February has been an extremely warm month compared to past winters. With so much sunshine and warm nights, I decided to experiment with doing some hydroponic lettuce and spinach. Normally I don't put anything out in the greenhouse until the second week of March.
I prepared my food-grade containers by adding the rainwater I had gathered the week before. Each tub holds 5 gallons of water. I use water-soluble fertilizer for nutrition and add the proper amount to the water.
Because I am not heating the greenhouse I added a small aquarium heater to the water which keeps the temperature around 70° F. This is a bit warm for cold-weather-loving plants, but, it keeps the water from freezing.
Buttercrunch Lettuce
I started the lettuce and spinach seedlings in my grow room under lights until they started getting their second leaves. This is when I carefully remove them from the soil and dip the roots into water to remove most of the dirt.
Spinach
As you can see both the seedlings are very small when I add them to the floating rafts. This is the way I have grown greens for early harvesting for three years now and have been very happy with the results.
It has been three days since putting the lettuce out into the greenhouse. So far they are acclimating to the sunshine very well and only wilted slightly on the first day.
The spinach was put out earlier this week and it too is doing very well.It will be interesting to see how well they do without heat during this week with upcoming cold nights.
The last two nights the temperatures were below freezing. This is how the lettuce looked after two cold nights. The leaves are lying down somewhat, but I can see new leaves forming in the center of the plant.
The spinach is doing very well also. I decided to put some of them in the soil to see how they would fair since I have so many plants in the seed room. If I do lose any in the greenhouse I have plenty to replace them with.
Either way the spinach is seemingly surviving the cold temperatures. If they do well for the next 5 days, I will plant more out in my tower gardens. We are supposed to have 20° F. nights until next week. Here is hoping that they all do well and I can put out some more of my seedlings to get a very early harvest.
Walla Walla Onion
I put a few onion seedlings into a 4" pot to see how well they would do. If they continue to grow well I will be putting all my trays of onions out this next week. This is the earliest I have ever used the greenhouse and I am hoping for all the plants to survive. It would be too costly to try and heat it with these low temperatures for just a few plants. Stay tuned for updates on their progress.
Until next time, this is Sunscape
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