And now, the Dungeon Report...

The only really bad thing about a garden (well, OK, the weeds, if you insist...but remember, I EAT them...), is that eventually the fall weather whacks it out of existance and no more crisp green leafy goodies, or vine -ripened juicy rotund tomatoes, or fresh cucumbers on bodacious vines.

We eat a LOT of lettuce and greens - it's a real dent in the food budget about the middle of January. And after eating garden-fresh for
four months, give or take a few days, it's not surprising that for a while every fall, our tastebuds turn up their collective noses at the market offerings.

Right now, we are out of garden lettuce, due to the heat and humidity. Lettuce and other greens like it cool, they thrive in the moderately cool months like late May and early June. When it gets too warm, the plants bolt to seed overnight. They know they are goners, so they hurry to perpetuate the species...It is now August. NOT a lettuce month.

So this year, we are embarking on a totally different strategy. The farm house has a very large basement, three separate rooms plus a root cellar. It stays fairly constantly quite cool down there. Lettuce likes to be cool, remember? The stone walls, concrete floor and low beamed ceiling makes a perfectly dungeon-like ambiance. The punks avoid playing in the dungeon - uh, basement, unless it's a pinata party (the only place they can't knock the walls in...).

The furnace sits smack in the middle of a room about 20 x 20 feet. It has two windows, and a plug-in. We are turning one side of this area into a salad bar. We had the shop lights. We had tables. We had pots and seed starter soil. We had Brent to mount the lights so they can be raised and lowered.

And we had SEEDS - left over from the garden planting. Plus, I had a prompting to buy extra lettuce seed before the stores took the seed racks down for the season. It's as bad as the seasonal clothes...they move fall wear in about the end of June...aggravating when you are looking for summer stuff in July.

Yeah, it's a bad angle. I was almost standing on my head, reaching across the table - too far to walk 6 steps to the other side, ya know...

So here's the set-up, for the first batch of salad. There are two more lights to the right, lots of space for tall stuff like herbs in floor-level pots. Maybe even a cucumber and cherry tomatoe plant...this is all an experiment, which gives us license to goof up and say, oh well.

Wow! Look at that! In two days, we had sprouts. Next job - put the babies in larger containers. Sort out the faster growing varities and arrange another table under the next light to handle the more ambitious greens. This is looking very promising!

We may kiss the produce guy goodbye if this works through the really cold months.

I'm just waiting for someone in a uniform to knock on the door inquiring about the blinding white light eminating from the glassblock windows. It's quite impressive on a foggy night...