Don't Throw Away Your Salad Scraps - Turn Them Into A Tasty Summer Project Instead

We often spend so much time worrying about how to safeguard our oh-so-delicate heads of lettuce after buying them — consider our tips for storing iceberg lettuce and instructions on how to store romaine lettuce — that we don't consider an alternative route to crisp salad, which is growing our own. Before you protest that you have a black thumb and kill everything you plant, you should know that growing lettuce requires very little in the way of gardening expertise. It can easily be done with implements you already have at home, plus the addition of a lettuce stump leftover from that salad you whipped up for your last cookout.

Look at this project less like "growing vegetables from scratch," which is intimidating, and more like a fun DIY project. Turns out, when you submerge a lettuce stump in a little bit of water, a new head of lettuce can grow out of it! You may either let this lettuce grow hydroponically, or plant it in a pot of dirt to give it some more oomph to get bigger. Proving that nature really is magic, this is a virtually endless hack. As long as you save the stump each time, you can theoretically regrow lettuce over and over. It's a bit time-consuming and not a 100% perfect science, but just think of how cool it would be to brag to your dinner guests that you are serving them greens from your own garden ... even if your "garden" is only your windowsill.

If you have the core of lettuce set aside after you trim all the leafy parts off for salad, cut it down to just the stump. Set this stump in a little bit of water in a sunny spot, like your kitchen window. All you need to do to encourage success in your regrowing lettuce is change the water every other day or so. Theoretically, a new head of lettuce will blossom in about two weeks. Now, there are some caveats here. For one, different types of lettuce regrow with varying success. Romaine is one variety that is known to work better than others with this method, for example. Also, sometimes, regardless of your best efforts, the plant will "bolt," or start growing seeds instead of edible leaves. There's nothing to be done about this, and nothing you can do to stop it from happening. Also, if you leave the stump in water instead of placing it in some nutritious soil, the resulting regrown lettuce will be smaller than the first.

Social media commenters report that lettuce really flourishes when you plant it in soil once it starts to sprout. That's because dirt ideally has nutrients that help feed the lettuce as it grows. Again, if you are working on only one head of lettuce at once, you can set a small pot on your windowsill and let it do its thing. You won't be churning out industrial qualities of lettuce, but you may grow enough for a picture-perfect small salad that you can plate to perfection.