As we kick off May, the goodness of the veggie garden also kicks off with greens that are becoming tall enough to harvest for salads, I thought I'd start showing off varieties being grown in our garden…right from the beds themselves.
Our first lettuces to be eaten are is from this row of Yedikule, a Turkish heirloom variety I planted from seed after receiving a free packet with an order of a million other seeds this past winter. I am starting to thin them out now to let a few of them turn into heads of lettuce, and so the longer leaves are being eaten and the shorter ones I pull are delicious little snacks for Lucy and Blondie, who constantly follow me around in the garden nowadays. I plant lettuces in between rows of onions, as they always seem to do well as companion plants, as well as among plants that will eventually provide the much-needed shade when the weather warms up. This variety, however, is known for getting bitter faster, so you need to enjoy it in the spring when it's perfection!
By the way folks, if anyone's reading this? Please do NOT buy lettuce starts - it's the biggest scam out there. They are INSANELY easy to grow and the starts not only are a ripoff, they are plastic waste gone wild. Even if you don't thin lettuce seeds once they start leafing? It's fine! Snip it off as - yep, you guessed it - leaf lettuce. If you want heads, just be more careful and don't just toss the entire packet of seeds in a line - aka, follow the directions on the packet (something that's still hard for me LOL...) to waste less, and keep the rest for secondary seeding or even til next year. You get exponentially more greens this way and for a fraction of the price...while contributing less to the fossil fuel disaster that plastic is doing in destroying our environment.
And this tastes soooo good, y'all.