Finding What We Have Lost - Growing your own food.

My lunch from the garden (pre-washed)


My Grandmother grew all the food for her family when she was raising her 8 children. Very few staples were purchased from "town". It's just two generations since, and our families are now far removed from this way of life. Sometimes I wonder, could I survive if there were not little packages of food on a grocery shelf? How did we lose this skill in these few years?

Well I'm not going to wander off into the woods to test my ability. I have a feeling the adventure would quickly turn into a rescue search. I am going to attempt to do what my grandmother did, grow all the veggies and fruit for my family. We'll have to learn to eat what is in season. My mother said that in the summer they couldn't open preserved items, that was for the winter. They had to eat what was currently ripe.

Here it is my first meal from my new potager. A salad! I grew it myself -buttons bursting-. I planted a salad mix and this is the results. Most of the lettuce is still small, so I thinned out the ones that were too close. This is those that I thinned and the the few larger leaves I found. It was enough salad for myself and my daughter. It was yummier than any other lettuce I have ever had :-)!

It was actually quite simple to grow, and the lettuce will keep producing new leaves as long as you leave the roots in the ground. This can even be done in a box with drainage on a patio. Just choose seed for a loose leaf variety of lettuce. Sprinkle the seeds on the prepared garden or patio container soil. Dust with a light layer of soil. Water well and soon you'll have lettuce popping up! Oh yeah, most veggies need lots of sunlight, lettuce does too. When they are about an inch tall, thin them to about an inch apart. You can eat all the little lettuce you thin. When the lettuce is larger, just pinch or snip off the larger leaves and the lettuce will continue to grow new leaves. Lettuce prefers cooler temperatures. Hot weather makes the lettuce bitter. So in our gulf coast area you must grow lettuce in the winter.

I'll be posting as different veggies are ready to harvest. Learning to stagger the harvest and keep something either preserved or ready to pick is going to be a challenge, but finding the lost skill of feeding yourself will be plenty rewarding!