Happy First Day of Spring! Let's eat.

It's the First Day of Spring - our favorite day of the year YAY!

Let's eat.

Right? Because that's our favorite thing to do on this favorite day of the year YAY!

But we don't want to hog it all for ourselves, so we also share the love and get everyone eating, including all of the billions of tiny helpful soil creatures and bacteria and microorganisms that are going to help grow our food this spring, too.

We're givers like that.

But before I lose you to "But I thought we were talking food, here", let's quick talk about how to feed your soil.

Remember how I was all "Cut down your cover crops" and everything? Well, that was the first step in feeding your soil. So, good job. You're nearly done feeding the soil. Just a few things left to do before we can talk about feeding YOU and you can have your first homegrown salad of spring.

(YAY!)

Since your cover crop is all chopped down into salad sized pieces and all disappearing at an incredible rate in the spring sunshine (don't worry, I'm not going to tell you to go out to the garden with a dinner fork and ranch dressing), it's time to pour on some compost or other organic amendment (we like Gardner & Bloome's Harvest Supreme quite a lot), rake it out and water it in.

This is like setting the table for your soil's bacteria and helpful organisms, and they'll get right to work breaking that chopped cover crop down into rich soil that your spring and summer crops will love.

Our soil friends say, "YAY!" and also, "YUM"

Love so much that they'll grow huge and healthy and productive, which means that you'll have huge, healthy and productive harvests this summer. Which means more eating. Which means more YAY!

Now you say, "YAY!", because obviously.

And we're all about YAY!

Because it's the First Day of Spring, remember?

YAY!

So, let's eat then!

If you already have lettuce and spring greens started, here are our some of our favorite salads and dressings all fixed up and ready for you to dive into headlong in a frenzy of IT'S SPRING LET'S EAT!

If you don't already have spring greens going, may we recommend a container salad garden that's so easy to grow and also so good looking that you could even use it as a centerpiece at the table so that your dining companions can serve themselves for once?

Yes we can. Recommend it.

And you can have it in less than a month. Just a few weeks even - now that the light levels are rising by the day!

Yay!

Materials
A smallish wooden box like a wine crate
New potting soil
Lettuce seeds
Unsoftened water (softened water has salts in it - no good)

To make

1. Fill your box about halfway to the top with potting soil
2. Sprinkle your lettuce seeds across the surface
3. Place it in a sunny window (with a tray underneath to catch water) or outside in part shade to full sun. Water in and keep the soil mo-ist until the seeds germinate (a few days). 
4. Keep the soil mo-ist as the seeds grow
5. Harvest your lettuce once it has a few true leaves (anything after the second leaf is a true leaf) using scissors or by just pinching off the leaves with your fingers and leave a a leaf or two behind so that the plants will continue to produce new leaves (AKA salad) for you

YAY!, right?

Happy First Day of Salad...ahem...I mean, Spring!