How to Harvest & Store Lettuce

Hi, I'm Jarrett Man of Stone Soup Farm in Belchertown, MA, and this is how to harvest and store lettuce. Lettuce is a great crop, it's a cold weather crop so it's going to do best in the early spring, the late summer or fall. There's two main ways to grow lettuce and one is to have it planted very densely like this and one is to plant seed by seed at a time so that you get one big fluffy plant which we call a head which you can see right there. If you want to harvest the densely planted stuff, then as I was doing a second ago, you can just go through and you grab a clump, saw it off at the base, make sure you don't have any weeds in there and you're good. The advantage of this way is that you're not cutting at the base of the plant and after a week or two, you'll start having regrowth like this and you'll be able to have a second harvest, even a third harvest if you're keeping them well. If you want to do head lettuce then you wait until the plants are nice and big and they're all on their own like this and you pull the leaves back and you find that they have the stem down there and you cut just at the base of the stem, a couple of the small leaves will come off and you've got a nice head of lettuce there for you. Once your lettuce is harvested, you should get them into cold water as soon as possible either by rinsing them or dunking them in cold water and get them into a plastic bag and into your fridge. They'll last the longest that way and they won't wilt. Fresh lettuce when harvested and quickly put into cold water and get into your fridge should last up to about a week without problem. So I'm Jarrett of Stone Soup Farm and that's how to harvest and store lettuce.