I have to admit, by time the spring rolls around I’m craving salad. Big time. Although I really enjoy leafy greens, I tend not to eat a lot of salad in the winter. This is partly because any lettuce available would have been shipped in over many kilometers or grown in energy-intensive greenhouses, but it’s also because I tend towards hot meals in the cooler months. But by May, the spring greens can’t come fast enough.
This spring, with the unusually warm weather, the salad craving hit hard and early. It’s still too soon in the season for local salad greens or to even plant lettuce in my garden, so I’m resisting (somewhat). But the other morning, as I was sipping my coffee in the company of my houseplants, an idea struck me. Why not grow lettuce indoors like a houseplant? We do it for herbs, why not lettuce? (Now I’m sure this revelation is not so revolutionary to some of you, but to me… well, let’s just say sometimes I’m a bit oblivious to the obvious.)
Not long afterwards, I came across the video at the top of this post from Cooking Up a Story: Growing Salad Bowls. It’s about growing lettuce in containers. How serendipitous! It’s geared toward container gardening for small urban backyards or balconies, but I don’t see why it wouldn’t work year-round in sunny corner of my home.
Has anyone tried growing their own food indoors over the winter? If so, how did work for you? If not, is this something you’d consider doing?
You can totally do it; just be sure to get leaf lettuce varieties, which grow more quickly than heading lettuce, and don’t put them too close to a heater to avoid them doing their impression of July lettuce and going to seed, which makes the remaining leaves bitter.
We don’t usually get significant greens before June here, but because I have a CSA, I try to save up all of my cravings for green salad for that month, when I seem to need to eat it twice a day all week to get through what’s in my box! Keep an eye on the blog in June for my lettuce secret, too
Ahah. I knew it was doable! Thanks for the tips.
This sounds great, do you think it would grow in the winter? We’ve got that sunroom off the back of the house and I’m now slobbering at the thought of wandering in, grabbing some leaves and making fresh salad without having to buy the lettuce. … Mind you, if it’s that edible we may have to watch my dad so that he doesn’t clean it out in one day.
I was actually just reading something over the weekend that says if you compare our winter hours of sunlight to Europe, or specifically UK, where they can grow year-round in greenhouses without extra light, that there is no reason why we can’t do the same if we can keep the plants warm enough. Very interesting possibilities. Apparently there is a commercial greenhouse near Toronto doing exactly that with things like salad greens.