Yesterday I had my first official lettuce harvest! While this topic is about as interesting as, oh, a lettuce harvest, I was pretty psyched. Not only is the stuff growing like gangbusters (water, sun, and Miracle Grow. Who knew?) but it's edible too! See, now instead of taking the subway to Trader Joe's to buy my $4.00 bag of organic romaine, I can now walk twenty feet to my balcony and PICK MY OWN SALAD! My God, the immediate gratification! If only my garden made mashed potatoes and did my laundry!

I've been on a kick lately (as is my wont, these three-day-lasting kicks) and the more I read about the environmental impact of groceries, the more I want to stick local. There's a push in high quality restaurants to trade out bottled water in favor of (filtered) tap, and when you factor in the fact that (according to NPR) the water's usually produced in Italy, the glass bottle in China, the bottle in Indonesia, each flown in from their respective countries to a centralized shipping area where it's taken by boat to New York, then put on a van to the distributer, before finally being brought by truck to the restaurant in California...

Hell of a carbon footprint, that.

I'm not going to stand here and shout that I'll never buy olive oil again (well I might, but we all know I'd only last three days), but this whole lettuce thing has made me positively twitchy to have a garden. Being able to grow my own potatoes (the unlimited mashing potential!) or tomatoes sounds so damn nice! Granted, I'm not much of a farmer (I came close to buying a composting kit until I realized that I'd have to deal directly with the worms. I sort of assumed that they did their business and the compost was deposited into a tidy little box. Not so much...) and true, the "patio tomato plant" I bought last season (yes, they actually sell such things) was butchered by my balcony's aforementioned wind, but someday - SOMEDAY - I will have a place with a garden. And as God is my witness, I will never be hungry again! (You know, assuming anything actually grows.)