Anyone can grow lettuce. Throw out some seeds, lightly water at dawn and dusk, wait two or three weeks, and presto! you have baby lettuce. But, now what? Like many, I harvested individual leaves early, before the lettuce qualified as a “head”. This leaf lettuce only amounted to a single serving at first picking, but that picking stimulated rapid growth. For the past month I’ve had nice heads of lettuce in my garden that provide biweekly salads.

Yet, last week I noticed that my lettuce aged almost over night. I looked a little closer and found the signs that I’d missed, so that I will harvest my heads in time from now on.

Maybe one day I won’t commit these mistakes as frequently.

Several signs of mature lettuce:

• Leaf Shape
  Mature lettuce has a broad, curly leaf; immature lettuce is spoon-like with a long, narrow stalk.
• Leaf Waviness
  Lettuce, when mature, has a wave to the leaves—the deeper the folds, the older the plant.
• Leaf Color (Romaine Lettuces, etc)
  Romaine lettuce begins its life as a normal green plant that slowly, or quickly depending on the variety, changes to a brown color in its leaves. The De Morges Braun leaves gain a uniform brown hue when mature, and the end of the leaf turns a pink-rust color when old.
• Texture
  I discovered that young lettuce feels particularly soft. This softness only departs when the lettuce becomes old and firm, when its leaves will tear apart with more easily.

I pick my De Morges Braun lettuce by the head when it reaches equilibrium in color. When the leaves are uniformly brown in color I sever the stem and refrigerate it that day, even when I have used that head as leaf lettuce. I find it unique that this variety grows old from the center out, and adorns its leaf tips with a rust-pink color.

I pick my “normal” lettuce, the Black-seeded Simpson, when its leaves curl and develop small spines on their back, but before their shade of green changes. When old, Black-seeded Simpson will change hue in one of two ways: its leaves may become pale yellow at the tips; or its leaves may become a darker green.

Now I have a mixture of just-right and too-old lettuces to eat—all at once.  At least we enjoy salads!

Wide shot of my garden.

I’ve got two kinds of lettuce, romaine (the variety is rare, called De Morges Braun) with a very round head, and leaf lettuce (Black Seeded Simpson).  The romaine, as I said, is quite rare and produces a round head that has brown speckling on the upper halves of its leaves; I’ve found it to be a hardy variety.  The Black Seeded Simpson is a bright colored lettuce with extremely wavy leaves.  What you cannot see in the pictures is the salad I harvested for the 4th of July, for 9 people.

In addition, I’ve got wax beans growing in my garden. I’ve already had one small harvest, enough for a serving for one, of these delicious beans. I love that they are bush beans, because I don’t have to worry about providing a structure to climb.

This morning while watering the garden I saw something on my cucumber plant that I’d missed: a huge fruit!  Technically, since it’s a pickling cucumber, the fruit is supposed to be picked before it becomes fat, but when I picked it this morning it weighed half a pound.  Yes! a half-pound pickling cucumber!

Usually the problems I faced were related to neglect.  Such as, but hardly limited to:

• Forgetting to open the shades.
• Forgetting to water the plant.
• Watering the plant too much.
• Putting a tropical plant beneath an air-conditioning vent, in summer.

So, the only logical thing to do was to plant a garden!

Hah, I kid, I kid.

In these times, even before the major financial trouble, it helps to keep a garden.  The price of food is insane today, when you can easily grow the very same vegetable in your garden.  Now, I’m no vegetarian, but I’m not going to raise my own animals.  But plants?  Bring it on!

That, and when talking with my parents, we all agreed that it would be nice to have some level of self-sufficiency.  And fresh produce is always nice; it is fresher to pick it, than to go to the store and buy it.

Being a programmer and designer–yes, I am one of those folks who wear both hats–the first thing I did was look for references.  I looked around for books that explain gardening, how to do it better, and so on and so forth.  In the end I bought several books: Square-foot Gardening, Weedless Gardening, and Carrots Love Tomatoes.  From the library I got a book on harvesting vegetables all year.  And so I read and learned from them.

Later I bought heirloom seeds, I’ll talk about GMO and hybrid problems another time, for a small garden.  Given how much time I can give this, plus how much experience I’ve got, I didn’t want to get overwhelmed.  There won’t be huge, plentiful yields or anything–but next year I should have the knowledge I need to double my garden’s size at least.

I’ll get around to posting pictures and articles about what I’m doing (and more importantly, why I’m doing this) weekly.

So there you have it, the green-thumb-less geek has gone to wreak havoc by starting a garden.