The Home Organic Gardener

I've grown a garden for several years now... good thing too that's what I went to school to learn how to do..plant things and take care of them. Some years I have great success and other's not so much. This year I was diligent in planting lettuce early in the spring partly because I needed to see the beauty of the earth growing good things at a time when it seemed the whole world was falling apart... at least it felt that way. Luckily the lettuce grew well and soon it was getting too hot to leave the lettuce in the ground or it would turn bitter and bolt.

Oh how I wanted to just leave the lettuce in. It looked so pretty in the garden box! It also made me look like an awesome gardener but since I was growing lettuce to actually eat it had to be harvested. Armed with my big green plastic bowl, probably from the dollar store, that has a boarder of Santa Clauses around it to put my bounteous harvest in I headed out to the garden!  I bent down to pluck the first lettuce plant out of the ground and as I was pulling it out and putting into my plastic green Santa bowl I noticed that a massive ant and earwig evacuation was taking place on my lettuce! Yuck!

Now the question was do I go on or do I just walk away and pretend like I'm growing ornamental lettuce just for looks. Could I really even eat the lettuce even if I quadruple washed it twenty times over? Would I be afraid that I'd be accidentally feeding me and my family dead ant carcasses every time I made salad? Would this lead to an indoor earwig infestation? Oh get a grip! This is nature!  How many dead ants do you think we've all eaten from lettuce from the store? Actually lets not even think about eating dead ants okay?

Like a good vegetable gardener. I picked all the lettuce... rinsed it three times with the secondary water and twice more after I got it in the house to make sure I got all the germs from the secondary water off the lettuce all the while on the look out for the earwigs that were coming out of no where it seemed. All the while my gallant 16 year old son who is supposed to protect his mother from insects laughs at me. He tells me I can handle this and continues to do what he was doing leaving me, a damsel in distress to figure it out for myself!

So I hear that ants don't taste too bad I just hope I never find one in my salad.