First planting of the year: Lettuce!

I’m happy to report that there are no new wild stories to tell this week. Just another week in an unpredictable Nova Scotia winter.

Our “people” tell me that we have a new line of fresh greens available in the form of micro green shoots such as pea, radish, broccoli, kale, arugula and sunflower shoots from Fundy Bay MicroGreens. They make great salad and allow me to tick the “healthy” box so I can eat more chips later (don’t tell Suzanne).

We are in the process of upgrading our website to make it more user friendly, intuitive (that’s very important for people like myself that live in the real world and therefor don’t don’t follow the same thought patterns as the software creators do) and just better….hopefully. As I explained to the guy who is developing a web based food safety programme for us “I am like the little old lady who drives the car but doesn’t even know where to find the dipstick to check the oil level; except, I want zero to 60 in 3 seconds flat…. and pull stumps!” We don’t want to become one of those companies that keep sending out new software “updates” that are most times, at best, just a horizontal change with no real improvements for the users. We don’t want to make you keep learning new systems if we can help it; this world could use less change at this point, not more. Regardless, the initial platform we used for the online store is not up to the challenge as sales continue to grow so we will need to “upgrade”……that’s better than just an update…I hope.

Today the first seeds of the season get planted in my basement grow-op! And, believe me, there has been, and will be, no pot grown in my grow-op; ever! The amount of time, attention, effort and money our country wasted on legalizing pot disgusts me. I promise you it hasn’t made Canada a better place….and it has just made parenting even harder. Pot has its place in medicine, I agree, but recreational use is just going to open the door for so many more poor decisions and actions that lead to things like poverty and homelessness. It’s no different than alcohol in that way. It can be used “wisely” but we all know that widespread availability will only increase the number of abusers. I am a liberal at heart (we all are in western society BTW) but there are certain lines of liberal thinking that I disdain. OK. Enough of that. That train of thought kind of got away from me but now that it’s out I’m not going to delete it either… :-l

We plant a couple lots of lettuce early to be transplanted into a greenhouse in early March for some late April greens. Today I will plant about 1300 seeds of “Salanova” lettuce. I’ll do the same next Thursday and the Thursday after to give about four weeks of early lettuce for our online store and farmers markets. “Salanova” is a fairly new take on how to produce a lettuce that is super easy to prepare for a salad for our hectic lifestyles. One cut across the base will produce enough, perfectly sized whole leaves for a salad for two. Check it out.
https://www.johnnyseeds.com/growers-library/vegetables/lettuce-salanova-production.html