Monthly Archives: September 2013

I was hovering about the garden last night and noticed a few lettuce plants look drastically different than the others.  After 3 minutes of playing “which one of these doesn’t belong with the others”, I found 3 bibb lettuce plants that did not look like the other 8-10.  They were quite tall and disorganized.

The “normal” looking bibb is on the left here, he is about half the age of the sibling to the right, but they came from the same seed packet.

Bibb lettuce variance in growth

I am thinking this is a result of the leggy-seedlings way-back-when. I had too little light on some of the lettuce seeds during their early days, and they stretched out looking for more light.  Many fell over and I threw them out, but some I left in and hoped for the best.

I made a salad out of this tall guy last night – and he tasted the same as his shorter, more organized neighbors.

I’m going to research this more and see what is up.  Both plants look healthy, and without knowing they were the same seed packet – you’d think they were completely different variants of lettuce.

Around day 42 of the first cycle of basil (aka: cheap seed basil), I pulled 7-8 plants from the hydroponic channels. I gave as many as I could away (with horrible luck, I think I got rid of 7).  I also took a few plants and put them in various configurations in a kitchen window.

They are 55 days from starting from seed, and only 35 days of real growth.

Full grown basil

Here are the results:

This guy was simply cut at the base of the stem and put into tap water. I had filled the pint glass up to cover the stem base about 1/2″, and have since reduced that so that just part of the roots are submerged.

Cut basil root growth in glass

The roots are much thicker than the roots in the NFT system.  And there are no root hairs. Maybe in its old age it can’t grow hair anymore.

Cut basil root growth

For the plant below, I cut the roots off from the rockwool cube.  This was necessary because he wouldn’t let go of the spreader mat inside the grow channel.  The roots had intertwined themselves fully in the fabricy-material.

Basil left in rockwoll in glass

You can see the bottom leaves are dead, and the little new root growth is all brown.  The rest of the plant looks withered.  He isn’t happy.

I did two plants this way, and both ended up looking pretty sad.  They both received the same treatment and tap-water.

Adoption

The plants I put up for adoption seemed to fair well.  I provided two plants that had a decent amount of roots come out nicely when removed from the hydroponic channel.  I delivered them in a solo cup with a 1/4″ of water on the roots, and the rockwool still somewhat moist from the nutrient water.

Day 42. Mature basil roots

I had feedback on these two plants that a gradual addition of soil was received well, and they should make the hydro-to-soil transition ok. Should know more this week or next and I’ll post pictures.

Two other plants with similar rockwool and roots are happy after 10 days in just water. One was just planted into soil and the other remains in water. So this should be a good experiment as well.

Conclusion

Cutting the roots all the way off will kill the plant. But what is really surprising, is that cutting off the entire root ball by lopping the plant at the stem base seemed to fare as well or better as keeping a majority of the roots in tact.

This seems consistent with growers who take cuttings from strong plants (quite popular in the flower, tomato and cannabis growing community, but not so much in the leafy non-flowering area) and can have them producing fruit within 15-25 days with a simple branch from an existing plant (aka, the mother).

For the first round of growing, I wanted something that I was familiar with growing, grew rapidly, and was fairly resilient to abuse.  I threw all those needs out and simply used whatever seeds I had leftover from planting over a year ago for the outdoor garden. Basil was the big winner here.

Now, even after giving some plants away and using some for pesto and the like, I have 30+ basil plants.

Day 42. Basil growth

I need to make room for more experimentation – like removing the spreader mat in the bottom of the channels, and trying different plants and variants of basil.

So, like a used-car-dealer on a Friday night commercial, everything must go!  I started by topping all the plants that had a single shoot-tip on the main shoot (stem).  This meant they were still growing upwards (vs outwards and getting bushy), and probably were going to want to go into seed-producing mode soon.  This means the plant puts all its effort into make flowers and seeds, while the leaves get bitter and tough.  I don’t want anything to goto flower or seed here.

After a 15-minute hackathon with the clippers, I had a gallon container filled.  I had de-stemmed most of the leaves, so having this much of just leaves was pretty impressive.

I continued to clip any basil getting tall, and ended up with about 3 gallons of unpacked basil.  I used about 6 cups (packed) for an awesome pesto, and put the remaining leaves into gallon zip-lock bags, sucked the air out of them, and put them in the freezer for the time being. They will stay bright green and mostly crisp this way (just make sure you get all the air out, then it helps to re-suck the air after about 10 mins in the freezer).

Day 51 basil harvest (apple for scale)

Here is part of the pile of basil from the day.

Even after harvesting that much, the garden is still pretty dense.

Day 51 basil in channels

 lettuce harvest & Regrow experiment

A few days, I made a salad for two with a single plant of lettuce that had grown quite large.  I cut it off at the bottom of the stem.  It appears to be growing a few shoots back. But time will tell if it’ll regrow.

Day 51 lettuce plant, 3 days after cutting

10 days ago, most all the seedlings in rockwool went into the two nursery channels.  Early last week, I found some of them had grown roots 2-3″ in a single day and were ready for planting into the finishing channels. I didn’t know exactly what to look for, so I moved over a few to the finishing channels that looked promising.

Then I went out of town for 5 days. Oops.

The system ran fine. I had a friend come check on it, as well as monitored it with a IP-camera that can pan around the room to see any water leaks, plant height, or people breaking in thinking I’m really not growing basil.

Day 31 basil and roots

The growth over 5 days was huge.  Here is a basil plant that had 3-4 leaves and 5-10 small roots (less than an inch) when I left.  And 5 days later its, well, a root ball thingy.

The PH and EC in the reservoir didn’t move too much – so we’re still within a good healthy range.

Current Scoreboard

So after moving everything from the first planting from the nursery channels to the finishing channels, the score is:
Sweet basil: 37
Bibb lettuce: 7

Day 32: finishing channels mostly filled and lit

This is from nearly 50 seeds of each plant type.  The lettuce I killed off early due to a lighting issue. What happened to the rest?

Basil

There were 2-3 basil plants that I moved a bit too early.  Their roots were not long enough to touch the bottom of the channel to get their nutrient film; so they died.

2 basil plants just didn’t root well.  Instead of many small roots with root-hair, they tried making one large root down to the bottom.  This left them wilted. I went ahead and removed them, as plants at this stage don’t seem so keen on quick recovery.

There are a few basil plants still in the nursery channels.  Some just didn’t grow quick, some had multiple seeds sprout within the same rockwool and I clipped the larger sprout (so that some are smaller and a bit behind the main cycle, in an effort to have a continuous supply of this stuff).

Lettuce

Day 33 lettuce woes

The lettuce plants are growing pretty good.  A few have an issue with some browning on their interior leaves.  Initial research says lack of iron, which the basil might be taking most of.  A few adjustments and few days should tell.

Day 33 happy lettuce