You’ve probably seen the kitchen hack: instead of throwing away the bottom of a head of romaine lettuce, put it in water and supposedly grow yourself more lettuce for free. It sounds almost too good to be true, especially when the original lettuce has already been eaten and the stump was headed for the compost pile anyway. So, is regrowing lettuce from scraps actually a money-saving gardening trick, or does it produce little more than an interesting windowsill experiment? The answer falls somewhere in between, because lettuce really can send up fresh leaves from the leftover base, but expectations matter. Here’s what happens, how much usable lettuce you can realistically expect, and whether we’d bother doing it again.
