We love the little gem lettuce we grow and the birds seem to share that sentiment.

Last week as we were harvesting lettuce for the market we saw that our next planting of little gem lettuce had been eaten by the birds. We had that issue with our first planting in the spring but we haven’t had it since.

The dry winter is most likely the reason as lettuce is filled with water and the birds are looking for water. Unfortunately that means we won’t have little gems for a while but the birds haven’t been eating any of our other varieties of lettuce so far. It was very quick that they ate the little gems and they could do it to the other varieties but hopefully not. We planted another few beds of lettuce on Tuesday and have a little bit more to plant in the greenhouse in a few weeks. Those won’t be ready until the spring

I don’t want to jinx it but the weather forecast is predicting a decent amount of rain on Thursday and over the weekend. All of our crops have been waiting for a consistent amount of rain instead of the couple of one-off rains we have had so far.

Ahead of the potential rain we got the field where we had all of our summer crops planted with cover crop which is great. We hope to not have to irrigate it much but the areas we’ve planted so far we have had to irrigate with the lack of rain.

The combination of it being cold and the soil being dry has allowed us to spend a lot of time weeding our crops. Getting ahead of the weeds is always crucial and hopefully now we are on top of them even if we get a good amount of rain that prevents us from weeding for a few weeks.

It is also that time of the year for us to begin crop planning for next year and then buying the seeds we need. We will start seeding in January so it’s a priority to get that figured out soon.

We are not changing too much from the spring crops we are growing in the amounts but we are dropping a few crops. The key goal for us this upcoming spring is to get each planting to be successful as we had a few plantings that didn’t do well in the spring.

Additionally we are planning all of our summer crops since the first ones will be seeded at the end of January and we don’t want to forget to grow a crop because we get very busy at that time.