Friday Farm Photo: Have a Freshly Picked Weekend.

Heirloom lettuce direct seeded in the kitchen garden the first part of April. Want to grow your own gourmet lettuce from seed? In this popular post I show you that it's easier than you think!

Do you have any plans this weekend? We usually hunker down at home for the holidays, though I do wish I'd thought to buy some potato chips the last time we were out.

In between munching on homemade sourdough rye French bread (a new experiment—so good toasted and topped with melty cheese and freshly laid fried eggs) and as much of this gorgeous lettuce as possible (we're racing the heat clock here), I'll be trying to get 50+ heirloom tomato plants, a few dozen heirloom pepper plants (after a several year break, I'm finally back to starting my tomatoes and peppers from seed!) and a bunch of other stuff in the ground.

More below. . .

Wednesday Dose of Cute: Why Dogs Don't Plant Vegetable Gardens

But I don't wanna have salad for the next 15 days in a row. I'll probably die if I eat that much lettuce.

More photos below. . .

On Loving Lettuce & Eating Salad for Breakfast

I Never Get Tired Of Looking At Lettuce

Over the years I’ve come to the conclusion that I do not think about salad the same way normal people do. The first step toward this realization occurred one Thanksgiving dinner when I was passed a beautiful wooden salad bowl. Peering inside, I saw a mouthwatering mix of butterhead lettuce, red onion, and avocado tossed with a creamy dressing. There was just one helping left, and as I was about to place it on my plate, I glanced around the table and noticed that only one other person had any salad. The contents of that bowl were supposed to feed seven more people!

Then there was the phone conversation I once had with a long-distance gardening friend. He had called to announce that he and his wife had made an interesting discovery about growing lettuce.

"If you just pull off some of the leaves instead of plucking the entire plant from the ground, the leaves will keep growing back. The way we figure it," he said brightly, "you only need three lettuce plants to feed two people for the entire summer."

I decided not to mention the three heads of lettuce I'd consumed earlier that day for lunch—or the 200 square feet of salad greens in my organic heirloom garden.

A few weeks ago I was harvesting a pile of mesclun to send home with a gardenless friend. "That’s plenty!" she said as I continued to pick.

"That," I politely informed her, "is barely enough for one serving."

And when I set a bowl of salad in front of a houseguest recently, he looked down at it, looked up at me, and said, "Please tell me this is for all of us."

"You don’t have to finish it," I reassured him. But I probably will.

So I’m a little obsessed with salads, which I eat nearly every day of the year. And while pretty much anything green, leafy, and not poisonous is fair game for my salad bowl, lettuce holds a special place in my heart.

For there are certain times when absolutely nothing, not even chocolate, will satisfy my soul and stomach except some freshly picked butter lettuce from the garden. Even if it’s 1:30 in the morning. And we’re in the middle of a thunder/lightning/wind/hail/rainstorm. And my terrified, 50-pound, thunder-phobic dog is trying desperately to climb into my arms as I crouch down harvesting lettuce in the wet darkness with a 98% dead flashlight. But oh, how that salad hit the spot.


European Mesclun Mix From Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds

The lettuce season this year was surprisingly bountiful. Lettuce is an iffy thing to plant for spring in southern Missouri. We usually have at least a few days in the 90s in April--which in itself can be enough to ruin your crop--and it's always a toss up as to whether May will behave itself and stay mild or jump headfirst into summer. This year it behaved, and I harvested gorgeous lettuce every day for weeks.

On June 8th, with temperatures threatening to soar upwards, I grabbed a pair of scissors and snipped what was left in the two 4' x 8' raised beds I'd direct seeded at the end of March, leaving the base of the plants in the ground. It amounted to several pounds. Because I make it a point to plant varieties that are heat tolerant and slow to bolt, despite quite a few days in the upper 80s I was still picking unbitter bounty on June 19th (while crossing my fingers the stuff in the fridge wouldn't rot). Today I enjoyed the last of the spring lettuce. July 1st--I think that may be a record.

My salads will now be lettuceless for the next several months, but if you live in a place where summers are mild (oh, how I envy you!), it's not too late to plant, and growing your own lettuce from seed is easier than you might think. Click here to visit my kitchen garden and learn how.


Fast Farm Food

With such an abundance of wonderful lettuce hanging around, it was only a matter of time before I figured out a way to eat it for breakfast. For the first time in months, I was out of my beloved blueberry bran muffins, and morning found me flailing around the kitchen, half starved, my mind a blank. I'm the kind of girl who needs to know what she's going to have for breakfast when her head hits the pillow the night before.

