 Hello and welcome to a little garden on the prairies. So today's video we're going to talk about storing lettuce. So here in my garden on the Saskatchewan Prairie Zone 3, the lettuce, the kale, the spinach is all out in full force and I am picking lettuces every day. We're eating tons of salads, we're using it in our sandwiches but for the most part it's pretty hard to keep up with all the lettuce that you have to pick every day. So it's always great if you can store it and make it last as long as possible so that you can enjoy it. So in this video I'm going to show you how I use reusable cotton to store my lettuce and help keep it fresh for several days. Another way to expand and lengthen your lettuce season in the garden is to do succession planting. So here in my containers I only planted up half with seeds at the beginning of the season and then about three weeks later planted up some more on the other half of the containers and these should be coming along shortly. So this is just an easy way to extend your season for your lettuces and your leafy greens to last a little bit longer throughout the summer before it gets too hot. With my greens I always use the cut and come again method where I just take the outer leaves from each plant and leave the whole plant intact so that it can keep shooting out new leaves throughout the season. So now that I've got another good harvesting of lettuces I'm going to take you inside and show you how I wash up and store my lettuces using reusable cotton towel. So with your garden lettuce you want to make sure you wash and dry it as soon as possible after you pick it. This stuff is very delicate and will wilt very fast after picking. If you can't get to it right away then you're best to just put it unwashed into the fridge to keep it from wilting. So I'm just using cool water here to give this garden lettuce a wash. If you were to be doing this with lettuce that you purchased in a store I would you know put a little bit of vinegar in here just to make sure you are dealing with any pesticides or unknowns that might be on your lettuces. So I really love this big salad spinner that I purchased. It's great for when you're trying to wash and store a whole bunch of lettuces. Even if you're bringing home a bunch from the store and you want to get it all washed up at one time this size is great. It's not great for storing in the fridge because it's pretty big but I do have smaller ones that I transfer to. Once I'm done cleaning and spinning you don't have to take the lid off. You can just pour the water out. I like to give these two or three spins just to make sure you get as much water as you can off them. It's good to open it up giving it a little fluff here. You can still see there's a bit of moisture quite a bit of moisture on these leaves so I'm going to just fluff and do another spin. You can see still more water coming off of it. Once you think you got all the water out of it like I said give it a good shake and spin it one more time. You'll see you'll even get a little more water out of it. Okay so once you've got it spun out three or four times and you feel it is as about as dry as you can get it. It's time to wrap it up into these cotton towels. So I usually lay out two or three of them depending on how much I'm wrapping up and if I want to separate my lettuces from my spinach or arugula sometimes I store the spinach separately so I can use it in some cooking recipes. So there's a couple ways you can do this. You can just simply spread a light layer on one of the cloths and then I just take it and roll it up and all that extra moisture these cotton towels will soak them up really good. So another way you could wrap these up if you want to do you know maybe a thicker layer of lettuce spread it all onto one then I just put another layer of the reusable cotton towel on top that way it kind of got two two pieces to absorb all that extra moisture and again you just roll it all up. So I like to use this Tupperware container. I think this is actually for celery storage. This makes a great storage for these. You can get three or four of these jammed in here pretty good once your lettuce is all wrapped up. So these cotton reusable towels that I'm using are just wonderful because you know you can obviously reuse them and you're not using paper towel or something that's ending going to end up in the garbage. You can use these over and over. I don't even wash them after each use. I can reuse these three or four times and then just throw them into a cold water wash and hang to dry. So these I picked up locally at a handmade store. So there was a vendor there that actually made these other pieces of cotton and then just stitch them herself. I did find a link on the Amazon website that I will leave in the description below to a whole variety of different reusable cotton towels that you can order online as well. So I just want to show you some that I have stored about three or four days ago just to show you how they are looking after being sitting in the fridge. As you can see they're still nice greens. They aren't wilting. They aren't feeling slimy or limp. So these are the ones I'll be eating up today in our salad and sandwiches and then the stuff we wrap up today will be good in the fridge for three or four days. So whether you're just going to be storing this in the fridge or if you're doing kale and you want to freeze it, this is still a good method to really get the moisture out of it. Wrap it up in these cotton reusable towels and then remove them, bag it and freeze it so that you have it for cooking or for your smoothies. So today I'm going to join a fresh salad made with my greens which consists of leafy lettuce, kale, spinach and a little bit of romaine. I was also trimming down some of the stalks on my spring onions and that makes a nice addition to a salad. I just chop them up with my herb scissors into the salad and from there you can really spruce up your salad and add a protein to it such as chicken or some tuna salad. Today I'm adding some egg salad that we made. I also found some few radishes in my garden today that were ready so I'm topping up this salad with some pepper, chunks of cheese and some freshly picked radishes. So if you enjoyed watching this video on how to store your garden fresh lettuce, please hit that like button, leave me a comment and don't forget to subscribe so that you don't miss out on future videos coming to the channel. Thanks for watching.