lettuce make art

head-of-lettuce

A woman in my office brought in a cou­ple flats of let­tuces that her father had grown. Every few months the father’s gar­den gets to that exu­ber­ant point where there’s no way you can begin to eat every­thing it pro­duces. What bet­ter thing to do with it than share?

lettuce-closeup

I brought home a cou­ple heads that are mak­ing their way into sal­ads. Peo­ple rave about the dif­fer­ence between home-grown and store-bought toma­toes, but let­tuce can show sim­i­lar dif­fer­ences. The thick outer stems in the sal­ads had a del­i­cate crunch with­out the bit­ter­ness that you often encounter.

Talk­ing to my coworker she was say­ing how her father was get­ting dis­tressed with the new water­ing restric­tions. Appar­ently he was used to water­ing his veg­eta­bles every day. She was try­ing to assure him that cut­ting back to every other day prob­a­bly wouldn’t make much dif­fer­ence, even in midsummer.

morphed-lettuce

In addi­tion to salad I made this abstrac­tion using another closeup of the let­tuce as a source. This employs the much-overused Find Edges fil­ter in Pho­to­shop, in com­bi­na­tion with a cou­ple of other con­trols. I tried to keep just a hint of the let­tuce to credit the bio­log­i­cal source of the image. It’s a desk­top doo­dle at this point, and I’m not sure I’ll do any­thing with it.

So, is this what they call play­ing with your food?

July 19 2009 06:13 am | Categories: artgardening | Tags:

One Response to “lettuce make art”

  1. tina on 19 Jul 2009 at 6:44 am #

    Yes, play­ing with your food. You just gotta have fun in the garden..

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