Incapable of doing anything else, I turned my mind toward thoughts of lunch. Before long I'd convinced myself that freshly laid fried eggs on a bed of lettuce wasn't really all that different from the scrambled eggs with chopped Swiss chard I sometimes whip up. Thinly sliced pieces of homegrown lamb salami crisped up nicely in place of pancetta or proscuitto or bacon and left me a little grease to fry the eggs in. A few chopped scallions, a drizzle of creamy dressing (yes, even foodie farmgirls sometimes buy bottled salad dressing--organic of course), and some freshly grated pecorino romano finished things off.

It wasn't until everything was arranged on my plate that I realized I'd just spent about five minutes making a meal that had not only come mostly from the farm, but was healthy and beautiful as well. I snapped a photo and dove in. I guess I need to run out of bran muffins more often.

© 2007 FarmgirlFare.com, the award-winning blog where Farmgirl Susan shares photos & stories of her crazy country life on 240 remote Missouri acres.

Farm Photo: 5/8/07

Big Boston Lettuce In The Greenhouse

I eat a salad nearly every day of the year. And while anything green, leafy, and not poisonous is fair game for my salad bowl, lettuce holds a special place in my heart, and I always grow numerous varieties of it in my kitchen garden.

But since daytime temperatures on the farm are already hanging in the mid-80s and threatening to go only higher, it's obvious that we're quickly nearing the end of a lovely but all-too-brief spring lettuce season. In many places, however, there's still plenty of time to plant. Click here to learn how you can go from seed to salad bowl in less than a month, no matter where you live (well, unless it's here, in which case you'll have to wait until fall to sow your seeds--but once you do it'll still be less than a month before you'll be able to start harvesting).

Need a little help getting growing? The Vegetable Gardener's Bible by Ed Smith has been my favorite gardening book for the past 7 years, and I highly recommend it for kitchen gardeners of all levels. Click here to read my review of it.

P.S. Oops! I somehow forgot to include the photo of Cary eating her birthday popcorn in Sunday's post, but it's there now. Click here if you'd like to take a look.

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© Copyright 2007 FarmgirlFare.com, where Farmgirl Susan shares photos and stories about her crazy country life on 240 remote Missouri acres.

Daily Farm Photo: 11/13/06

Petite Rouge Heirloom Lettuce In The Garden

There's nothing better than eating freshly picked food in season--except when you trick the seasons and extend your harvest. Thanks to floating row covers, heavy clear plastic, and some old bedsheets, we're still enjoying all kinds of gorgeous and tasty organic salad greens. (Click here to learn how you can go from seed to salad bowl in less than a month--no matter where you live.) Of course even the loveliest, most delicious lettuces pale in comparison to the star of Saturday night's dinner--fresh, tender venison on the opening day of deer season. I was out in the field with the sheep and managed to bag two bucks armed with nothing more than my shepherd's crook and Cary's baby bottle. Now that's country living!

A year of Daily Photos ago:
Volunteer Dill Coming Up Among The Escarole (Yippee!)

And out of the kitchen came: Beyond Easy Beer Bread

Daily Farm Photo: 5/24/06

Eating Local

You may have heard that the Eat Local Challenge is going on this month (which, I realize, is almost over). But you can participate in your own Eat Local Challenge any time of the year. Why bother? Click here for 10 good reasons. You could start today--even if you live in a place where it's still too early for farmers' markets. Try seeking out and eating just one locally produced thing a day.

Ask around. You might be surprised to find that there is an amazing cheesemaker located just a few miles away. Or that your favorite supermarket buys some of its produce from nearby growers. Or that your neighbor down the street is an avid edible gardener willing to share. Even locally brewed beer counts! Note: The Locavores use a 100-mile radius around their home to define local foods, which gives you a fairly large hunting ground.

For more help finding food nearby, check out LocalHarvest.org. To learn how others are living up to their challenge, visit the new group blog EatLocalChallenge.com.

And for some inspiration to support small farmers (along with a healthy serving of gorgeous photos), head over to Small Farms: A Blog From The Heart, where the incredible Tana will have you laughing, crying, and wanting to make tonight's dinner from food that still has dirt clinging to it.

Of course you can't get any more local than your own backyard (or windowsill or front porch steps or fire escape). I've been harvesting several varieties of lettuce (including the Rocky Top Mix pictured above from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds), along with all kinds of other tasty salad greens, for several weeks now. Click here, and I'll have you going from seed packet to salad bowl in under a month—even if your 'garden' consists of a couple of plastic buckets or tubs.

I've also been enjoying asparagus from the garden for the past month, though my little bed has only been offering up four or five spears at a time. Tender, locally grown asparagus is still available in many places right now, and I urge you to try to get your hands on some.

For interesting ways to prepare it, check out Asparagus Aspirations at Seriously Good, where Kevin has been compiling asparagus recipes from food bloggers around the world all month long.

Wondering where Cary is? She's been up to no good in the garden (again), and I have the pictures to prove it. Click here to see for yourself.

So what tasty local things have you been eating?

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