing summer lettuce so let's talk about how to do it [Music] first I just want to say before we jump into this video if you like this kind of content make sure to subscribe also I want to give a shout out to the sort of my micro mentors on some are growing in terms of lettuce production and I'm gonna link to all their instagrams below because they're really inspiring farmers in general and you should just get to know them if you want to be a you know if you want to be a professional grower you are a professional grower Eric Schultz from steadfast farm has been a huge inspiration to me I interviewed him last year for growing for market article I also interviewed ray Tyler who wrote a little ebook about some tips on summer growing and then also Elliot's elder who have already shouted out in a video who helped me with that same article and he is at fair share farm in North Carolina so check them out I'll link to all of them in the show notes and alright let's talk about this summer lettuce thing so the first thing you really have to consider when it comes to growing summer lettuce is the seed it's it's not just any lettuce grows in the summer you need to have one that is sort of adapted for summer growing you know slightly higher germination temperature or has a you know is slower to bolt doesn't get as bitter that can be an issue with summer lettuce so the first thing is selecting the right seed we grow a few different ones right now we're really heavy on salad Nova which is the one that is right here below me salad Nova has been a really good crop for us so far this year it's really our first year with it we did a lot of summer varieties last year and we had some good luck with it but we're really trying salad over this year full-on so I'm excited about it so far the yield has been good and we've really liked the flavor and the texture they hold up really well like if you're selling this to chefs they're gonna really love how it stands up on the plate so so selecting summer hardy crops is definitely going to be your first line of defense against the heat your second line of defense is really gonna be not direct seeding you can direct seeded in the summer time if you hit the timing right and you're in the right environment lettuce has something called thermal dormancy so essentially it goes dormant beyond a certain temperature and I think that temperature is roughly 80 to 85 degrees but when it Clips as that temperature when the soil eclipse is that temperature won't germinate so you really need to think about that when it comes to starting your own lettuce I think it's good to point out that that thermal dormancy element the same thing applies to jerk to start so if you start a bunch of soil blocks or a bunch of cell trays and then put them in your greenhouse where it's 90 degrees or 100 degrees they're not gonna terminate any better than they will in the field we often put ours in the cooler overnight another tip I got from Ray Tyler one of many is put them in the cooler overnight or put them in the cellar and that's what Elliot seldinger was doing at least for a while or build a German and germination chamber to kind of get them to that optimal range where they're more likely to germinate at a higher percentage so we'll actually put ours in the cooler overnight and then take them out and leave them in the in the shed in our little wash pack shed which is covered on a concrete slab so it's cooler and it's a more consistent temperature and we almost always have great germination I mean weed 99% this is lettuce right here right there that we direct seeded we direct seeded that when the temperatures were going to be you know a little bit more mild we had a nice cold front come through about I guess it was probably three weeks ago two or three weeks ago so we were able to direct seed a little bit of lettuce I like the direct seeding because I can use the the the green quick cut greens harvester on it and it goes in the harvest goes really fast so I don't necessarily think the direct seeding is is always the best option for for summer growing in fact I really like transplants we know we're moving away a lot from doing any sort of direct seeding any more than we have to things like carrot some lettuce in the spring and that sort of thing but we really like transplants so you can see here's a bunch of transplants that's a lettuce right there we just stuck in the middle of these are herbs dill here and then cilantro and basil and some other things in this line but then we stuck in it we snuck in some some a cat and we snuck in some salad over there because the transplants you can harden them off in the Sun so this is something we'll go look at my greenhouse in a second but basically you want to grow your transplants as big as possible the bigger the transplant the better the survival like the better the transplant not the bigger but the better the transplant the better their survival so you want to grow as nice of a transplant as you can so that when you stick it in the soil it's kind of halfway there or a quarter of the way there when it comes to actually producing goo starts is that you want to make sure to harden them off is leaving them out in the Sun you know in the hot heat of the Sun for as long as you can a few days at least you need to keep the mist at that whole time you need to make sure that the crop is getting lots of of watering and cooling off but it has to get adapted to that really really hot Sun after it comes out of the greenhouse so let me show you we've got we don't have any hardening off right now we should but maybe I'll do that today so we've got some lettuce in here that's just in the greenhouse which we have rimae draped over our greenhouse to kind of block a little bit of the intensity of the Sun so we've got lettuce there and then we've got lettuce here getting ready to go out talking about healthy transplants I mean I'm talking about fairly we do everything in soil blocks let me put that in the so it'll focus on it so we do everything in soil blocks and that gives us a really healthy transplant so when we're putting these out you know they're not too leggy they're they're really healthy and robust I mean that's a pretty healthy