🌱 Home Gardening with Hydroponics - Garden Update (August 28, 2017)
Welcome gardening enthusiasts to the next update on my indoor lettuce wall garden so you can follow along with the progress from seed to harvest. It's been 14 days since the last update and about 40 days since the seeds were started.
So far the results have been typical to cycles in the past. Most plants are growing as expected and we have been eating leaves from the bigger lettuce plants growing from the previous cycle. The rest of the lettuce will be ready to begin eating from bythis weekend. With proper harvesting of the bottom leaves from different plants in rotation, they should continue to grow bigger and provide food for 30 days. During this time I will need to get the next plants growing and ready to swap out to keep a continuous cycle of harvestable leaves.
Current view of everything growing in the wall garden.
This week I will be getting my outside hydrogarden system up and running - finally! The cucumber plants I temporarily put in this system (top left and bottom left spots) will be moving outside and the lettuce plant on the left/middle row that got all "leggy" will be taken out. I will fill the spaces with some herbs, probably cilantro and parsley, and maybe one or two new baby lettuce plants.
I decided to skip the intermediate garage step this time and get things going out front this week since I need to get the plants established before the sun angle drops too low. I will post about this by the weekend as I go.
Close up of plants on the middle row.
Close up of plants on the top row.
One of my pepper plants temporarily in the wall garden.
Peanut Plant Update
My gift from the squirrels is doing good. It seems to be growing at a rapid pace with new stalks coming up over the past week and this morning the first yellow flower bloomed. The main plant that sprouted first has doubled in height, I have a picture below to compare the height against the window frame.
According to what I have read about growing peanuts, we are on day 20 of an average 90 day time to harvest. So sometime around November 1st is the target date to pull it up and see what we get. Supposedly the plant starts to develop the nodes that become peanuts once the flowers start blooming.
A few more stalks have sprouted up around the main one.
The first flower opened up this morning.
Comparing the growth over 20 days.
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Thanks for reading, now get out there and get GROWING!
Hydroponics is definitely a fantastic thing I've known about it for some years and have never gotten around to trying it , I do enjoy growing chilli so perhaps one day I should definitely make a proper effort and maybe start with a small set up , great article. Cheers mike
Thank you Mike. It is definitely a great way to grow food. Plants grow faster with larger fruit and higher yields using less water.
Do you use natural light or artificial, I use a LED grow light earlier in the year until the days get longer then they go in the green house, cheers mike
My indoor wall garden (lettuce/herbs) has LED light bars, 1 red/blue and 1 daylight per row. The rest of my plants like tomato, cucumber, peppers, etc grow outside in sunlight. I am in Florida so we don't have any kind of harsh winter here, things will grow year-round.
I show how I built them all in my previous posts. :-)
Sound I will visit. Cheers mate
This is so cool. I am so intrigued and following your peanut plant, I am excited to see the results. Thanks for sharing. Upvoted and following
Thank you. I am really curious on how the peanut project turns out. Not sure if you saw my post a little while back on how it got started, but hopefully it yields some peanuts. :-) I am following you as well. So much good info you share.
Thank you and yes I read your earlier post
I've seen hydroponics systems online before but I always thought they could never work well. You've got something great going there! Making lettuce last by strategically choosing leaves is something I do too, and it definitely extends the amount of food you can harvest. Also, I'm pretty impressed by how well you keep track of the number of days you've got a plant going. I always start off trying to keep track of everything but sooner or later (sooner) I scrap all plans and just make decisions as I go, and have no clue when things are 'supposed' to be fruiting, etc. Great post! Resteemed :)
Thank you for support and feedback. Normally I "grow" with the flow, like you said, once you know the normal cycles of your gardens you just know when things need to be swapped out, etc.
But yes, in the beginning with each of my new systems I document the growing cycles to get an understanding of what I can expect to get out of them and what varieties yield the most in the system. Once I have that general grow/replace cycle rhythm down pat I don't document it any more.
Two months back I decided to do a full clean out of all my hydroponic systems which gave a perfect opportunity to walk everyone through how I do things in "real-time". All the notes I took are coming in handy now. :-)
The downside is having to buy produce from the store during this time, it's driving me nuts. LOL
What a great set up, I especially like the peanut plant, I would never have thought to grow this plant in a hydroponics garden.
Thank you. Well, the peanut plant is not in hydro. The running joke with that is from my previous posts is that it was a gift from the squirrels i have been battling with in my outside gardens. They buried a raw peanut in one of my pots and it started to grow. :-)
Ahh, right. New to Steemit, so not up on the inside jokes... yet.
Beautiful set up, I wish you lots of healthy plants.
Thank you so much.
This is just awesome. Keep posting... :-)
Thank you.
Nice work guy.. but i have a wide land to grow vegetables and i do it to support my family finance and it makes my family helthier. I can grow vegetables in wide area because I live in a rural area. Because you live in a big city and hard to grow vegetables because of lacak of area, hydrophonic ia the best solution. You did it right
Indeed. Thank you. That is true, hydroponics is the only way for me to grow enough food for us so we don't have to buy from the stores. One day we will move somewhere with land to grow on too.
This is incredible, hopefully this is extended to area where it harder to grow crops and feed the areas that desperately need food.
I agree, hydroponics is starting to catch on. Hopefully this way of growing food can help others.
Great system. I like hydroponics. You get fantastic results.
Thank you :-)
Hi @steempowergarden, I'm new in the community and your posts looks great to me. I'm also a garden fan and will follow your experiencies. Greetings!
Thank you for the support.