During this last weekend, we had some good friends of ours over for dinner.  We had a wonderful time visiting, and I loved all the wonderful gardening advice I got as well.  One of those bits of advice was to take this small strip of dirt along our screen porch, and turn it into a lettuce patch.  The strip gets very little sun- but it does get some, which is enough to grow lettuce.  My friend suggested that by using that piece of dirt, I could potentially have lettuce all summer long- without the hours and hours of direct sun, my lettuce wouldn’t decide to bolt and go to seed so quickly.

You don’t say?

I couldn’t stop thinking of this, so yesterday I took a pitchfork to the dirt to see what was there- and what do you know, there was nothing there.  I was too tired to do much else, but today I managed to find a bit of energy.  I robbed the main garden space of some newly acquired compost, worked it in, and wasted no time in scattering some lettuce seeds.

I planted some lettuce out a few weeks ago, but with the cool temps, I’ve had nothing come up yet.  Much of the seed is older, so I was wondering about viability… I decided to not plant lettuce in the SFG way, and instead, just sprinkled a whole lot of seeds in the ground.  I will thin if needed, but I figure this way I can at least ensure some measure of success with the lettuce.

I planted several varieties here- all different types of romaine, which is my absolute favorite.  I planted some Vivian which was an old packet from Burpee- don’t know how successful that will be.  I also planted Little Gem, a small variety, Verte Mar from Seeds of Change, as well as Jericho- my favorite romaine, and then last but not least, some Cimarron- a red romaine.  I tossed the Jericho and the Cimarron together in the dirt closest to the front of the house- I have visions of this beautiful patch of red and green tantalizing from the sidewalk.

I had planned on sowing some spring mix, but lo and behold, I couldn’t find the seed packet.  I was puzzling over this when I remembered that last year I’d given an ample supply of my seeds to someone who was growing a garden to donate to food pantries and whatnot.  Mental note: When donating seed, remember that, so you don’t count on having it on hand when you go to plant.

Time will tell if this is successful.  I swear I can taste the lettuce already.  I’m looking forward to updating with success!