Salads!

My herbs (some of them)

I am getting a ridiculous amount of pleasure playing with my indoor plants, especially the hydroponic salad garden. I started up in early December, and I've got lettuce enough to keep me in a daily salad. In about a month, I'm going to have a deluge of cherry tomatoes (god willing and the creek don't rise). I don't know that a million cherry tomatoes is ever needed, but I can always cook them down into a quick sauce, since I also am drowning in basil (with sides of oregano, thyme and dill). 

They do require tending, however, it's not just set and forget. The plants in the countertop units need water and liquid nutrients, and the lights on the front of the units helpfully signal when to take care of that. The lights and the water pumps are on automatic timers, and once you've told it when to turn on in the morning (I have them come on at about sunrise) then they are set. But the roots get tangled in the filter and pumps, and regular harvesting is necessary once they get to a certain size.

Seven tomato plants, blooming under my own lights.
That's an old car windshield-screen, reflecting back

The jars need refilling with nutrient-rich mixture, every few days. It's kind of a production, getting my used jugs (picked from the neighbors' recycling boxes) and measuring and mixing the solution, checking each jar, and taking off the lids and topping them off properly. And I had to set the place up, with adjustable shelves to keep the jars the right distance from the lights, and putting my own grow lights on a (simple mechanical) timer.

The big basement unit is smarter than the countertop units and talks to an app on my phone to remind me to top off the water and nutrients. But it also requires maintenance, and I've run into a couple of problems with roots jamming the sensors. 

Blooms and babies!

But spending time tending my salad gardens makes me happy!

Today's lunch
No slugs or bugs!

 

Mostly lettuce in one half of the basement farm
Different colors and shapes and tastes

Mild Winter

 On February 1, these over achieving daffodils are blooming. They were first to bloom last year, some aberration occurring naturally. I will probably pick them and bring them in, because we’ll have a couple of very cold days. 

Also, nearby, the winter jasmine is putting on its annual show in an effort to keep me from rooting out its invasive agressive suckering presence. 

Kratky

Today I moved several cherry tomato plants from The Farm to jars with water under lights. Not a speck of soil to be found! Some of the roots inside the jars are exposed to air in a growing method known as “kratky”, after the guy who promoted it. It’s passive hydroponics, where my plug-in Aerogarden units are active hydroponics, with the water actively spraying from the top over the roots regularly. 

The plants are micro-dwarf varieties. They are expected to not grow more than 24” tall, but produce many clusters of cherry tomatoes as they spread horizontally . They might survive and continue yielding for a year or so, with proper tending. That’s basically to keep water levels right, feed them liquid fertilizer from time to time, inspect the water for slime and algae (the amber jars should prevent that) and make sure they get enough light. 

I left four plants in The Farm, the maximum recommended number. I’m anxious to try dwarf varieties of salad tomatoes, bigger than cherry but smaller than huge slicers. I belong to several Facebook groups where I pick up all this info.

I had cherry tomatoes last year in one of my little active units, lasting about six months. I transplanted some extras last year to dirt pots, but the yield was small. 

The Law of the Farm

Tomatoes on the left, lettuce and herbs on the right
The lights adjust upward as the crops grow up
This is in my basement

Many years ago I read what may have been my very first self-help book ever. It was written by the guy who invented the Franklin Planner, a looseleaf little notebook with pages for calendar and to-do lists, with a system and expensive training classes for how to use it to be more productive, that was all the rage in the 1980s. 

So one of the nuggets of wisdom in the book I read (instead of attending a class) was the Law of the Farm. Basically, the point is, some things have to be done at a certain time (planting, for example) and some things just take time to happen (crops ripening, for example). No matter what you do, you can't break those laws. Therefore, sometimes you have to plan ahead, and if you fail to start at the right time, you will not succeed no matter how hard you try or what you do. This is one of the two nuggets from that book that I remember.

So now, as an indoor farmer myself, I have to respect those laws. 

