Salad Days
For a few evenings last week, our dinner salad included lettuce harvested from the spaces between the pavers that cover our driveway. It was volunteer lettuce, courtesy of our gardening neighbors to the east.
We live on a slight hill that slopes down from east to west, and each house on our street is on a lot somewhat lower than the one uphill of it, with a retaining wall marking the boundary. Our gardening neighbors have created several large raised beds on the strip of land that borders the top of the retaining wall. The raised beds, framed with planks of wood, perch as if on a three-foot-tall cliff overlooking our driveway.
They planted red leaf lettuce in one of the raised beds last spring, and they had a very nice crop of it. In the fall, what remained of the red leaf lettuce went to seed, and then with winter and freezing temperatures, the last remains of the lettuce disappeared. But the lettuce had obviously self-seeded.
Looking out a side window about a month ago, I noticed that a new crop of red leaf lettuce had begun to appear in the raised bed where last year’s lettuce had been—though I hadn’t yet seen any signs of gardening on the part of our neighbors.
Then a bit later I noticed little clusters of ruffly red leaves appearing on the edge of our driveway below the raised beds. Obviously some last fall’s seeds had drifted in our direction and sowed themselves between our pavers. I waited until the volunteer crop got larger and then harvested it.
Would that time travel was a reality! We could have had volunteer tomatoes with our volunteer lettuce.
A decade or more ago, at about this same time of year, an uninvited seedling appeared in a flower bed at the side of our house. I noticed that its leaves had a fuzzy texture and lacy edges, and as it developed, I recognized it as a tomato plant.
It grew and grew, and we realized the seed from which it sprouted had been delivered with a layer of compost my husband had transferred to the flower bed from our compost heap. Every scrap of fruit and vegetable waste goes to the compost heap, including uneaten bits of tomato.
Since the tomato plant had sneaked up on us unawares, I hadn’t made any provision to contain its ramblings with stakes or a tomato cage, and so as it got larger, shoots branched off from the main stem and sprawled here and there among the flowers. In recognition of this, we named it “The Creeper.”
In time tiny yellow tomato blossoms began to appear, and then tiny green tomatoes that swelled and swelled and turned red. The Creeper produced so many tomatoes so faithfully that for a few months that summer we harvested a tomato every day and I never had to put tomatoes on my grocery list.
I saved the seeds from one of these tomatoes and planted some of them the following spring, but in the meantime we had made some changes in our landscaping and the flower bed where the Creeper had flourished no longer existed.
In the absence of the particular combination of location and the one magical seed that had produced the Creeper, I was never able to coax the plants that sprouted from the saved seeds to even produce blossoms. In fact, my green thumb doesn’t extend much beyond pansies and herbs in pots, so I’m particularly delighted when nature volunteers to come to my rescue.
We live on a slight hill that slopes down from east to west, and each house on our street is on a lot somewhat lower than the one uphill of it, with a retaining wall marking the boundary. Our gardening neighbors have created several large raised beds on the strip of land that borders the top of the retaining wall. The raised beds, framed with planks of wood, perch as if on a three-foot-tall cliff overlooking our driveway.
They planted red leaf lettuce in one of the raised beds last spring, and they had a very nice crop of it. In the fall, what remained of the red leaf lettuce went to seed, and then with winter and freezing temperatures, the last remains of the lettuce disappeared. But the lettuce had obviously self-seeded.
Looking out a side window about a month ago, I noticed that a new crop of red leaf lettuce had begun to appear in the raised bed where last year’s lettuce had been—though I hadn’t yet seen any signs of gardening on the part of our neighbors.
Then a bit later I noticed little clusters of ruffly red leaves appearing on the edge of our driveway below the raised beds. Obviously some last fall’s seeds had drifted in our direction and sowed themselves between our pavers. I waited until the volunteer crop got larger and then harvested it.
Would that time travel was a reality! We could have had volunteer tomatoes with our volunteer lettuce.
A decade or more ago, at about this same time of year, an uninvited seedling appeared in a flower bed at the side of our house. I noticed that its leaves had a fuzzy texture and lacy edges, and as it developed, I recognized it as a tomato plant.
It grew and grew, and we realized the seed from which it sprouted had been delivered with a layer of compost my husband had transferred to the flower bed from our compost heap. Every scrap of fruit and vegetable waste goes to the compost heap, including uneaten bits of tomato.
Since the tomato plant had sneaked up on us unawares, I hadn’t made any provision to contain its ramblings with stakes or a tomato cage, and so as it got larger, shoots branched off from the main stem and sprawled here and there among the flowers. In recognition of this, we named it “The Creeper.”
In time tiny yellow tomato blossoms began to appear, and then tiny green tomatoes that swelled and swelled and turned red. The Creeper produced so many tomatoes so faithfully that for a few months that summer we harvested a tomato every day and I never had to put tomatoes on my grocery list.
I saved the seeds from one of these tomatoes and planted some of them the following spring, but in the meantime we had made some changes in our landscaping and the flower bed where the Creeper had flourished no longer existed.
In the absence of the particular combination of location and the one magical seed that had produced the Creeper, I was never able to coax the plants that sprouted from the saved seeds to even produce blossoms. In fact, my green thumb doesn’t extend much beyond pansies and herbs in pots, so I’m particularly delighted when nature volunteers to come to my rescue.
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