plant and we like to do that we'd like to do them in soil blocks because we just get we just feel like we get a better product and we can hold it for longer like you know these are over a week pass do that you know they're probably ten or twelve days past needing to get in the field but we had to wait until one of our blocks is ready so um so yeah they're just kind of hanging out and they look great so I'm excited because they're not gonna be that much further behind the ones the half of the tray that we already planted they're just gonna go in right after and it's important no matter if you're growing lettuce for market or you're growing interest for yourself to think about lettuce and summer lettuce in succession you may not get that second cut off of it we start some every single week in order to ensure that we have it every single week to harvest from in that will fluctuate as is as this ball gets nearer we'll have to do less every week because we can get second cuttings from our lettuce and sometimes even third cuttings all right so let's get a little bit more linear on this you're starting with your so you're starting with good transplants and when you you you're gonna harden them off and then you want to get them into the field under some shade if possible like some people use shade cloth 30 or 50 percent shade cloth you don't want to use it for the whole time but you do want to use it in that establishment phase it's a good way to essentially get that crop established and get its roots in the soil before it has it time to to to kind of get damaged from the Sun from the heat so that that's the first thing is getting it into the soil after a good hardening off underneath some shade we actually use you can see here the last thing is crazy see here we we've cut some of these out but this is we under plant our I've done a video on this already but we've we enter plant our lettuce below celery in the goal with inner planting it like that under planting it is actually simple it's just to kind of provide a natural shade cloth so that's that's how we establish our lettuce and that's what you know the lettuce that you see me cutting off of is actually was established under celery it's in what we call our ever bed I also want to say that one really underrated place to grow summer lettuce it's actually not out in the field it's in your tunnels that seems counterintuitive in a way but what people kind of forget about plastic is it's a little bit of a shade you can sort of demonstrate this by just all I did was I got behind the plastic there's a big thing of plastic right there where the light is coming through and it dropped the the intensity of the Sun considerably so that that's just something to think about like if you have a tunnel and you don't you know your cucumbers are done and your tomatoes are done throwing around the lettuce real quick and it and it'll add it doesn't intensify it it actually adds a little bit of shade so it's a great way to grow summer lettuce I specifically planted sweet corn in here not because it's a very profitable crop or very it doesn't yield very high you get two years off each one of these but I put it in here as a sort of annual hedgerow to kind of add a little bit of coolness like all that underneath it'll be shaded a little bit not not really shading the lettuce but shading the soil around it and offering a little bit of coolness under there and keeping the lettuce cool is a big part of keeping it growing and I do want to emphasize before transplanting you got to think about your soil tilth you know we're doing no-till so we essentially have a blanket of love of compost of light kind of multi or compost that we're just shoving the transplants into if you're not doing that you need to make sure that that this health is nice that it's fairly fertile but it doesn't have to be high high fertility it's not a heavy feeder it can come you can if you have a heavy feeder before that broccoli or something you really don't even have to compost it maybe just lightly with some see you know some chicken manure or something like that and some people actually use like a landscape fabric which we do a little bit well you do use a little landscape fabric I don't have anything against it it's a really good it's reusable and it's a really good way to block out weeds and that sort of thing and also hold in moisture I think it's a good idea when you can to use some sort of fabric or some sort of molt's that will keep it from being in direct contact with the soil you can see in these first few plants that I cut that I'm cutting that I'm leaving quite a bit around the bottom but what you can't really see in the videos there's a little bit rot right there so I'm just kind of skipping over that rod so those first few just because we got a ton of rain recently they kind of it got a little bit of this kind of yellowing rot on the bottom and but other than wise the head was great still got a fairly good yield per head even though I had to you know kind of skip through some of that in the beginning but a lot of people we use a landscape fabric plants into that and then you and then you know you may end up with a little bit less of that rot so once you have it in the ground you have you know your lettuce already in the soil the next thing you really have to think about is keeping it watered and keeping it misted the when i say myst it I mean you live in Kentucky so when a hot hot summer could be really intense on your crop so you know you need to think about how you're gonna cool those crops off and one of the things I definitely suggest in terms of that is having some overhead irrigation that you can turn on in the middle of the day or you know several times a day especially when it's super hot so I just turned on the irrigation for 5-10 minutes just get everything misted and cooled down I probably do it five times a day and it was 93 degrees yesterday and it probably at five six times maybe yesterday just during the heat of the summer in if it doesn't cool down below 85 degrees you know below that sort of growth period of 80 ish you know lettuce isn't gonna grow if it's so if the soil is over 80 degrees so when it gets to that you really