My kids surprised me at Christmas with a giant indoor hydroponic growing system, called The Farm! It has an electronic control system that turns the lights on and off at the right time, adjusts how often the internal water is circulated depending on whether you are in the germination phase or the growing phase, and an app to alert you about water levels. It came with seeds for cherry tomatoes, lettuce and herbs, which I got started on New Years Day. Soon I'll be moving some of the cherry tomatoes into other containers, and starting some other kinds of larger tomatoes. I'll harvest or move the lettuce and herbs to other containers in a while, and will start (mostly flower) seeds for the outdoor garden in it. Once I transplant the outdoor seedlings, I'll start eggplants and peppers in The Farm. 

Kale, two varieties. I continually snip off the largest leaves
and shred them into my salads.
I also like the extra light at the dark end of my kitchen counter.

I've decided I don't want to try lettuce and greens outside, because I don't like the slugs. I have my four little hydroponic units from last year (same company as The Farm) and I've got lettuce and kale and herbs going there. I'll try to keep an indoor crop going all summer - last year, I planted everything out and didn't start the countertop garden again until Thanksgiving. I've been eating lettuce and kale and dill and thyme (SO MUCH THYME) and basil and thai basil since Christmas. 

The seed catalogues start coming in December now, and according to the Law of the Farm (and limited supply and increasing demand) I have to buy seeds now. So I've got more varieties of lettuce and other greens to grow. Often, my trips to the supermarket are driven by needing salad makings, and much of the lettuce I get seems to slime up quickly. So I much prefer my own, seconds from counter to bowl, but I'm not quite self sufficient yet.

‘‘Twas The Day Before Christmas

 And we woke up to temperatures just barely above zero. We knew the storm was coming, and I got all the outdoor lights taken care of a couple of weeks ago. So last minute prep included making sure I had plenty of dry firewood (in case the power goes off-so far so good!) and doing a last plant check. My chard had survived so far, but I didn’t expect it would make it through this prolonged bout of extreme cold, so I harvested what there was. A nice supplement to tonight’s meat-heavy dinner- just a quick sauté and a sprinkle of balsamic vinegar, I think. But it’s never as beautiful cooked as when it’s fresh from the garden!

I did a fairly minimal light show this year. The red lights along the roof have been up for about five or more years. I added the white lights at the entrance for practicality, and the colored lights along the bushes in front also illuminate the side path.

Moved Indoors

In September, we hit the first string of nights below 60 degrees, then below 50 degrees. That was the signal to start bringing in the house plants.  Starting September 25, I've been moving many of them indoors. They are generally bigger than they were went they went out, and I've divided some into multiple pots and I am trying to propagate more. So far, I've managed to buy only one new one this season! But still, there is just a lot to contend with.

 I acquired some shelves on which to put my plants over the winter last year as the collection grew. Some of that furniture went outside with the plants, so I had to first clean all the furniture and get it back inside before the plants could come in. Then the plants themselves, and their pots, had to be wiped cleaned, and then thoroughly sprayed with horticultural soap before bringing them in. So it was a bit of a multi-day production.

All my plants were in my "new" sunroom last year, but I expanded some into my morning room (as I call my office for its eastern exposure). I follow "urban jungle blog" on the 'gram, and that has made me up my game for how to position the plants. I decided spreading them out both looks cleaner and simpler, and it also brings the lushness to more of the house. Puttering among them all is a pleasure for me.

Some plants are still outside, but nights now are down in the thirties. No frost yet, but it's coming. The ones outside can take more cold, and I may try to overwinter a couple of the hardy ones in my plastic grow-shed, maybe with more protection. The grow shed only saves a couple of degrees over outside unless the sun is shining, but if it gets really really cold I could put a ceramic space heater (which I own) out there via extension cord. The other trick with the grow shed is to remember they don't get any precipitation there, and so they need some watering during the winter. I'll almost certainly put the (hardy) banana there, with an eye to planting it in the ground and starting a banana grove next year. I don't have a non-freezing sheltered place, but my above-ground spare bedroom normally has the heat vent closed (when no-one is staying there which is almost always) and it gets down around 60, I think. So I may try to put some of the plants that want some dormancy, but not actual freezing, in there.

Many of the plants I brought inside quickly lost a few leaves. I don't really trim and prune them during their summer vacation, so there was some catching up to do. I don't think the loss of leaves was indicative of bigger problems, as they seem to have settled into their new places without continuing to go bald.

Summer Glory

 I came home to a solidly green jungle, but I woke up today to this:

I planted this a year ago in my front rain garden. It’s a native hibiscus.