Lettuce harvesting

After watching a couple of videos I decided to harvest some lettuce this morning. If you cut the leaves leaving about an inch to inch-and-a-half from the base it should start growing again. Other than a 30-45 day guideline and just watching them grow, I'm not sure how big they are supposed to get but figured they looked ready. I'm happy to report that our first organic-home-grown-lettuce salad was delicious and I only dressed it with some olive oil and splash of balsamic vinaigrette!

Hey, I'm a beginner :-) but I also learned that you want to cut the leaves before they 'bolt'. If the plant gets stressed generally due to temperature, drought, overcrowding, etc., it starts to seed and flower = bolt. It also causes the lettuce to taste bitter. I read that if your lettuce plants bolt, it's probably best to heap them into your compost pile and start again.

That must be what happened to my basil last year! It grew tall and flowered and did not produce the lush basil leaves I was expecting. On that note, we caught a segment on the Katie Brown Workshop program and watched her & her pal build a tiered herb garden that we may give a try. They used a wooden stair risers and screwed in wooden window boxes. Here is a link to her instruction page:
http://www.katiebrown.com/kbep1.cfm?cat=GROW&episodeid=6&seasonID=5

How does your garden grow?

Last weekend was nice and we did some garden work on Saturday. I pulled weeds and George started working on the shed which will eventually be a green house.


There was a small plant growing and the leaves looked like there might be some sort of root vegetable underneath. George dug it up and solved the mystery. It was a white daikon radish in the shape of a carrot! We tried a tiny piece and it had a spicy peppery taste.


The Santa Rosa Plum Tree we planted in Dec. 09, just flowered.


The nasturtium is still taking off like crazy!

And last but not least, the lettuce plants seem to be doing exceptionally well! Look at how much they have grown!



Now everything is getting a good watering with this stormy weekend. We've also been following the NHK news on Japan, especially George. It's hard to fathom such devastation and along with the sadness we feel towards the challenges survivors are facing, we are also reminded and making some emergency preparations of our own.