Personal Growth in Heels: from Lettuce Seeds to Ecoterrorist

A year ago, I had messed things up, as usual.

Like an idiot I went to the nursery just to, you know, see what they had--you know, in April, in Southern California. Yeah. They had everything. I immediately started running around with my little cart picking up six packs of pumpkins and cilantro and pineapple sage and tomatillos and about nine thousand packets of seeds because I had one 2'x6' bed in my backyard and it could obviously sustain all the edible plant life necessary for a complete food forest. 

I have to admit the people at the nursery were complete freaking enablers holding the end of my tourniquet so I could shoot myself up with my drug of choice because at no time did anyone stop me and say hey loser. Are you a farmer? Are you a commercial poppy grower? Do you own an estate in Columbia where you anticipate having to support the entirety of a vast army of rebels? Because you will one hundred percent never in life ever be able to find places with enough sun and enough space for like, a fraction of what you have in your cart right now. Unless you plan on stealing this shopping cart and making it into a planter, in which case then yes, you can go ahead and take that tomato plant. 

Worst was all the packets of seeds. Once I got home and started looking more closely at the spacing requirements for all my six packs I realized I had room for exactly one six pack of plants. The rest I dug into odd places here and there and put into pots for the time being and then looked forlornly at my packets of seeds. I distributed about half a packet of green bean seeds into an enormous, ridiculously expensive set of peat pots seed starters and then looked at the other like, ten thousand seed packets and went to go look for a mirror so I could punch myself in the face. Goddammit. I was never going to have blue pumpkins. 

I was just going to have to come up with a solution, so I left all the expensive seed packets sitting on the backyard table to make sure that I didn't forget about them.

Since I usually mess up in clusters, I forgot all about them.

Until it rained during the night. During a drought. In April. It does not rain in April in So Cal, much less during an historic drought but it rained that night in a torrential downpour that promptly ruined all my heirloom seeds.

I swear to God. I'm gonna punch you in the freaking face.

Desperately I turned to google and amid a sea of laughing actual gardeners who just shook their heads at questions posted by dumbasses like me, one guy was like, "Sure. Throw them out in the garden. What do you have to lose?" Clinging to those heartfelt words of encouragement and support, I pathetically salvaged one packet of butter lettuce seeds and scraped them out of the soggy clump in the bottom of the envelope, not so much carefully sprinkling them evenly over the ground as like, flicking them off the side of my fingers in slimy clots. I put them in where other stuff was already growing so I could pretend like I was still successful even as I watched to see how much of a failure I really was. 

They. Came. Up. 

Lettuce. At last. The one thing even I can't mess up.

Except I read something in passing about something called bolting. Lettuce bolted if it got too hot. Huh. Not sure what bolting is. Also, lettuce could "go to seed" if planted too late. This seemed unlikely. First of all, where are there freaking seeds on a lettuce? And also, if it just rained in the middle of a damn drought, it definitely was not going to get too hot for the lettuce to bolt. Whatever that might be. They grow lettuce in fields in full sun in, like, Fresno. My lovely shady backyard is not going to be too hot for a lettuce.

Oh. Bolting MEANS "go to seed."
 Like, become inedible and send up crazy cell phone towers out of the center of the lettuce.

So my lettuce bolted because obviously I did exactly zero of the sun research you're supposed to do to map out the zones of your house, the compass directions, and the hours of sun each area of the garden gets each day. We had about a week of beautiful wonderful lettuce and then it bolted. Each head shot up on stalks about three feet high and sent up yellow flowers that turned into little dandelion fluff. The stalks extrude a milky sap that seeps into the leaves, making them bitter and inedible to protect the plant once it starts trying to set seed.

Ever practical, my husband listened to me wail about the turning of the tides and how fate was intervening in our destinies for a minute before asking, "If it's setting seed, shouldn't you be able to collect it?"

Hmm. Back to google. Aha, YES, you can collect lettuce seed (waiting until the yellow flowers turn to little brown pods and then breaking them open). After a few minutes of doing so I was startled to realize I'd collected at least a couple hundred seeds from a single plant. I went and got an envelope. Holy crap. Thousands. Of seeds. 

I planted our harvested seeds last fall and though birds got them, bugs got them, weather got them, somehow, miraculously, I ended up with a bed full of lettuce again this winter that cost me nothing. An unseasonable hot spell sent them bolting again, and they've already reseeded the bed and the lawn around the bed. Lettuce heads are cropping up everywhere and we're back to gathering seeds, though for what I'm not sure. The seeds are in every inch of dirt on my property by now, blowing here and there on the wind by the dandelion fluff parachutes they sprout. My little son comes out to pop seeds heads open and empty the seeds into envelopes with me. "Let's have a seed sale," he suggests. "We can have like a lemonade stand but with lettuce seeds. For ten or fifteen dollars." 

I'm not sure the demand for heirloom butter lettuce is quite THAT high yet. We do have so much seed though, and I'm a little smug every time I go to the nursery now and shake the $3 packet of lettuce seeds. If that was really how much those seeds were worth I could retire on what I'm pulling out of my lettuce bed. 

"What are you going to do with all of it?" my neighbor Suzy asks. 

"I don't know. Maybe just scatter it into people's lawns at night and run away shouting 'Grow Food! Not Lawns!' like an ecoterrorist ninja." I laugh, but my daughter looks sideways at me. 

"Shh, mom. Now they know our plans."