The 2024 Gardens: Part 1

My very last garden post in 2023 went up three days before the endoscopic ultrasound (a routine procedure performed without a hitch in almost all cases) that landed me in the hospital and skilled nursing for nine weeks. As I wrote when I finally got home in late October and finally started blogging again (albeit slowly) in late November, the gardens had gone to tatters since late August. And while I said then that I would "likely" have a garden again, I confess that it is now late April and other than make a few lazy notes in my head, I have not done a single thing on the garden front. 

That being said, absolutely nothing prepared me for what I discovered a few days ago coming up in the kitchen garden:

Recognize this? Here, let's try another photo:

Those, my friends, are volunteer lettuce starts. I never even suspected that lettuce would go to seed and then come up in the spring. 

In that last garden post in 2023, I noted that some of the the Black Seeded Simpson lettuce had gone to flower:

I had taken down most of the flowering stalks, but left a few up because the flowers were so beautiful and delicate:

Given the medical situation this fall, no one ever got back to them to clip the remaining flowers. And so the lettuce did what any sensible plant would do: it seeded itself.

We' won't be making much salad from these few starts unless they get a lot larger. All the same, I clipped a few leaves this evening and added them to our salad bowls before we sat down to supper. That gave us each a taste of spring and a hint of the magic of growing our own food.

And that taste was delicious.