Growing Salad / Salat Pflanzen

We have two window boxes on our balcony. Over the winter they had pink heather in them, which had turned rather brown by the end of March. I kept meaning to clear them out and plant something new, but I never got around to it until I accidentally backed my chair into one and dumped the entire thing over.

After cleaning up the mess and being left with two empty window boxes, I was rather uninspired as to what to do with them. "Buy some seeds, Mommy!" suggested Nikolas. I thought it was a good idea, but kept forgetting to look for them when I was out and about. And, besides, where do you buy seeds in Austria? Then one day I was at DM (Drogerie Markt which does not sell any sorts of medicines whatsoever despite what you might think the name suggests), and there they had a small display of seed packets: radishes, carrots, tomatoes, and lettuce.

I quickly ruled out the first three (I don't like radishes...how could carrots grow in a window box...and tomatoes would be ripe only after we had left Salzburg) and bought the lettuce seeds. Nikolas was elated that he was going to grow "salad". We set right to work planting the seeds (though not all the seeds mind you, because if none grew, we could try again, I thought).

Every couple hours for the next week or so, Nikolas would race through the living room shrieking, "I have to check my salad!" And every time, he would sadly look at the empty window box. I thought many times of the book The Carrot Seed, where everyone tells the boy that his seed would not come up, and though I never said it, I kept thinking, "Those seeds will never come up."

But Nikolas believed they would. Every day Nikolas kept checking on those seeds. Sometimes he even woke up early, getting out of bed before he was really ready, just to check on his seeds. He watered the seeds and sang to the seeds and talked to the seeds. He was going to 'read' them the Frog and Toad story about The Garden, but we left the book in New Jersey and so he watched the claymation version (inside, without the seeds) on YouTube instead. Nikolas never gave up on his seeds despite the fact that weeks went by. And then one day, the seeds came up! Just as he knew they would.