want to think about doing some night irrigation some really really nice cold water so in the morning when the sun's starting to come up the soils not too hot you cool that soil in that plant down and it'll start growing or keep growing and then you want to get it you want to keep water on it too I don't use drip irrigation but you kill it and you should maybe should I usually water pretty heavily at night and then let that get you know let that get soaked in all through the through the morning and all through the evening and then you know do that as needed you know depending on how dry the soil is but then I also use the misting when it comes to harvesting you really you know generally you want to harvest it when it's cool so that maybe at night some people harvest at night there are some studies that show that you know the it extends the shelf life I don't know I you know I think that you might want to experiment a little bit with that on your own whatever varieties you're choosing that may be variety specific harvesting at night just just may create you know intensify that sort of latex that white stuff that you see when you cut lettuce it may just intensify that a little bit and bring it up so I would just be cautious about harvesting at night I've never tried it myself so experiment with it let me know if you do it if you if you like doing that let me know because I'm curious myself but for the most part most people harvest super early in the morning when the crop is already cool and you know with the salad nuovo we harvest you know with a knife and you kind of go around and get just the best looking stuff with the direct seeded stuff you generally harvest it with a harvester because it's faster in the summer like I said it's harder to get that direct seeded stuff because you really have to time it well getting it cooled down is another thing like if you're not getting it didn't get below 75 last night so if you're getting if that that lettuce is essentially 75 degrees when it's coming out of the ground so you want to get that cooled down to that 40 degree range as fast as possible so that means either putting in a tote and getting in your cooler getting it into really cold water is another really good option to get it kind of chilled down that's gonna extend the shelf life and also make it keep it from getting any sort of bacterial issues or those sorts of things like keeping it cold and getting it cold fast helps to not only extend the shelf life but also you know is good for food safety and if you're selling lettuce something that people don't usually wash on their own especially like a mixed lettuce you really really need to be concerned about food safety and making sure that you're diligent about that another important sort of post-harvest thing is that you you want to get it dry if you do wash it you don't have to wash it if it didn't get if it's not above door like if you have it in landscape fabric or something and you're harvesting it and you know you don't necessarily have to wash it because that way you actually preserve the shelf life especially if it's already clean but you don't want to give it to anybody if it has that grit on it or you don't want to eat it yourself so you're gonna want to cut it you know and wash it and however either after you've cooled it off or before it goes into the cooler but you're gonna want to spin it as dry as possible this is really important for you know food sanitation just not to have it be wet but also just for shelf-life and then you know a lot of people are using this sort of fan system this is something that Curtis Stone has has has really pushed and it's basically just a table with fans above it it blows all those little beads of water off which is really important just to get as much of that off as possible to make it clean dry really fast and cold that's how you're gonna retain the most shelf life on it and of course you can just cut it as a head lettuce there's nothing wrong with that I like mixed greens they tend to sell better for us at market into restaurants but you know head lettuce is fine too there's nothing wrong with that have lettuce I like the transplant head lettuce you know cutting in as a mixed green especially these sort of multi-leaf ones like the the salad Nova because they get the flavor of a head lettuce without being a head lettuce and you sometimes get multiple cuts from them depending on what the weather is like one thing that I think is really important after you cut it is to use something like this time tine rake and week time rate sign rank leader to actually just scrape the soil one of the micro mentors that I did not mention would be Ben Hartman who who I kind of learned to this from who after he cuts his greens will go through and just sort of lightly scratch off everything that dropped and put it into the aisle so that it doesn't rot on top of the crop and you can get another cutting from it later and that should be that should be part of your routine when you're cutting lettuce you know packaging is all up to you you can kind of do your own you know decide what you want to do for packaging I recommend things that are not do not have holes in them you know anything that air if air can get to the Greenes it's gonna wilt them you also want to keep them out of the Sun when you're selling them or when you're you know offering them or those sorts of things other than that guys I'm gonna go make some breakfast I shot this whole video in my PJs and as always if you like this video please like this video make sure to hit the subscribe button and the little bell that'll make sure that you get the updates cheer with your friends leave us a comment make this question [Music]

Channel: No-Till Growers

Views: 93,227

Keywords: Notill, No till, Summer lettuce, Can I grow summer lettuce, How to grow lettuce in summer, Heat lettuce, No bolt lettuce, Salad mix summer, Hot weather, Sunshine, Heat, Tolerant, No tillage, Gardening, Market garden, Permaculture, Biointensive, Micro farm, Small farm, Market gardening, Lettuce how to, Interplanting, Shade cloth, Homestead, Farmstead

Id: cjnqPTkZFck

Length: 16min 33sec (993 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 01 2018