• Everything other than hot peppers. Questions, discussion, and grow logs. Cannabis grow pics are only allowed when posted from a legal juridstiction.

Lettuce

W

wordwiz

It's early February. Football is over and I'm not that much into basketball. The weather outside is unpleasant. There's nothing on TV. I don't have a good book to read.

So I did the next best thing - sowed lettuce. In cups. Five cups each of Flashy Black Trout and Simpson Elite. 3-4 seeds per cup, which I will winnow out as they grow. (Ever try planting one Simpson seed at a time - they are barely larger than a mustard seed.)

My concern is coming up with enough lights to cover everything. But... I have a plan!

Mike
 
lettuce is good, so what did you plant ? oops sorry you already said, but never heard of those what type are they ?
I've seen some kind of lettuce seed before & they're very very small seeds. but I'm still kinda confused where the hell do those seeds come from ? I know the plant but I havent seen nothing like a flower or whatever to produce those seeds.
 
A clue - CFL. And that is not Canadian Football League. I'm sold on these 20 watt, 2700K lights. Create a 4' light bar with the lights spaced six inches apart. 100 watts per bar. With the right relector, two of them will easily cover eight square feet, delivering 100% PAR. Running them for 16 hours per day will cost 32ยข/day. I have a limited budget I'm allowed to spend on my hobby, and the boss includes electricity costs in the equation. She might increase it two-fold or more once I fry a green tomato for her in March!

See, I have this other secret plan - to submit my efforts to NASA and get a $50 million grant to help them develop a way to grow enough food to sustain a manned mission to Mars.

Mike
 
Beef, Pork, Cheese, Hot Sauce, Fish, Beer, Tequila, Chicken Wings, Peppers....since when is lettuce a "food"?

Cheers, TB.

And..."no Mr. Bond. I do not expect you to talk. I expect you to die!"
 
chilehunter said:
lettuce is good, so what did you plant ? oops sorry you already said, but never heard of those what type are they ?
I've seen some kind of lettuce seed before & they're very very small seeds. but I'm still kinda confused where the hell do those seeds come from ? I know the plant but I havent seen nothing like a flower or whatever to produce those seeds.
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lettuce will eventually flower, we just eat it before that happens... i grew lettuce once. a looooot of earwigs that year. never again. *shudders*
 
lettuce is good, so what did you plant ? oops sorry you already said, but never heard of those what type are they ?
Click to expand...

The Flashy Trout Back is a Romaine type, see http://www.territorialseed.com/product/917/s

I got it free with some seed potatoes I bought from www.wood prairie.com. I ordered some Red and Blue seed potatoes from them.

The Simpson elite is a loosehead lettuce that grows really nice heads that can get to 15 inches wide. Great on sandwiches though as kids mom would fix it by adding some chopped up fried bacon and hot vinegar with the bacon grease. Almost like dandelion greens, though she never added boiled eggs to the lettuce. We grew it under a canvass in a tobacco bed.

For those of you not familiar with tobacco beds, they were 12' x 100' areas that we sowed tobacco seed in. The plants could not take direct sunlight until they were decent size, so they had to be covered with a cotton canvas. When it rained, the canvas would stick to the ground and inhibit the plants from sprouting or growing. The lettuce would sprout and grow quicker, so it held the canvas up just a bit.

Mike
 
I wish peppers sprouted this fast. Several lettuce seeds have already poked their head through the soil. I should easily have a new, decent size head of lettuce to eat by St. Paddy's day. :)

Mike
 
wordwiz said:
For those of you not familiar with tobacco beds, they were 12' x 100' areas that we sowed tobacco seed in. The plants could not take direct sunlight until they were decent size, so they had to be covered with a cotton canvas. When it rained, the canvas would stick to the ground and inhibit the plants from sprouting or growing. The lettuce would sprout and grow quicker, so it held the canvas up just a bit.
Click to expand...

Now that's something I didn't know, and I'm from a tobacco state. How big do the tobacco seedlings need to be before they can take direct sun? I do grow ornamental tobaccos sometimes, and it never occurred to me to treat them any differently than the rest of my flowers.
 
Pam said:
Now that's something I didn't know, and I'm from a tobacco state. How big do the tobacco seedlings need to be before they can take direct sun? I do grow ornamental tobaccos sometimes, and it never occurred to me to treat them any differently than the rest of my flowers.
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They generally have to have a set or two of their first true leaves before you want to start introducing direct light on them.
 
We always left the canvas on until 5-7 days before transplanting.

And after the first "pulling of the plants" we would put it back on and water the beds. This helped settle the dirt around the roots of the plants that were not pulled. The canvas also helped keep them from getting leggy.

I've also know of people who "mowed" the bed, though this was real common. It happened when the weather was very uncooperative. A bed gets close to having plants large enough to plant and then the rains come - knocking us out of setting for maybe a week of more. Transplanters simply did not like long leaves on plants. The guys would attach a lawn mower to boards and then carry it across the boards along the side of the bed, trimming the plants.

We did it the easy way - used branch trimmers and clipped off the tops after they were pulled. Tobaaco only needs the very heart of the plant to survive.

These days, plantings are grown hydroponically.

Mike
 
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