27 May How to Grow Lettuce Indoors
One complaint that people have about eating healthy is the lack of high-quality organic produce. It can be hard to source your own greens, such as lettuce. But why purchase lettuce when you can easily grow your own?
Satisfy the culinary adventurer within you and start from scratch to grow your own lettuce. We’ve got some tips on how to do just that.
1. Give it a home
Plastic pots are light and versatile, while clay pots have that funky DIY aesthetic. If you choose the latter, line the pot with a plastic bag, which you need to puncture holes in to allow for drainage.
Because clay pots have the tendency to absorb water and therefore dry out the soil faster than if you were to plant in a plastic container, that plastic bag for your clay pot is crucial.
Before you use your pot, make sure to clean your container. If your pot was once home to another plant, this step is crucial because you never know what its former inhabitant could’ve left behind. It could potentially pose as a threat to your lettuce!
Use soap and warm water, or a mixture of bleach and water (1:9 ratio of bleach to water) to thoroughly clean your pot.
2. Get dirty
Lettuce is an easy-going, low maintenance vegetable to plant. It should be fine with whatever soil you choose, though you should use fresh soil. Reusing old soil can introduce bacteria and nasty insects that could damage your fresh lettuce plants.
Fill your pot with soil until it almost reaches the top, leaving a little bit of room for your seeds and some soil to put over the seeds.
3. Spread those lettuce seeds
Sprinkle the seeds over the soil. Don’t focus too much on the distance between seeds. Once you’re done that, add additional soil over the seeds.
But don’t add too much! Keep it at around 1/8-inch to 1/4-inch of soil over top. If those seeds are covered by too much soil, they won’t be able to receive the light they need to grow.
4. Proceed with TLC
The most important thing about these little plants is that the soil needs to always be moist. Water the soil with a spray bottle every morning, or whenever it looks a bit dry. This can be tested by sticking your fingertip into the soil. If it’s dry, then water it.
The lettuce seedlings need a lot of sun, but make sure wherever you keep the pot isn’t too hot, or else your lettuce will dry out. Fourteen to 16 hours of sunlight is ideal.
To get the best harvest, your lettuce should be fed a liquid organic fertilizer after each harvest. Whereas other microgreens need that time to mature, you can eat the immature leaves of lettuce.
Grow lettuce in your very own kitchen
Certainly, growing lettuce is simple, but it can be tedious to water it as often as you need to. If you have children or pets in the house, soil may also not be the best choice.
With an Urban Cultivator Residential, the automatic controls make sure that your lettuce grows at the right temperature and receives the appropriate amount of water, without the mess of soil.
The unit is capable of producing an entire flat of baby lettuce, and will only take about four weeks before you can harvest, compared to having to wait six to eight weeks for a head of lettuce. There’s no reason to not grow more lettuce, and grow it faster.
Make growing lettuce even easier with Urban Cultivator!
