There are many joys of gardening, not least of which is harvesting food feet from your front door to dine on just minutes or hours later.
It is 3 January 2016.
Here is the lettuce that I just harvested from my garden — wild lettuce from plants we had dined off of last spring and then in the fall — and for which I will be making a salad dressing shortly.
DC-area lettuce harvested 3 Jan 2016 (c) A Siegel
Lettuce growing in DC-area garden. late Dec 2015
To be clear, this is healthy (even beautiful) lettuce — three different varieties — that we will all enjoy eating.
We will all enjoy, however, with serious ill-ease.
Every one of us know that this should not happen. We should not be eating lettuce from the garden in January.
I live with a climate change(d) backyard.
We live in a climate change(d) world.
Amid the hottest year in recorded history, here is the monthly US variation from ‘normal’. (Note: ‘normal’ is already ‘climate changed’, as there is a rolling 30-year period for ‘normal’ in most discussions, currently 1981-2010 for many reports.) Blue = cooler than normal. Red = warmer than normal. Very simply, most of the United States (and most of the world) spent most of 2015 in the deep red.
US monthly temperature departures from normal, 2015 (note: dark blue = colder, dark red = warmer than ‘normal’
Note that extremely deep December red along the Atlantic coast. My lettuce thrived in the middle of the deepest of that red.
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1 While enjoying sandals in DC during October or garden salad in January, remaining aware of climate threat // Oct 19, 2016 at 4:06 pm
[…] To start the year, we enjoyed a salad directly from the garden […]