[ Lost in the Landscape ]

lettuce make art

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?

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.

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 | Categories: art • gardening | Tags: lettuce • photoshop | 1 Comment »

sharing with the birds

I don’t dead­head every flow­er­ing plant in the garden–That would drive me crazy! Besides there are plants that pro­duce seeds that keep the local bird pop­u­la­tion happy, and many of these plants are annu­als that would only come back next year from seed.

There are some let­tuce plants that I’ve been let­ting go to seed for the last decade or so. I put up with some slightly scrappy look­ing plants for a month or so. But there are some lit­tle yellow-green finches that descend on the veg­etable gar­den, mak­ing a most excel­lent squawk­ing racket. And when the weather turns cool again, there’s a nice lit­tle col­lec­tion of baby let­tuces, all from seed, some plants for the salad plate, some to make more seeds for the birds.

July 02 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: deadheading • lettuce • reseeding | 2 Comments »

casual vegetable gardening

Some things I put in the ground exactly where I want them. Other things I put in once and let nature take care of the rest. Way back in the Pale­o­zoic era I’d bought some red romaine let­tuce plants. There were more than we could eat, and a few went to seed. They looked a lit­tle unkempt, but the lit­tle yel­low finches loved the seeds and made a ruckus in the yard as they fed on them.

After the next rains, tiny let­tuce plants began to sprout all over. The plants that were in rea­son­able spots I let grow, and the baby greens from them were as tasty as the red leaves were great to look at. I let a few of those go to seed again, and the cycle started all over. Here are a few plants from the cur­rent crop, pro­vid­ing a nice red coun­ter­point around a green rosemary:

Veg­etable gar­dens so often seem to be dis­ci­plined, mil­i­tary spaces with their per­fectly aligned rows of exactly the same plant, one after another. Instead of that, why not plant the veg­gies like they’re an exten­sion of the gar­den? And why not let some of them go to seed and repop­u­late themselves?

March 09 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: lettuce • reseeding • vegetable gardening | 5 Comments »