Starting Lettuce Under Grow Lights

  I recently posted about my grow light setup; it is working great. To recap, I am using my solar panels to power a 42 watt LED light to start seeds in my basement. The seed tray in that grow box gets plenty of light to start seedlings.

  The seed tray itself has a lot of small "pots" or "cells" to get the seeds started. But they can't stay too long or the plants would get root-bound. The plants grew much faster than I expected but they are in a near perfect growing environment. 

  As you can see, I only used 24 of the 62 available cells and I still ended up with over a hundred lettuce plants. I will bag up some of these and give them away to fellow gardening friends.

  I had ten 3-inch pots in my potting bench so I started with them. I mixed up my own organic potting soil, which is a mix of course sand, sifted compost (three years old), and reused soil from commercial potted plants. I first put a very small amount of mulched tree bark in the pots just to cover the drain holes so my soil wouldn't run out. I separated the small lettuce plants, there were up to four sprouted in each of the seedling tray cells, and transplanted them to the larger pots. Once I had enough to fill this reused tub, I set the whole thing out in the rain to get watered in.

  These thirteen transplants are in reused Chobani yogurt cups that I drilled drain holes through the bottoms. They are a perfect size. These also went out into the rain to water in.

  After separating the sprouts to transplant into the larger pots, I found that I had a dozen or so orphan sprouts that were the runts of the multi-sprout cells. I transplanted the larger sprouts and had a bunch of smaller sprouts left. "Waste not, want not", the old saying goes and I decided to take a chance and plant those little sprouts right into the garden. Temps are still going below freezing at night and I gave them little chance of survival.

  But survive they did. To give them a fighting chance, after transplanting them I set a bunch of half liter plastic bottles filled with water between the plants. This bed is then covered by a frosted shower curtain. Diffused sun light goes through the plastic, gives the plants the light they need to thrive, and also warms up the water in the bottles. At night, the bottles release the heat and keep the plants warm enough to survive. They were all doing just fine after a week so far. 

  I have onions sets planted around the diameter of this small raised bed. Once they grow, their smell should keep some pests away from the lettuce and whatever else I decide to plant here. I will direct seed radishes soon, I inter-plant radishes a lot since they grow to harvest size in 4-5 weeks and then open up space for the longer term plants. Once the soil warms up more, and I can remove the plastic cover, I will mulch this bed

Raspberry Patch

  I have a raspberry patch that is four feet wide and twenty feet long. It is about fifteen to twenty years old. I built a raised bed for it out of 3x4 landscaping timbers and have completely replaced all the wood once, about five years ago. Originally, I dug down twelve inches and the timbers raise the bed six inches above ground level. I filled this with screened soil and compost. The raspberry plants grow well and reproduce themselves each year. They add new canes and old ones die and I prune them out. So it is a continuous cycle of renewal. But they don't all survive.

  I got the plants from my dad's patch. It was getting out of control so I dug up all his plants, tilled the soil, replanted most of them, but took twenty plants to my garden and transplanted them there. Since then, I have twice dug out all my plants, reworked the soil, which had become over run with weeds, and replanted them with better spacing. It is a lot of work to keep them producing and healthy.

  Every spring, usually in March, I cut out all the dead canes, which is generally a third of them. Raspberries fruit on second year canes. That means the canes that sprout and grow this year will bear fruit next year. The canes that sprouted and grew last year will bear fruit this year. And the canes that fruited last year mostly died and were cut out yesterday. 

 

 It is not a job I enjoy doing, not at all. Weeding between the prickly canes is difficult and the thorns on the canes scratch my arms up terrible. The needle-like thorns go right through gloves and my hands and fingers get lots of tiny splinters that itch. It takes me about three hours to do that. Once the weeding and thinning is done, I usually put down a layer of compost and then a layer of mulch on top of that. I put a thick layer of mulch down in the fall as well but it is mostly all gone by spring. The fall mulch is grass clippings and leaves chopped up by my tow-behind yard vacuum and mulcher. It does a great job and the combination of grass and leaves feeds the solid very well. I now have a steady stream of used coffee grounds so I have been spreading them in the bed as well. Raspberries like a slightly acidic soil and the coffee grounds help in that regard. But the best thing is that worms love coffee grounds so this gives the worm population a big boost.

 

Preying Mantis egg sack on a raspberry cane

   Insect pests are always a problem for organic growers but it is minimal for me. I adhere to good hygiene practices by removing all dead canes and leaf litter, where insects tend to over-winter and /or leave behind eggs. I keep the soil healthy, natural/organic, and my plants don't get stressed. I encourage predator insects and birds to visit the patch and adjoining garden and they reduce the pests considerably. Foxes and rabbits will eat some low-hanging fruit, but they just eat a few and move on (there is a lot of wild fruit on my property for them).

   We usually harvest four to six quarts of berries in years when the weather is favorable. I freeze some but most get eaten fresh on my breakfast yogurt, on cereal, just plain, and in baked goods. The picking season is barely three weeks long and then it is done for the year. That makes them a great treat.

I have many previous postings about my berry patch going back several years.

https://eatbettercheaper.blogspot.com/2016/04/home-raspberry-patch-april-2016.html

https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/5079821384631049382/7457776091482169484