Showing posts with label romaine lettuce. Show all posts
Showing posts with label romaine lettuce. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 29, 2014

Salad Days

It's sunny.
It's warm.
And the lettuce is coming out of my ears!

My flukey experiment of planting lettuce in the fall to keep the soil from blowing away has led to lots of lettuce. Loads of it. Legions and legionnaires of it! Mais oui!

Every day I have to harvest another head of lettuce because the stuff is growing like hotcakes. If I sold the lettuce, they'd sell like weeds! And I'd become a millionaire--what piece of cupcake!

For dinner last night I made a French onion soup from scratch but because of the invasion of lettuce, I scrapped the hot soup for a green lettuce salad with cherry tomatoes. And it was delicious.


It's only January and already I'm enjoying these salad days! Bon appetit!

Tuesday, January 28, 2014

Let Us Discuss the Fluke

"I did it on a whim", I said waving my serrated knife in the air.
"What?" Mr. Wonderful said standing in the kitchen.
"And it worked."
"What worked?"
"It's a fluke!"
"What's a fluke?!"

I called it a "fluke" but that didn't help Mr. Wonderful understand what I was talking about because most things in my life have fallen into the "fluke" category. Major flukes alone have included: 1) My pet; 2) My career; and 3) The car I drive because no one can believe the thing still runs.

But this current fluke I was referring to was one of the flukiest. Back in the fall after I'd ripped out my barren tomatoes, I read that in order to keep the soil from blowing away in the coming Santa Ana winds, that I should plant "winter crops". Winter crops include things like broccoli, kale and silver Christmas trees, pre-decorated.

So off to the the nursery I went with Mr. Wonderful in tow. I bought broccoli, kale, romaine lettuce, Jerusalem artichokes and Popeye spinach. It's strange planting baby vegetables in October. But hey, it was just on a fluke. Who knew if they would take.

Well, they took! Here it is January and the artichokes are growing. The broccoli looks like broccoli! The curly kale is ready to be ground into a healthy smoothie! The lettuce is just amazing! It went from small:


To BIG: 

To my kitchen counter! And into a salad.


These flukes were fabulous!

The only disappointment was the spinach which hasn't grown at all. If spinach doesn't grow how can it help Popeye be so strong? Maybe I should talk to Popeye about it. Or maybe I should just plant more flukey romaine lettuce!