Organically Grown Lettuce

Thought I’d share a picture of my lettuce I picked on November 30th of this year. Grown in raised beds filled with quality compost,  which in essence comes from a carefully tended compost pile with the right mixture of brown and green matter, water, and oxygen. When all is working optimally in a pile it will reach high temperatures of 120-150F. The high heat will kill most pathogens and weed seeds, but the beneficial mycorrizhae will survive. There is a natural “cooling off” period and then the compost is “finished compost” or “humus” and can be put to use. All varieties are heirloom, some dating back to Thomas Jefferson. This late season lettuce is so delicious.

While leaf lettuce was eaten during Greek and Roman times, heading lettuce did not appear until the late 1500’s. Lettuce, a member of the daisy family, first became popular table fare back in Greek and Roman times. They believed that lettuce salads enhanced the appetite in preparation for their gigantic feasts. Thomas Jefferson grew fifteen varieties of lettuce in his garden, during the 1800’s, of which only two were of the heading variety. Today the heading variety is the most popular in the United States, with consumption at over four billion heads a year.

In Greek mythology, the torrid love affair between the goddess Aphrodite and the dazzling youth Adonis ended in a gruesome salad. For after Aphrodite hid Adonis in a bed of lettuce, he was killed there by a wild boar. Adonis’s violent death was therefore connected in the ancient Greek mind with lettuce, which assumed the role of religious and cultural metaphor for “food for corpses” and, more broadly speaking, for male impotence (the core of the Adonis theme). For this reason, Athenaeus, the author/compiler of the classical work The Deipnosophists (the rambling dinner conversations of several learned epicures), devoted an entire chapter of table discussion to lettuce and its ability to render male lovemaking worthless. For the ancient Greeks, perfumes and spices were equated with virility and seduction. Lettuce was the opposite.

In this light it strikes me as curious that eating lettuce as a component of a voluptuous meal would gain favor at all, yet it did. About the time of the emperor Domitian (A.D. 81–96), it became fashionable among the Roman elite to serve a lettuce salad as an appetizer before the first course, a custom that we practice even to this day.

Mother Nature can put good food on the table, even in late fall. Give organic gardening a try, you’ll be glad you did. Pardon me, I have a “fresh” salad to eat.