Tunnel Bed Flips & Summer Lettuce
Lettuce is one of our signature crops. We strive to grow and sell lettuce for as much of the year as we can. Currently, we reliably have lettuce available every week from early May through late December. A large part of the reason we have lettuce available for such a long period of time is our tunnels. Since we’re starting to transplant our summer lettuce this week into our tunnels we though we’d take a moment to go over our process of “flipping” beds and growing summer lettuce.
First, off: what is a bed flip? It’s a bit of market farm jargon that basically means that we are removing an old crop from a bed and preparing that bed for a new crop. In most of our tunnels we get about 3 crops per year from each bed. This helps us optimize the use of the space in our tunnels so that we can bring the largest amount of the best crops from the tunnel beds.
The photos below (from separate beds/tunnels) show the steps. First is the our finished product - lettuce mix :-). The second photo shows landscape fabric removed and the bed tilled, the third photo shows landscape fabric installation, and the fourth photo shows recently transplanted lettuce.
Here’s how we do our bed flips:
Remove old crop debris/weeds: There’s almost always some left over crop debris and/or weeds when we flip beds. We remove this material to reduce disease pressure and to help us in subsequent steps.
Remove landscape fabric: We use landscape fabric to help manage weeds and disease and keep lettuce clean. We remove landscape fabric and allow it to rest for a period of time before we reuse it.
Prepare the soil: We use a small rototiller to lightly till the soil. This helps to loosen the soil and makes it easy to transplant lettuce into. After we till, we lightly rake the bed to make it nice and smooth and uniform.
Install new landscape fabric: Now we’re ready to put landscape fabric back down and our bed is ready to go!
Summer Lettuce
We grow four kinds of summer lettuce and three of them grow pretty reliable in the heat: our lettuce mix, green curly, and summer crisp lettuces all do well in the heat. We’re experimenting with a romaine variety as well but have had mixed results. The heat of the summer can cause lettuce to both become bitter and bolt (which means is goes into it’s reproductive phase and becomes much less palatable). We use a combination of shade cloth, irrigation, careful variety selection, and landscape fabric to help manage the stress of summer.
Salad tunnel :-)