Salad Production at Canara Farm

Hi and welcome to the latest updates from our very special market garden, at Canara Farm, Mylor. We hope you enjoyed our previous feature introducing Farmer Pete. Today we will be taking a closer look at the Gourmet Baby Leaf Salad or more famously known as the Lizard Leaves.

'' I don't do direct drilled lettuce because you have to sterilize the soil to be able to do it. I don't want to do that here on this farm so I always module raise my lettuce and that way you get ahead of the weed and you don't have to use soil sterilizing chemicals. We module transplant and that works well for us. ''

'' This batch was harvested in pretty much the last day or two and the important thing with salad is how quickly you get it chilled down post cutting. It is estimated that you lose a day’s shelf life for every hour post cut and refrigerated so that’s why we always work with a small tractor with a small transport box. We only cut 200kg at a time and we make a lot of frequent trips back to the fridges. ''

'' We have a refrigerated pack house and we can achieve about 7 or 8 degrees in here with both chillers running even through the summer. Our salad is kept at 3-5 degrees for maximum shelf life and we minimize the amount of time it is within the packing process. We are trying to preserve the best shelf life at all times and it’s all really fresh. The salad we cut today can be in your fridges tomorrow. ''

We are coming into some fantastic seasonal produce now and within 2 to 3 weeks we will have a nice flow of summer produce available. We hope you have enjoyed reading about the Lizard Leaf production at the farm, and we look forward to sharing more with you. See you soon!