At the end of the summer I became very overwhelmed with how big our first garden had become, and one afternoon I made a rash decision to clear it all out.

No. More. Garden! Of course it felt great in the moment, and then I almost immediately regretted my decision. I missed having fresh greens to eat with dinner…

So two weeks ago, I decided to do some experimenting with a winter garden. I had been looking online and originally was planning to construct a makeshift greenhouse over the whole bottom section of the garden, but I knew that I didn’t really need that much space. Instead, as I was walking down the isle in the grocery store and a set of clear storage tubs called out to me, the tubs seemed to be the perfect solution to my problem!

Since I’m only planting a small amount of lettuce, I figured two storage tubs should be more than enough room. I prepped the soil by raking it and then used the tub to make a print of my planting area. Each tub received two rows of lettuce.

Although the package recommended “soaking” the seeds, I decided that the soil was very moist due to all of our rain and skipped the “soaking” step. I’ve got the Gourmet Blend Lettuce seeds in my hand; it’s hard to believe that a huge head of lettuce could grow from something so small.

So far, family and friends seem to give the sideways head tilt and ask “what exactly are you doing?”

The answer…I really don’t know, but I hope that it works!

I took the following pictures one week after planting the seeds…we’re starting to get lettuce sprouts! I’m going to let them grow for another week or so before I thin them out.

At this moment in time I feel pretty confident that I’m going to be able to pull off having fresh lettuce all winter. My only concern is how tall the lettuce might grow, so we’ll have to eat lots of greens to keep up!

I’ll be sure to do a follow up post once things really start growing and we have our first salad with dinner. Until then, try to stay warm…it was a cold one out there today!