Washing lettuce

Well, we've been getting loads of fabulous veggies from the local farmer's market, and among those veggies that are coming out right now is lettuce. Now if you've only been privy to lettuce that you buy in the grocery store, then you are probably unaware of the amount of dirt that can accumulate in between the leaves.

So the other week I came home with two large heads of lettuce and proceeded to prepare them to put in the fridge. To make things easier for later I decided to wash and tear the lettuce up so that all that I have to do is pull out what the family needed and use right away. To wash farm fresh lettuce it is best to soak the lettuce in water so that sand and dirt can sink to the bottom of the water, then take the lettuce from the water and use a salad spinner to get the moisture off the lettuce. Typically I do this by loading the lettuce in the spinner to do the whole process, taking the basket out with the lettuce to dump the water out of the lower bowl then replacing the basket with lettuce to spin.

The problem is, that with so much lettuce it would have taken 4-5 times to do this and that a lot of wasted water. I didn't want to fill the whole sink, not to mention I had already filled the salad spinner. While looking over my options, I happened to have a bucket that my family uses to pick strawberries with and I decided to dump the water from the sald spinner (along with the lettuce) into this bucket. I would add lettuce to the water, swishing it around every now and then until the lettuce took up about 1/2-2/3 of the water space (you want to have room at the bottom to collect the dirt). By the time I was done putting the lettuce in the water, it was ready to move it on to the salad spinner. I spun the lettuce and transferred it to a bag that would go in the refridgerator (this is a good way to reuse a ziploc bag), and then repeated the entire process.

Instead of using 4-5 buckets of water (approximately one gallon sized), I used one bucket of water to rinse 2 of the largest heads of lettuce I've ever seen. If I did this every two weeks (which is probably less often than it actually would be), I can save up to 8 gallons of water a month, and up to 24 gallons per season (since we maybe get local lettuce for 3 months, at the outside). This is a small amount of water, but all these little things add up.

If I find some other vegetable like this (say Swiss Chard, Leeks, and other really dirty veggies) and use the same concepts, finding the smallest volume that I can use and just using it repeatedly until all my veggies are clean, then I could save much more water in the process. Since most dirt and sand will just sink to the bottom, the water above the bottom 1/4 should be relatively clean (maybe a little green, but free of sediment). For particularly dirty leaves I rub a thumb over them to break up anything that's not realeasing on it's own.