Is it worth planting a lettuce root from the grocery store?
I'd read about folks planting
carrot tops and other detritus from their salad-making, but hadn't been
buying enough grocery-store produce to even consider giving it a try.
But when the lettuce head at the left ended up in our kitchen this
winter with a big mass of roots still attached, I couldn't resist the
urge to set it out in the garden.I planted that lettuce under a quick hoop in the middle of February...and it sat there for weeks doing nothing at all. The photo at the top of this post shows the plant's current state nearly two months later. It's finally almost large enough to pick a few leaves from...although, for the sake of comparison, leaf lettuce direct-seeded on the same date is nearly as big:
What's with that lettuce
root growing so slowly? I suspect that February lettuce from Krogers is
hydroponic produce grown at the perfect temperature and nutrient
levels. In the wild weather of an Ohio garden, hot-house varieties are
going to lose the sprint to harvest to my hardy Black-seeded Simpson
every time.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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