Dateline: 2016-01-21
As promised in the last post, this one is all about the fruits (well, technically vegetables) of our garden labor. The lettuce has gotten ripe, very ripe. In fact I suspect that it was allowed to go slightly too long. Some of the leaves were starting to yellow and overall the plants were starting to get unruly. So let the nom begin.
With a sharp kitchen knife it didn’t take much to go from “planter decoration” to “almost ready to eat”. However there is one very important step that isn’t pictured here: Wash everything very thoroughly. Just because the salad grew up in a garden planter that’s never so much as looked at a pesticide, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t need washing. Beyond the inevitable bugs (I hate spiders), there is the road dust. Not sure about you, but I don’t want to eat whatever the cars on the freeway are kicking up. So every leaf was washed individually before I cut up the lettuce into my Oxo salad spinner and washed very thoroughly again.
Unfortunately nothing else of value is growing (or ready for harvesting) so I had to add a few outsourced items (read: I bought other vegetables at the store). This was a simple meal so it only had the addition of tomatoes (which we’ve grown successfully before), onions, and chicken. Cucumbers and avocado are also delicious additions, but I was a little lazy. Let me say, it was just as delicious as any lettuce I’ve bought at the store and required basically zero effort to grow successfully. Maybe there was some luck involved (I won’t know until I try again), but this was a very quick and satisfying grow.