Lettuce Luxury

Your salad mix is quite pampered. It has been our habit to give your salad mix a bath and a spin dry before taking it to you at the market. But as of this week, your salad mix will be enjoying the full service - a bubble bath! Oooh la la.

In the midst of this drought, we rarely think beyond the obvious lack of water to the flow-on affects to the environment and to the wildlife that inhabit it. For example, the Bower Birds who live in the forest near our garden, and who in normal years raid our garden for a few weeks in early spring, are so desperate for food that they have been eating everything they can get their sharp beaks to - including your Brandywine tomato's as they ripen on the vine in the polyhouse!

Another of these flow on affects is a plague of Rutherglen bugs (Nysius vinitor). This native 4-5mm long flying insect sucks the sap of plants and fruit, lessening plant vigour and spreading disease. But even worse, they are everywhere - including amongst the lettuce we turn into salad mix! 

And thus the new bubble bath that Jack and Rod made today. The plan is to dump the salad mix in the bath full of water, place the mesh on top of it, then bubble air through the mix. This will dislodge the Rutherglen bugs from the leaves and push them though the mesh to the surface, were we will skim them off. Then voilà! No more bugs in the salad mix - we hope!