End of Season Review - Lettuce & Corn

Lettuce

The lettuce story this year was a mixed bag – both good and bad.


Lettuce Harvest from the end of July

The good news was that I was harvesting lettuce until the end of November.  The bad news was that I started the lettuce 4 weeks late in the spring and then ended up losing a bunch of seedlings.  So my plan for X number of this variety and X number of that, didn't materialize - it ended up being a case of transplanting whichever seedlings I had left.  Then I didn’t get around to doing another sowing until mid-August, which resulted in a large lettuce-free gap at the end of the summer.

In addition to 4 varieties I had grown before, I also grew two new ones:  Radicchetta & Sweetie Baby.

Sweetie Baby

Sweetie Baby was quite nice, but I couldn't say the same about Radichetta.

Simpson Elite & Radichetta

It was so incredibly bitter – just awful!  I chose it based on one of Dave’s spotlights, but when I went to double check the details on his post, I realized that the variety I grew looked very different.  While his resembled oak leaf lettuce, mine looked more like dandelion leaves.  I obviously had purchased a completely different variety.  After that first taste, I ripped out all the plants and that was that.

Freshly picked lettuce, especially romaine & Batavia, keeps very well in the fridge, so the harvest gap between the spring and fall sowing was about 4 weeks less than what is reflected by the harvest period in the table.  Still, this means that we went without lettuce from the end of August to mid-November - a definite fail on my part.


Overall Impressions & Plan for Next Year

I’m satisfied with our lettuce last season, all things considered.  The overall harvest was down from last year's total of 9,145 grams (20.16 lbs), but harvesting lettuce into late November partly makes up for that.

Final harvest at the end of November
 

I’ll be keeping all of the varieties except for Radichetta and will be adding a few more.  I enjoy  having a mix of lettuce and would rather grow only a few plants of 5 or 6 varieties rather than a lot of one or two.  I also noticed that the Royal Red variety didn’t hold up to the cold as well as the others, so I’ll drop that one in the fall and add one or two cold tolerant varieties.

Of course, my timing and seeding in the spring will go exactly according to plan and I’ll be doing timely succession plantings during the summer and into the fall ;)

Corn

When it comes to the corn, all I can say is …. dang corn stalk muncher.

Corn stalk casualty

Every day, it seemed that another stalk went down.  Miraculously, I was still able to harvest one tiny cob:

Corn in hand

Before heading to the kitchen

And that was it  - out of 24 plants I harvested one 42 gram (1.5 oz) cob of corn.

As for the most likely suspect in my corny tale, I’m pretty sure we are not dealing with raccoons as the culprit preferred chewing through the stalks rather than the cobs.  My feeling is that we are looking at skunks.  We had seen a couple of them wandering around out back several times and in their quest for grubs, our backyard was a mess of shallow holes & dug up patches of grass by late summer – more so than ever before.


Overall Impressions and Plan for Next Year

I can still recall how incredible that corn tasted – it was split 4 ways, and oh, what a mouthful of deliciousness it was :)

My plan for next year?  Well, it centers around a rather unexpected surprise at Christmas:

Christmas gift from a very thoughtful friend
who sympathized with my corn woes

I already have the perfect spot for it – on top of the arbour, pointing down towards the beds.  One of the things I really like is the fact that it’s solar powered, so no need to deal with extension cords.  I’m very excited to try it – hopefully it delivers on it's promise.