Let Us Eat Lettuce

Salads are great - so how amazing is it that you can basically take a palmful of microscopic lettuce seeds, sprinkle them on some dirt, add a bit of water and boom...salad. I'm not really sure you can mess up growing leaf lettuce. I just planted these toddlers about four days ago. In a few weeks I will start pulling them up and mixing them into a delicious salad along with the purple-vined Malabar spinach, which, based on its growth rate and production, could probably survive a nuclear holocaust.

I see every single plant I grow as a step toward independence. A freedom from commercial pesticide-coated farms. A liberation from the American "need" to eat twice as much meat as vegetables and fruits. Every seed brings me closer to becoming a home that produces more than it consumes. I'm not an environmental nut by any stretch of the imagination (come on...cow farts damaging the ozone...seriously?) but I do believe in taking care of the creation around us. I am amazed at the amount of trash my little family produces each week, which I take out to the curb and is then hauled off to some overflowing landfill that's probably stinking up someone's beautiful farm next door. We make tons of trash* from all the junk we buy in stores that we could be growing or producing ourselves with a fraction of the waste. I always feel a little depressed on trash days driving around the city and seeing the shear amount of garbage stacked next to the streets. We suck. So I'm going to keep sowing and growing, and hope that someday I can make more than I waste.

*And we use cloth diapers. So our trash would easily be doubled or tripled per week with disposables.