Please Lettuce Go To The Farm Today

"I came to love my rows, my beans, though so many more than I wanted.  They attached me to the earth...What shall I learn of beans or beans of me?"
-Thoreau (The Bean-Field)

(CLICK PICTURES TO ENLARGE AND ENJOY)

When you click on this picture, first focus your attention on the right side and slowly scan to the left, Matt did a phenomenal job of capturing the depth of this bed.  The rows feel like they go on forever.  It's pretty cool to think about how many seeds, sowed side-by-side, grew almost at the exact same pace mimicking each other's movements.

In the warm weather, the greenhouse has become utterly beautiful, but this bed in particular really sucked me in.  What made this even more fascinating was that this artistic display of agriculture is actually a common blend of lettuces that we may eat every time we make, or order, a salad.

Let me introduce you to the team(from bottom to top):
Truckee
Truckee lettuce is a baby loose leaf lettuce with a strong green color. It has lots of round nubs sticking out like little fingers, these are called lobes.

Annapolis

Annapolis is a Romaine lettuce with a very dark reddish/purple color with tiny flashes of green towards the stem. It has fewer lobes than the Truckee and almost looks like one round leaf. These dark colored lettuces tend to have a more bitter taste than the greens, which adds a change of flavor to the standard salad mix.

Sulu
Sulu not only has an incredibly cool name, but it is also a baby Oakleaf lettuce with a standout lime-green color and many smaller lobes that distinguish itself from the rest of the pack.

I used to look at my salad as just that, never distinguishing one lettuce from the other, but after watching these grow from seedlings to maturity, in under a month and tasting them fresh from the ground, my perspective definitely changed.