Lettuce Assembly Line

Every Friday evening we work on getting our stuff ready to take to the farmers' market on Saturday morning.  One of my jobs is to package the spring lettuce mix that we sell. 

For the spring mix, Tom plants loose leaf lettuce.  He mixes 5 different varieties and plants them thickly in rows.  The row closest to the camera is the spring mix.  

Tom harvests the lettuce  with a pair of scissors.  That is the hardest job.  He leaves about an inch and it will regrow from what is left.  In this way, he can harvest several bunches off of one row.  In order to keep it from wilting while he is harvesting it, he fills a tub with cold water and dumps the lettuce in the tub.  Then, it is my turn.

I remove the lettuce from the water and put it on a wire draining rack.  If it is still very wet, I spin it with my kitchen salad spinner.  Then it goes onto a clean towel on the kitchen counter and I set up my "assembly line" for packaging the lettuce.

We use official "Oklahoma Grown" produce bags.  Our Stillwater Farmers' Market is a proud member of this state organization.  

http://okgrown.com/

I weigh the lettuce on a postal scale.  It measures to a tenth of an ounce.  We are not allowed to sell "by weight".  To do so, you must have an expensive scale that has to have been approved by state inspectors.  So, we just sell the lettuce "by the bag" and do not post a weight on it.  However, I like to make sure that all the bags weigh about the same so that all our customers get the same amount of lettuce.

Once the lettuce is bagged, it goes into one of our coolers to keep it cool.

Tom uses bottles of ice in the bottom of our coolers that he covers with towels.  These work really well and can be reused many, many times.  He has an old refrigerator in the garage where he keeps the ice bottles between uses.