All About Lettuce

 We (actually I) planted a garden this year. I come from a long line of farmers. My grandparents were farmers and my parents both grew up on farms. My parents always had a large garden when I was a kid. Unfortunately, they never really had us work with them in the garden. Yes, I was called upon to go over to the garden and pull up onions (one of my favorite jobs) and I used to pull off Japanese beetles and throw them in the jars of gasoline. Of course, I would also often wake up on sunny summer mornings to a kitchen table full of pea pods or beans to be hulled. What I never did was help to plant the garden. I'm sure it was just easier for my parents to do it themselves. I wish they hadn't.


Oh well. They did teach me lots of other good things. So....here I am planting a garden in my little yard. I really wanted to plant lettuce and bought both butter lettuce and large leaf lettuce. For the most part, it was a no brainer. I bought the plants, dug the space and watered as needed. I'm about at the end of the patch and it has provided quite a few salads.


One thing I really didn't think about when harvesting lettuce, was how many bugs I would have to smash (good thing I'm not squeamish) and how much dirt gets on the leaves. If I plant more next year or even in the fall, I'm definitely going to purchase some straw to lay over the ground to eliminate some of the dirt. What I liked about all those bugs and dirt was that it was REAL. Neither thing is harmful and it only took a few minutes to go from dirty mess to delicious salad. Here's my salad in pictures.

Lettuce straight from the lettuce patch (about 10 steps from my door). You can see the dirt. I only killed two bugs with this batch.

The lettuce is getting a good bath in the colander.

Here's the finished product. I also added three kinds of herbs from the garden. The rest of the produce is not from the garden. I do have some tomatoes growing but don't think I'll ever get around to carrots.