Big House, Tiny Garden, March 2026

I’ve always been selective about what I eat in restaurants. Salad is an obvious choice to avoid processed foods as much as possible. Unfortunately, I almost never order salads, because I don’t like them. The greens are simply not tasty, and the preparations are lame.

For many many years, I haven't understood the allure of salads at all. I thought I simply didn’t like salad, period.

Until I started growing my own lettuces, that is. I now know that the greens I can grow in my home or garden are vastly superior to the greens that are served in most restaurants or sold in grocery stores! Now that I grow my own lettuces, I have a nice big salad for breakfast nearly every day.

Here’s my indoor lettuce garden.

I will, of course, be seeding my outside beds with lettuce, and other spring vegetable such as carrots, beets, radishes etc very soon, but for now, my morning plates are chock full of stuff I just picked from under grow lights. So much more tender, sweet, and flavorful than the stuff I can buy in any grocery store!

As for the outside, my pooch longs for the days when I am outside more often, tossing her balls whenever I get a chance, and loving her up each time I pass her, or she passes me. Those days are coming up quickly! Too quickly! I’ve got my seeds, I’ve spoken to my soil source about the mix I want, I’ve arranged to buy some nice chicken poop for my compost piles, and I’ve done some planning.

Before I put anything into the ground, I intend (best laid plans...) to cover some parts of my back yard with weed barrier fabric to stop unwanted plants, mostly Jerusalem artichokes – am I ever sorry I put those in my tiny back yard. It threatens to wipe out everything else I have done there. They are beautiful as flowering plants, and if they were a good food source I might feel better about them, but let’s be honest here, they are not that useful as food.

And to think just two weeks ago, I had this in my life:

In another week, I’m off to Nashville, hoping to buy a house there so that I can snowbird between my upstate New York home in the summers, and my not-quite-so-cold home in a warmer southern clime. A blue state in the summers, and a red state in the winters. One of them is bound to be safer than the other during the apocalypse, no? We will see.

That’s it for this month’s Garden Hive Challenge for February. Or is it March already?!!!

This is my entry to Hive Garden Community's monthly garden challenge for March 2026. Thank you so much for reading this, and please show us your own.