Lettuce!

Gardening is an activity requiring at times extraordinary patience. Really, growing anything requires patience, but sometimes it' tough to wait. We've had the pea plants in the bed outside since early March and only in the last two days have we finally gotten a flower. We'll probably be swimming in peas before too long, but it's already the latter half of April. We wanted peas last month. But we must wait.

That makes lettuce maybe the easiest and most fun thing to grow. Leaf lettuce in particular you can harvest a month after planting, sometimes sooner. Here is our first major haul.

We have three lettuce blends (they sell lettuce mixes in packets these days, which is nice, since there are about 100 kinds and you don't want to buy dozens of seed packets and try to mix them). One is still out in the pea bed awaiting harvesting (the arugula bolted to seed already, it's barely been out there five weeks), and this is our master chef blend. We don't know what's in it, but it's tasty. Made salad last night with a selection of leaves, and today, in order to resow our hot-season lettuce blend, we went ahead and pulled all of these out. Rinsed and stored in a plastic bag in the fridge they'll last as long as any salad mix from the store, but this here represents about a dime's worth of lettuce seed instead of two or three $3.79 bags of lettuce. Sweet!