One of the most popular crops used—and had massive success with—the paperpot system is lettuce. Be it mixed lettuce varieties to the reliable Salanova, the paperpot system is a solid system that can guarantee excellent success rates when it comes to transplanting lettuce.
But if you’re new to transplanting, or you’re considering transplanting, and you’re wondering about when the perfect time is to transplant lettuce, then sit back because Paperpot Co.’s got you covered with an insightful video where Urban Farmer Curtis Stone shares which size of lettuce is the perfect size to be transplanted out to the field.
Lettuce Growth
The video was filmed in the spring, and Curtis shows how a tray of his three-week-old Salanova lettuce with about an inch and a half of growth from the top of the tray. While his crops were able to achieve that inch-and-a-half of height in three weeks in the springtime at his location, it may take shorter or longer depending on each grower’s season, climate, temperature, and geographical location.
In fact, in hotter climates, especially in the summertime, sometimes it can take just two weeks to less than that to reach that inch-and-a-half growth. But no matter how long it takes, the important thing to note is the size of the transplants: one and a half inches’ height from the soil.
Transplanting Sooner
If the lettuce crops are transplanted out into the field, and they’re smaller than an inch and a half in height, then what can happen is that they might get buried too deep into the soil with the transplanter, and they’ll have to be fixed by hand.
Although it can technically be done, the transplanting process would get more tedious, as you’ll either need to take greater care in not burying the transplants in too deep, or you’ll have to go back and fix their transplant depth.
Transplanting Later
While it can get troublesome to transplant crops smaller than an inch and a half in height, a bigger problem would be transplanting later when the crops are larger. When transplanting tall crops, each of the transplant will tend to topple over to their sides because even while in the trays, they get tangled up in the other pots in the chain.
And as the transplants go down the chute, they get constantly knocked over and buried under too deep as the transplanter moves away, which ultimately means more work because they’ll need to be fixed one by one by hand.
Save Time and Effort
To avoid any unnecessary extra work when dealing with transplants, make sure that the crops are at the perfect height of an inch and a half before they’re transferred into the field.