Lettuce in a wheelbarrow - gardening technique

Sunset, August, 1994 by Ben Marks

How a crazy idea became a reality, and why it might not be so crazy after all

LETTUCE IN A wheelbarrow? Don't look at me--it wasn't my idea. Blame it on Caroline. I didn't even plant the stuff. Blame that on Bud.

The idea evolved innocently enough from a conversation last summer with a friend named Caroline. She and her young family had recently moved into a stately old house whose gardens were in even worse shape than the gutters. All summer long the yard was in an uproar. One day, during a lull in the landscaping. I noticed a rusty old wheelbarrow filled with bushy heads of green and red leaf lettuce. The vegetable garden, it seems, was being dug up to make way for the pool.

"I'm a little worried about the vegetables," said Caroline, unable to suppress a chuckle at the collection of salad-to-go before her. "Leave 'em like that" was my typically smart-aleck response. "They look fine in a wheelbarrow."

Instantly, Caroline's wheels started turning. "If you grew lettuce in a wheelbarrow," she mused, "you could move it around to catch the afternoon sun." Sun, in fact, is a problem in her yard, which is shaded by mature redwoods and oaks.

OKAY, BUT WHY LETTUCE? WHY A WHEELBARROW?

Enter Bud Stuckey, Sunset's resident horticulturist and ace gardener. Bud quickly got into the spirit of things. He filled a beat-up wheelbarrow with potting soil and compost fertilized with fish emulsion, then planted it with various kinds of lettuces as well as endive, parsley, nasturtium, basil, and chives.

Truth told, Bud took the concept of lettuce in a wheelbarrow a whole lot more seriously than Caroline and I had. Bud's idea was to create a gourmet salad bar on wheels. Like Caroline, he considered portability a key benefit of this mobile propagation technique, although he used the wheelbarrow to roll his tender crops out of the harsh afternoon sun rather than into it. To foil slugs, he parked the wheelbarrow in a slightly different spot in the Sunset test garden each night. Gophers? No problem here, he announced with a smile. Drainage? Rust had taken care of that. And Bud knew that the short root systems of lettuces and similar plants lent themselves perfectly to the average wheelbarrow's shallow dimensions.

Meanwhile, back at my house, the family lettuce patch was producing so much that we were buying balsamic vinegar by the gallon. Unwittingly, our older son, Sam, added the final element to this mobile gardening story. As most children do, Sam took great pride in the garden he helped plant. He enjoyed the gentle act of harvesting ("Prepare to die!" he'd bellow as he hacked at the heads). Most of all, he loved washing the newly picked greens. His method was, and is, singular--a rinse with the garden hose in a child-size plastic shopping cart. After an invigorating spin around the lawn, he would pronounce the lettuce washed--and drained. Call me indulgent, but if that's all it takes to get him to eat his greens, so be it.

Now, if I could just figure out a way to make eggplant fun...