 Hi there and welcome to my channel. My name is Tracy and I am a small scale gardener living in growing zone 3 on the prairies in Saskatchewan Canada. So we are about midway through our growing season here on the prairies and I am just out here doing a final harvest on my lettuces that I have growing in containers. You know I've been doing the cut and come again off them for good months now enjoying all sorts of great salads but the leaves are starting to get a little limp and not so great tasting anymore. So I'm going to harvest all of my romaine and butter crunch and my kale lettuces today and I'm hoping that I can start some another batch of lettuces in these containers and get another fresh round going before the end of the season. Here I've removed my spinach already and put in some bok choy which is coming along pretty fast. So if you're like me you kind of get end up with a lot more lettuce than you can eat as far as salads go and try and think of other things to do with them is a challenge. I like to put them into sandwiches whenever I can but I just wanted to share with you four other things that you can do with your lettuce greens other than salad so that you can get some use out of them. The first use that I would suggest that I'm sure most of us do and that is just to compost what you can't eat. So you know rather than having to discard all these wonderful greens after they've gone bad you can throw them in your compost bin. If you have a vermicomposting system you can feed them to your worms. You have animals such as pigs or chickens, rabbits, they will all eat I'm sure any kind of greens that you'll give them. So that's the first use I'm suggesting for your leftover salad greens. So the next use that you could try with all your leftover salad greens is to use these in your own DIY liquid fertilizer. So I've already started collecting some of my garden plants. This is some kale that I have in the pail. I'm just going to pull all these lettuces out roots and all. Add them to my pail here. A little bit of dirt on them is good to have as well. So making your own liquid fertilizer is a super easy thing to do and it's a great way to use up or get more bang for your buck out of you know plants and vegetables from your garden in your yard that may no longer be edible or that aren't edible such as you know leaves from your or the foliage from your tomatoes. I've got all my lettuce roots and pieces that I'm not going to take to the kitchen. I'm going to add today some comfrey leaves because those are a great thing to have in your liquid fertilizer. You could also add weeds from your yard you know preferably edible ones such as dandelion, alfalfa, chicory, chickweed just pretty much anything that you pull from the ground and roots and all can go in here and all you need to do is fill it up with water and you should avoid using tap water so preferably rainwater, water from your pond or well water is what you want to use. So once you have that filled right to the top with water just try to submerse all of your your foliage under the water. So you're then going to want to cover this up with the lid. It's going to sit for a couple weeks and during that time all that foliage will break down and dissolve into the water and create a beautiful organic fertilizer. So here is a batch of liquid fertilizer I made from just from comfrey leaves and if you've never made this type of DIY fertilizer before I want to warn you that this smells very very bad. Welcome to my garden. Hey, time to see what's in the comfrey pail here. It's kind of like fermented. Oh, it stinks. And you might think oh my gosh how could I put this on my plants it does not smell good but that's just the way it smells and believe me it's it's beautiful liquid gold so when I go to use it on my plants I usually do like a 1 to 10 ratio with water and I had strained this through a strainer. There wasn't very much material left in it. Pretty much all the comfrey leaves had dissolved and deteriorated into slime and stirred right in so pretty much the whole thing was liquid by the time it was finished fermenting. So yeah you want to be careful you don't splash this on yourself because the smell lingers I tell you. So once you have a jug all mixed up I just go around and give all my plants a good drink. You can use this on your vegetables, your flowers, on your berry bushes. Pretty much only use this type of fertilizer on my plants. I avoid using any granular or bottom types fertilizers so I always make sure I have a jug of this liquid fertilizer on tap at all times so that I can give my plants a feeding every week. Okay so that is two ways you can use up some of your garden lettuces out here at your garden but we still have this whole container now of harvested lettuce greens that we still need to find something to do with. So I'm going to take you inside to my kitchen and show you two more ways to use up these salad. Okay so we are in my kitchen now and I have taken all the lettuce greens and put them in a sink full of cool water with a little bit of vinegar. I'm spitting them dry and so we're going to get to method number three and that is to simply take this washed lettuce and throw it in the freezer. This is by far my favorite method. So what I like to do most with all of my leftover lettuces and other veggies is keep them in a pail in the deep freeze and when it's filled up make a pot full of vegetable stock that I can use in my cooking. So whenever I'm peeling potatoes, carrots, onions, all the little ends of celery, peppers and all that stuff everything goes into my veggie scrap container and gets boiled up into vegetable stock at some point. So that's number three for a different use for your salad greens and finally the number four way that you can use up your lettuce greens is to dehydrate them into a green vegetable powder. So this would be the most time-consuming of the four uses that I have shown you because obviously you need to dehydrate over a couple days and you need to make sure that your greens are well drained and you have very little moisture in them so that they they dehydrate properly. So this is probably my least favorite method because I'm a lazy gardener but it is a great way to create a green powder full of nutrients that you can use in soups and in your stir fries, your smoothies, you can sneak it into your children's dishes and you can even put it into your baking. So what you end up with is a shelf-stable product that you can keep in your spice cupboard and use all throughout the winter season and just a great way to use up your lettuce greens. You could also mix in you know a variety of herbs that you've harvested from your garden create a really nice flavorful green powder for your cooking. So I have three layers here of lettuce greens I'm going to dehydrate and I will be setting this at the temperature of 105 Fahrenheit or 41 degrees Celsius. So here in my lettuce leaves after about 12 hours drying in the dehydrator so I'm just going to use my Nutribullet here to blitz this up into a nice green powder. So I also have a bunch of dried herbs here from my garden that I've been collecting. I got some parsley, sage, thyme, oregano and basil. So this is totally optional but I'm going to add some of that into this green powder just to add some more flavor to the dishes and cooking that I add this to. Once you blitz this up in your Magic Bullet it's going to be quite a small amount here but you can really shove a lot of these dried leaves in here at one time. So I hope you enjoyed watching my video on four ideas of how you can use up your lettuce greens from your garden. If you haven't already please don't forget to hit the subscribe button and click on that notification bell so that you don't miss out on the next video. Thanks for watching!