Welcome, folks, to the first harvest of this system.
These lettuce plants are eight weeks old and they are very much ready to harvest.
This is a Romaine lettuce.
We've got boxes. There's roughly a hundred in here.
Harvesting is very easy.
It's May 24th and it's an important day here.
It was the first harvest we've had of lettuce.
We've had Romaine lettuce that's been growing for eight weeks
and we just harvested nearly a hundred heads of lettuce.
It'll all be used for food pantry upon Tuesday or on Thursday.
Make the lettuce out of it.
Put it down in here.
All right.
Okay, so what are we going to do? Are we going to climb the ladder?
Climb the ladder.
All right.
They're so beautiful.
Wow.
Come on!
Okay, someone else could have your turn.
The atmosphere here was really wonderful.
We had sent out emails to a lot of people to invite them.
And we had probably a crowd of at least 20 people
who made sure everybody got to harvest and everybody got to taste.
Everybody was really impressed with how good it tasted
and how beautiful the lettuce was.
You're not smiling.
You've got to look like this.
I said, don't let this work.
Because he helped build this farm.
That's why I wanted him to be smiling.
Everybody's seeing it.
You just take some food out.
They have the pantry.
You can donate to people.
I can say it's like some homeless people.
You don't need food or anything.
You're homeless people.
And then you ask somebody to take some food out.
I feel so good.
Because it takes me a long time to come up
to do all this stuff.
I see it now.
Because some people, when they do like some stuff,
they don't really get what they want.
But you get everything what you like to do.
We like to have it.
I feel so good.
I feel happy about it.
Thank you.
Today was an exciting day, indeed,
for CDSC's hydroponic spark.
We harvest our first small batch of romaine lettuce.
We are extremely happy with the results.
We had the participation of community members,
staff members, pantry clients.
Everyone participated in the harvesting.
We did a wonderful taste test.
The reactions that we got were,
mmm, yum, delicious.
It was a very delicious assembly.
What was your reaction?
Mmm, mmm, mmm.
All I need is a tomato.
Mmm, a little more vomit.
We have some of this.
We are so thrilled and we are looking forward
to having this one grow so big
that we will be able to have the community
participate on a bigger scale, on a larger scale.
What was your reaction?
It tasted delicious.
I originally thought that we were only going to be
able to get about 100 hits of lettuce,
and I think that now we'll be getting at least
150 per week, along with bok choy and collards.
So the capacity is higher than I was expecting.
It's still going to take probably a month to six weeks
to get a really good handle on what the capacity
is going to be.
Mmm, mmm, mmm.
That's it. Now they need to try it.
Try it.
That's it, everyone.
Thank you.
Thank you.
