These are mini heads of lettuce. They're about 5-6 inches across. They contain enough lettuce for a single serving salad (depending on the consumer) or a couple of sandwiches.

We wanted to provide lettuce mix to our customers, but taking a knife to produce (other than harvest) gets defined as processing. At that point the Board of Health starts imposing regulations that cost us significant money to implement. So we decided to try mini heads of lettuce and put a couple of different colors in a bag, thereby providing lettuce mix while only doing normal harvest and washing.

I ordered a red and a green butterhead mini head lettuce. Somehow I got the wrong seed for the red, which turned out to be an oakleaf lettuce (not shown). By the time I got the right seed we were into fall lettuce.

On the right is the green butterhead, "Dancine". For some reason it develops a lot of tipburn at this season, which is visible in the photo. It basically looks like a Boston lettuce, except that it's smaller.

On the left is the red butterhead I wanted, "Australe". While it's darker than Dancine, it's not really a dark red, so mixing it in a bag results in a leaf that just looks slightly off-color. The oakleaf was much darker red and looked good in a mix. Unfortunately, I don't know the variety since it was mixed up in shipping.

Another problem, now that I have the two varieties I wanted, I now find that they have different seed-to-maturity intervals, so the Australe is ready when the Dancine isn't, and the Australe has gone by when the Dancine is ready. I can get around that by weekly planting.

Fortunately, we find there's a market for mini heads of lettuce. So we're now selling single mini heads. The Australe lends itself well to this. Although it's a butterhead, the shape is something between the butterhead and a Romaine. As a standalone lettuce, it's attractive, so I'll probably grow it again next year. The Dancine did well in the beginning of the year, but after getting through a fairly hot summer, it hasn't yet gotten back to the same performance it had in Spring. It also bolts fairly quickly, so we have to cut it fairly young. That means it's small (particularly when we trim the brown edge leaves), so we sometimes have to put two heads into a bag.