It’s the time of year when salad sales start to skyrocket. Sweet, round cos lettuce. Striking red oak lettuce. Curly Batavia lettuce. Peppery rocket leaves. All of the above. How about mixed in one bag?

You may have recently received a bag of mixed salad in your Oddbox, from one of our longtime growers LJ Betts. A few weeks ago, a large processor cancelled their very hefty order. This meant there was lots surplus, ready to go straight into your boxes. In May, some of the Oddbox team travelled down to Kent to visit the farm and see just how their lovingly grown salad ends up in our kitchens. 

For a salad bag, 10cm cuts make for the perfect bite of leaf. This used to have to be harvested by hand, but LJ Betts has revolutionised this with a machine that trims the salad leaves twice, in two 10cm cuts. With the plants tightly packed together, the blades slice across the leaves using the surrounding heads for resistance for a nice clean cut. Impressive, right?

Cutting right there on the field means that there is one less step for the suppliers, who don’t need to meticulously chop the leaves for their own bags. It’s much less handling for these delicate leaves and much simpler in general. Just how things should be. 

Alongside the admittedly impressive machinery, there's also some equally impressive humans at LJ Betts too. We spoke to Nick Ottewell, the commercial director. He spoke with such care and love for the crops. To him, sustainability means “being able to grow crops over a prolonged period of time to the right quality”.

To successfully run a salad farm for nearly 100 years, it takes scrupulous planning, thinking about which fields to use for salad crops, and which to set aside for break crops. If you grow the same crop on the same patch of land over and over again, the crops can encounter all sorts of diseases. Clubroot in rocket and pythium in spinach - that sort of thing. So to avoid this, the farm will grow a break crop such as wheat, as a way to give the soil a break. 

There's so much more than just break crops when it comes to growing salad leaves. It’s also thinking about pests, stopping rabbits from nibbling at stems or insects from chewing holes in tender leaves. It’s methodically planning water consumption, filling reservoirs according to regulations to ensure the right amount is used where needed. It’s agonising over which variety will be the most delicious whilst also resisting disease, then planting 100,000 of them all in one day.

So, next time you open your Oddbox and spot a little bag of salad, ready to toss with dressing or pile into sandwiches, you can now explain to everyone around just how the sausage – no sorry – salad gets made. We hope it’s extra delicious, knowing everything that it takes to grow these greens.