We had a nice gentle rain last night (0.5 inch in the gauge) and there is nothing that compares to day-break on the morning after a rain when everything is fresh and clear especially when there is harvesting to be done. The salad patch was calling and I had to go.
Everyone should be growing salad greens. Compared to the bagged crap in the supermarkets, especially that white bread of the plant world; iceberg lettuce, there is just no comparison to what the average person can grow at home. Even if you don't have a formal garden plot, salad greens can be started in seed packs and transplanted to almost any kind of container that receives sufficient sunlight. Even seed sprouts have gone high tech with the development of microgreens. These are sprouts that are allowed to grow to the two leaf stage and then harvested as an addition to traditional salad or as a stand alone gourmet mix.
Our everyday large leaf salad mix at the Food Patch consists of cuttings of Johnny's Allstar Gourmet Lettuce Mix (containing six different lettuce varieties) and Johnny's Premium Greens Mix (consisting of spicy to mild to slightly sweet mustard greens and Chinese cabbage). I also like to add in a few young beet leaves if they are available and chard leaves up to about three or four inches in length. This gives an incredible mix with lots of color, flavor and nutritional value.
Typically during the growing season I start one nine cell pack of each mix every other week. These are sprouted inside and grown under lights until the leaves are two to three inches high. Then the packs are set out in the shade and gradually hardened to direct sun light over the course of about a week. They are transplanted to the garden and used to fill in any empty spot that is available. In the heat of high summer (July/August) indoor sprouting and development under lights is critical because many lettuce seed varieties do not sprout well when the ground is hot. At those times of the season, transplants are often placed so that they will be shaded by taller plants during the hot afternoon hours. I also have a small movable tunnel covered with shade cloth (50% transmission) for those weeks in August when it is just too hot for salad. This is not optimal but it assures us that we at least have some salad available even if it is not optimal (still better than the bagged stuff).
The other key to the perfect salad is correct harvesting. Greens should be cut early in the morning preferably before they are touched by direct sun. Clippings immediately go to cold tap water for fast chilling. I use two standard dish washing pans so that I can alternate and do two washes outside and then drain and bring inside for one last wash in the spinner. They are laid out on dish towels until almost dry but not wilted and then placed in gallon zip-loc storage bags with lots of extra air to keep the leaves from getting matted down in the frig. This mix will last for over a week but rarely does it make it that long before being devoured. One standard dish pan yields about three one gallon zip loc-bags.
Yesterday morning was spent down at the Maryland Poultry Swap. It was just down the road in Shrapsburg. It was very well attended and I was hoping to see some chicken tractors but most of the show was taken up by poultry fanciers. There were some nice examples of large stationary coops and I even ran into our local egg farmer, Rufus Martin. He was selling fresh chicken meat that his farm had slaughtered earlier that morning. Can't get much fresher than that. I did manage to run into a guy from Aquabarrel who had adapted some of their rain barrel fixtures to chicken waterers and feeders. With all of the engineering going into the chicken tractor I just couldn't pass these up especially since they are made with square buckets that should be easily adaptable to our design. Aside from figuring how to hang them they should save me a lot of additional time and trouble.
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