A Non Gardeners Garden: Lettuce

Let me start by saying I am terrible with houseplants. No, let me change that, I'm terrible with all plants. I've tried keeping a garden, growing flowers, basil, to no avail. Not even weeds will grow on my watch.

I guess I will never be a professional botanist or work in a nursery. My hopes and dreams of having a little herb and flower garden in the backyard are not really very realistic. But I love the look of a green plant in an otherwise very ungreen room. So I must try a little bit harder at keeping these things alive. Maybe watering them regularly will help, you think?

Anyways, I stumbled upon a little tip on Facebook the other day about saving the base of the lettuce when you are done making a salad, putting it in an inch of water and changing the water out daily to see it grow. I am very much a skeptic so I read some of the comments and several people attested to this working well! Have I found the solution to not having to buy lettuce for the rest of my life?! Probably not, but since I have a habit of killing anything green and this seemed reasonably simple and easy to care for, I figured, why not?

The funny thing is I've been on a slight health kick lately (I say slight because I did make myself a nutella banana sandwich yesterday *drool*) and I've been serving up salad and green things as much as possible. Last week when I made a salad, I figured I'd give this little method a try. I took the base of the romaine that I chopped off, stuck it in a cup of water on the windowsill and waited.  I unfortunately did not take a picture of what it looked like in the beginning but rest assured, it was just a lobbed off romaine butt.

That was last week, this is what it looks like now:

 

Houston we have liftoff!

 In the second picture you can see where the original cut was made and how there's a good inch and a half of new growth starting from the inside.  In the first picture on the left is another one I started 2 days ago and is coming along quite nicely.

Now I should say, I started with 2 last week and the larger one didn't do much of anything so I threw it out. Although the successful one and my unsuccessful one that is now compost were from 2 separate packages, one being from Wegmans and another being from BJs, you can guess which one flourished *hint it's the Wegmans one*  Although I am thrilled with the results so far one week in, I am not claiming to be a farmer just yet. I don't have any clue what I will do when it starts to get bigger if it even decides to. What's more likely is it takes one look at me, realizes what I do to plants and kills itself to save it from the misery of slowly withering away in my care.

If the little guys live on another week or two I'll post more pictures and update on the progress or lack thereof. Hopefully this will be the start of something beautiful and will encourage me to grow and tend to some edibles I can place in the backyard. Here's to hoping!