LETTUCE LESSONS

I park my bike at the Bowley plant center and study the patchwork gray sky, realizing this might not be an ideal day to visit the field. The ground is a soggy mess from last night’s rain, but I splash on through the dirty puddles. Some birds dart away from my boots and seek cover under the leaves of an enormous purple cabbage. As I wade through the knee-deep grass, I hope that birds are the only things living in it.

From a distance, it’s hard to see the division of individual rows amidst the dense overgrowth of plants. Our garden is thriving in the spring gloom—maybe even turning a little wild.

The garden certainly looked different on a blazing afternoon back in October, when my fellow students and I broke the ground during the “laboratory” portion of our “Plant Bio 1” class. We stooped and sweated in the last of the Davis summer heat, driven by instructor Muhammad Marrush’s sweet promise of the cut watermelon that awaited us. Scraping a hoe over dry top soil to make room for seedlings of lettuce, broccoli and bok choy was quite a change from the kind of lab work I was used to.

Though we planted only one row apiece, I was parched, muddy and sore after a mere 40 minutes of work. Hauling a painter’s bucket full of water proved to be harder than it looked, and I was chagrined to see how quickly every hard-earned drop disappeared straight into the ground.

As I survey them now, it’s apparent that they’ve had no want of moisture this winter. The garden is a leafy explosion of vegetables—as well as an army of weeds. I yank a few intruders out of the ground with a satisfying rrrrrip, but our pretext of order—with our straight rows and plastic labels—is being steadily overrun as nature reclaims the land.

I push the weeds aside as I shuffle along the stretch of greenery, stuffing some plastic bags with muddy handfuls of spinach and cilantro. I dig at a green onion, unearth some radishes and wonder what on earth I could do with mustard greens. Somewhere along the line, all of the effort and labor associated with fresh produce suddenly hit home.

In the back of my mind, I’ve always had the second-grade understanding that “food doesn’t grow on shelves.” But here in the field, I am immersed in the natural processes I take so much for granted, and the concept of self-sufficiency finally manifests itself in the mud under my fingernails, in the slight strain of my back. Today I’m taking a small but active part in the great agricultural system of give and take, on which I so heavily depend.

Harvest bounty in hand, I return to my bike a little dirtier, but triumphant. Though my bulging bags may be labeled “Safeway,” the leafy greens they contain are straight from the source. Everything will need a good cleaning, a thorough once-over for bits of grass and bugs. It seems like a lot of extra effort, when a ride to the store with my roommate offers me hassle-free lettuce for a dollar. But today I feel a tinge of grower’s pride that outweighs the issue of convenience.

“Think of this garden as your own,” instructor Marrush urged us when our plant bio class came to an end. “Keep tending it, not because you will be graded on it, but because you will be able to benefit from it.” When the field gets plowed under in April to make way for a new crop of students, I hope they discover the same satisfaction of being able to provide for themselves in this small way. In giving a few seedlings some water and a little work, I’ve come away from the experience with much more than a free salad.

— Erin Loury