Lettuce Days

Sorry for the multiple posts all together! I have been trying to get the KOFA wifi to work well enough to do my blog posts but with no success. So, I decided to use my phone and get my posts done - which means you get several all on the same day.

Yesterday (Sunday), after participating in the worship service here at KOFA, we headed off to the Lettuce Days. What fun we had!

We got to see a lot of tractors and implements (I took pictures for my brother to see!).

How about this baler? And crawler tractor?

There was a guy carving vegetables and fruit...

Ignore the porta-potties in the background...

 And another one carving ice (with chainsaw and other implements):

The event was held at the University of Arizona Demonstration Farm, so they had parts of their fields available so you could walk through them:

This is a lettuce planter - there are 4 seats and someone sits facing backwards putting the seedlings in...

One of the visitors (someone like me, not a professional!) tried the planter - I don't know if you can see the row that she planted - she did a good job!

We also learned that you should clean your greens - even those that are "triple washed".

 The lady who talked with us about washing greens was fascinating - very passionate! She is working with growers to try to deal with incursions into their fields that cause areas to be unable to be harvested. If there is any poop in the field, the plants that are within a 5' radius of the poop cannot be harvested. Some buyers (e.g. Dole, or McDonalds) may have more stringent requirements - she said that one of the buyers demands that a 50' radius around a poop not be used. The biggest issue is bird poop - she said that she is looking into some options - one thing that she said was she was wondering about outfitting a drone to have it look like a predator (hawk) and have it fly a non-regular pattern over the field to dissuade flocks of birds. Another thing she mentioned was bringing in hawks to patrol the fields - even though the hawk would also poop, it would be a single bird instead of a flock.

She also said, though, when the buyer disallows a larger than 5' radius to be delivered to them, although the crop cannot be sold to someone else, nor can individuals come to "glean" the unused portion, the local food bank can come in and get the portion up to the 5' radius.

We also were able to go on an open-sided bus tour of the demonstration farm.

Our tour guide

This is a demonstration field of baby leaf spinach - one of the biggest problems with baby leaf spinach is a disease (I think it was like "powdery mildew") - the growers had asked for help with it, so the university had planted, I think, 70 varieties of spinach, to see which ones might be good options for the growers to consider planting. The convention for the growers had been just within the last couple of weeks - so the growers were brought out here to see what options they might have.

This is the lady who talked with us about the spinach process - she also told us that they had planted a few patches of varieties that are known to be very susceptible to the disease, and they were trying multiple treatments to see if anything was useful to combat the problem.

The open-bus tour took us past several fields - some growing switchgrass for seed (this is a crop that will produce ethanol but is better than growing corn for ethanol because it can grow in a more "marginal" field and thus leave the corn crops for food, - others growing celery (I never would have recognized a celery "bush" as being the source of celery), leaf lettuce, cabbages - at the end, there was a garden where we could "harvest" some crops for ourselves - we got carrots and onions.

There were also various growers who were giving away product - we brought a lot of fruit and vegetables back to KOFA. After sharing with other folks here, we still had a lot left for ourselves!

It was a really fun day!