The other night, we had cheeseburgers and potato salad for dinner. I was getting my burger fixings ready – ketchup and onions – when I realized that I had some leaf lettuce that was just about ready. So I hurried up to the garden and got some lettuce – about three leaves per burger – to give our burgers a bit of the “fresh from the garden” taste. I’ve tried to take a picture of my first harvests, but the lettuce was all eaten by the time I thought about it.
This lettuce has a bit of
an interesting history. Last spring, I
tried starting more seeds indoors than I usually do, but with limited window
sill space, I ended up with a lot of straggly seedlings. So I bought a grow light, hoping I’d have a
larger area than a window sill to start seeds.
I also wondered if I could grow some leaf lettuce during the
winter. I found a spot I could put the
light – it’s not the best place, but I’d have to clean out a spot for something
better – and planted a small pot with some old seeds. And nothing grew.
In late winter, I went
and bought all my seeds for the year, including new leaf lettuce. I planted another small pot, and it
germinated. At first, it seemed fine,
but then it still went a bit straggly. I
think my light was too high, something to fix for next year. But about a month after I planted it, it finally
stopped snowing and I worked up a spot and transplanted out my indoor
lettuce. I also direct sowed a larger
patch.
That was about a month
ago. The lettuce I direct sowed looks
like it will be ready to harvest sometime next week. So it took a month of growing lettuce indoors
to get a harvest about a week-and-a-half earlier than if I had just waited to
plant outside. Of course, if I hadn’t tried
to grow lettuce indoors, we wouldn’t have had any for our cheeseburgers.
