Branching Out
Deeply Rooted
I have started two large batches of leaf lettuce seedlings over the course of the past month, and while I am having good results getting them started I ran in to a bottle neck with my first batch now that the seedlings are about 3-4 weeks old. The lettuce seedlings are developing a broad habit, and become crowded in the large 4-cells that I had used to bump them up. A friend got a fancy cold frame for Christmas, so she took a couple of dozen off my hands thankfully. I will have to move the rest of them to individual 4" pots, which will require a lot of potting soil.
Round two of lettuce seedlings were started in 3/4" mini soil blocks, and are just one week old. This time I selected four kinds of Romaine in the hopes that it will have a more slender upright growth habit. I am going to try bumping them up to the 2" soil blocks this time, so that I can space the lettuce blocks 5-6" apart on a tray to grow them out under lights. It is my hope that this will help with the crowding, but it will take up a lot of space. It will also be interesting to see if a 2" block of soil is sufficient to sustain them to grow to a reasonable size without having to bump them up again. The plan is to be able to harvest the outer leaves so that the rest of the plant can keep growing, so I suspect that I will need a large number of plants.
In looking through past threads on this topic I noticed that most of the posts were from long, long ago. Just curious if anyone has had success producing robust quantities of lettuce indoors recently. Any tips would be most appreciated.
Round two of lettuce seedlings were started in 3/4" mini soil blocks, and are just one week old. This time I selected four kinds of Romaine in the hopes that it will have a more slender upright growth habit. I am going to try bumping them up to the 2" soil blocks this time, so that I can space the lettuce blocks 5-6" apart on a tray to grow them out under lights. It is my hope that this will help with the crowding, but it will take up a lot of space. It will also be interesting to see if a 2" block of soil is sufficient to sustain them to grow to a reasonable size without having to bump them up again. The plan is to be able to harvest the outer leaves so that the rest of the plant can keep growing, so I suspect that I will need a large number of plants.
In looking through past threads on this topic I noticed that most of the posts were from long, long ago. Just curious if anyone has had success producing robust quantities of lettuce indoors recently. Any tips would be most appreciated.