Lettuce Entertain You

I don't know why I find lettuce so amusing. Maybe it's the gorgeous palette, from neon chartreuse to deep burgundy. Maybe it's the array of shapes from tight iceberg globes to enormous frizzy heads.Or the fact that it tolerates shade and can grow in my getting-shaded-out side beds without a hint of concern.

Lettuce is one of the best ways for new gardeners to learn succession planting. Many gardening books suggest planting a short row of lettuce, then another length of row a few weeks later. That works, but I hate to see two-thirds of a row sitting empty when it could have something in it. I plant whole rows as soon as the soil is no longer soupy in the spring, then start trays of replacement plants inside. When I pop out a lettuce plant--and I just harvest the whole plant rather than picking leaves most of the time--I can just pop a new seedling in its place.

In the spring, I plant cool-season lettuce varieties outside but start heat-tolerant types indoors. Once we hit mid-summer I start trays of cool-weather lettuces indoors to sub into the garden bed in early autumn, then switch over to spinach and Oriental salad greens to close out the outdoor gardening season. Once you get in this habit of thinking about lettuce in terms of continual starting, planting and harvesting through the growing season, it's easy to transfer that mindset to other crops and corners of the garden.

Lettuce is also fun to tuck in just about anywhere: hanging baskets, flower pots, between young tomato plants where they will be harvested before the tomatoes take over the bed. Miniature varieties like Tom Thumb are particularly well suited to inter-planting between bigger veggie crops. Plant some between rows of tall vegetables like brussels sprouts or under the ferny asparagus once it has passed the spring spear stage.

Unlike many garden vegetables these days, lettuce seed remains an inexpensive pleasure, and the dozens of varieties offered in garden seed companies like those at High Mowing Seeds, a Vermont grower that sells all organic seed mostly raised at their own seed farm in Wolcott, provide hours of catalog reading pleasure. Just remember that lettuce seed needs light to germinate -- sprinkle it lightly over the surface of damp seed starting mix then rub the surface with your hand just enough to ensure the seeds won't blow away. It's never too late to start lettuce, so peruse the garden-store racks now and get started on your late summer lettuce entertainment.

Thinnings: It's What's For Dinner

One of the fabulous things about growing your own food is how efficient you can be at using every last drop of the product at every stage. A commercial farm would discard, or maybe possibly compost, the millions of seedlings of lettuce, spinach, carrots, herbs and other produce that get thinned out when transplanting or in thickly direct-seeded rows. Me, I get to eat them, along with my weeds, volunteers, and just about anything else edible growing on the premises.

I've been eating thinned lettuce and spinach salad for weeks now, and tonight's bounty features a bowl full of mixed thinned basil--Genovese, sweet, lemon, lime, cinnamon.  The basil is in the oven right now, atop a bechamel sauce atop a quick pizza crust, all of it smothered under some local mozzarella.

Last night, I had pulled out some barley soup from the very bottom of the freezer--that time of year, when I'm in a rush to finish off what's left in there before this year's stuff goes in--and decided that some greens and cornbread would put together a good meal with it. Out to the garden, and scrounging around the beds I found three plants of golden chard, a couple small heads of radicchio, and a young red kale that had all reappeared from last year's plantings. I pulled them up, cut off the roots and chucked them to the chickens, and headed in to saute these 'weeds' in a little canola and sesame oil. A little splash of vinegar and sprinkle of sesame seeds, and they were just the right side-dish.

Of course there's the real 'weeds,' too -- uninvited specimens that are welcome into my kitchen nonetheless. My earliest seasonal salads are thick with garden sorrel. I'm not sure why this grows rampant in my yard, with it's tangy lemon or oxalic acid taste and arrow-shaped leaves. I suspect it came in on a load of topsoil bought to fill my original raised beds. I also use it to make 'weed soup' as my family calls it--an early summer treat of a creamed base, pureed potatoes, a bit of onion and black pepper, and copious handfuls of garden sorrel that turn it brilliant green.

More than 263 million pounds of food are thrown away in the United States every single day, according to the End Hunger program of the Society of St. Andrew. But that's not even counting the weeds and thinnings that never make it to the 'food' category--though they do make it to my dinner plate. Growing your own food enhances your own, and the nation's, food security because garden-grown food is used more efficiently, so we need less of it.

Memorial Day

It's Memorial Day, and all across the norther tier of North America (except where still under snow, floodwaters, or tornado debris), gardeners are heading outside to till up a plot and plant the tomato, pepper and eggplant flats they brought home from the local garden center. Overnight, vegetable gardens will appear as if my magic, transforming a rectangle of lawn or weeds into a plot of cultivated earth with good-sized plants in it.

I applaud anyone who grows any portion of their own food themselves, even just a single tomato plant. There are psychological, philosophical, and even political benefits from seeing where something comes from, from watching a plant from seed or small seedling to a nurturing, nutritional product on your family's dinner plates. Just knowing that you could manage to grow your own food if the the world as we know it crashed tomorrow is comforting and practical. I like living here in Vermont, in a land of gardeners, market farmers and food preservation fanatics--no matter what happens, no matter how big the storm or the floods or the stock market crash, we all know that no one here is going to starve. That's not necessarily a given in other parts of the world.

I was slow getting into the garden this spring, as even my raised beds were saturated. But we've still been eating salads and braised greens for several weeks now, partly from early plantings or spinach, arugula, Italian dandelion, mizuna and other cold-hardy salad fixings, and partly due to my own sloppiness--thanks to the fact that I never cleaned out the kale, radicchio and chard at the end of last year, they all sprouted again, adding to the early spring bounty.

While the Memorial Day weekend still marks a big apex in my planting schedule, gardening for me has evolved into a year-round part of my life. There is just about always something you can plant, indoors or out, any week of the year. There's also likely something you can harvest, indoors or out, every week o the year.

If you are a new gardener and you missed the Memorial Day planting date because you were out at the parades and barbecues, fishing or visiting relatives, don't worry, you can always plant next weekend, or the weekend after. Just start small--I can't count how many folks I've know who decided one year (usually associated with moving to the country) that they'd have a huge vegetable garden, worked themselves to utter exhaustion on Memorial Day weekend, then stared in bafflement at the patch of dead stalks and weeds in mid-July.

So plant a few things this Memorial Day if you possibly can -- and if you don't have ground, plant a cherry tomato plant in a container or hanging basket, or check around for community garden plots available in your neighborhood. Planting a single veggie plant this weekend will make you part of a huge, borderless community of gardeners, all keeping the skills of food security and self-sufficiency alive.

If you can't plant this summer--order up a copy of Barbara Damrosch's Garden Primer for your summer beach read, and patiently plan next year's garden. However you do it, enjoy your holiday!