The growing of lettuce....

Today we embarked on a fieldtrip to the lettuce fields with Autumn's class. We were in for a day of learning about local agriculture and it was fun!

Have you ever wondered how much work goes into raising produce for the United States?
Well, let me tell you...it's incredible! I never knew there was so much to growing fields of lettuce, let alone all the other vegetables that we didn't talk about.

We started with one of the student's dad. He talked to us about the seed and planting. It's amazing. Raw seed reminds me of chewing tabacco and is what you are used to planting in your home garden. We got to have some organic raw seed to bring home and we saw how that was hand planted with a little machine.
We also saw the coated seed that they use. It's about the size of a BB and will germinate in 3 days if watered and given sunlight. That's some fast growing seed! We saw a big tractor pulling a planting machine for this kind of seed and then we walked in the field to see how it was planted. It lays on the top of the soil in a little crack. You don't want it covered very much with dirt.
We will get to watch a crop of lettuce that will be planted for production. This will be seed that is planted and then allowed to grow and then go to seed. When it flowers and then goes to seed the flower looks kind of like a dandilion (live and dead).

After that presentation/hands on activity was done we headed to a field owned by one of our friends from church. He has grown Romain lettuce and it was being harvested. It's very neat to watch how the workers work. They are fast and very orderly with what they do. We watched them cut, trim, set in a row, & then box the lettuce. Interesting. Colin talked to us about how many boxes they get out of an acre of lettuce, etc....
The kids all got to glean a little of the lettuce from where the workers had already cut. Autumn brought home 4 whole plants of it and then some loose leaves for the guinea pigs. Can't beat fresh, free lettuce :)
The lettuce we watched will be shipped to the Boston, MA area for selling. That amazed me. So anyone that buys Romaine lettuce there under the name "Andy Boy" is buying lettuce that our friend grew :)

One part that shocked me is finding out that lettuce is about 2 weeks old when it finally hits the grocery shelves! And it looks so fresh. Wow!

After leaving that field we went to the Coolers where produce is vacuumed (to take out a lot of the moistere) and held until it ships out. Most of the lettuce goes out the same day it comes in. They never want to keep it overnight but have kept some up to one week in the cooler. It was COLD in the coolers. Even me, "Miss I love the cold" was cold! It was 33*.
They also showed us how they make ice "slush" there and it goes on top of the broccoli to cool it and for when it ships.

It was all very intersting. A lot was over the kids heads but the adults really got into the discussions. I know, I learned A LOT. I'm sure Autumn and I will be talking about it for a while. She brought some seed home so we'll plant that too. Maybe we'll even send some seed to Gramma & Grampa to try growing in the spring.

I'll add pictures when I get them developed. Harold has the digital so I had to use the regular one. Check back in a couple days for the pics.