Harvest Moon

I love the song Harvest Moon by Neil Young. I'm not a superfan of his by any stretch of the imagination, but I do think that song is pretty cool. It's a beautiful love song and there's a broom player in the song. If you watch a live performance of it, the broom player swishes the broom rhythmically on the floor. How cool is that?

I harvested the last of my lettuce yesterday. Lettuce does not like hot weather and goes to seed when it heats up. I had been holding off on the last little batch, biding my time. Plus, we were out of lettuce. : ) It's been nice in the last few months....I have bought no lettuce at the store, but occasionally supplemented my crop with a few heads from the local farmers' market.

This time, I pulled the plants out by the roots since they were done for the season.

Then, I cut off the roots and thick part and put it into my salad spinner. This took a while....the root parts have a ton of dirt (I even saw a few bugs/worms).

My salad spinner is from IKEA. Those puppies can get expensive! All of the yucky leaves and root parts went into my compost container to be taken out to the compost bin.

Finally, I put the washed leaves in a plastic bin to store in the fridge. Prewashed lettuce!

I am extremely pleased with my lettuce crop this year. Last year, we had built our raised veggie bed too late in the spring to sow lettuce seeds. In my zone, you can sow lettuce seeds as early as mid- to late-March.

Last year, I tried to plant a fall crop and had no success. We had a drought here last summer into the fall, so I could not get anything to germinate! Some of those seeds actually germinated this spring. I'm going to try again this year....I'd love me some fresh lettuce as fall arrives, before the garden goes to bed!