Month: March 2011

We are still seeing much better progress with the growth of our lettuce in two of the three cups.  I tried pressing down the seeds further in the third cup in case they were too shallow.  Hopefully we will start seeing lettuce growth in the third cup by next class.

Today we saw definitive growth in our lettuce plants! Nice. However, we don’t have a sprout yet in one of the cups planted on 3/22. Bummer. We’ll act accordingly if we do not see any action by next class. We did not test for pH, nor did we add nutrient solution. Things look okay.

Our basil has shown only limited growth since its planting. On Thursday 3/17 we planted lettuce seeds in our 3rd container which had no basil growth. Today that lettuce sprout is taller than both of our basil sprouts. The basil has turned black and would appear to be rotted or dead. Based on some additional research we discovered that the water culture system is best for lettuce, and not many other plants. This is due to the high water content provided by the water culture hydroponic system. We decided to make a change and plant lettuce. We added nutrient solution and tested the pH. The pH stands at 7.5 and we estimate that we’ve used about 2 gallons of nutrient solution since the project began. We’ll report back on the progress of our lettuce on 3/29. We hope all goes well!

Last Thursday (3/17/11) we decided to plant Lettuce in the cup that wasn’t showing any signs of growth of the Basil.  Today when we came in (3/22/11) we found that it has already grown more then our Basil had and we planted the Basil at the very beginning of the project.  Our Basil was also turning dark and did not look like it had survived. We made the decision after more research to remove the dead Basil plants and plant lettuce in our Water Culture system since it is a plant that thrives on plenty of water. Hopefully we will see more progress in the future.

When we came back from spring break we found that the water level was good for our four basil plants.  The growth is taking some time and we are now finally seeing them poke up through the perlite.  Is anyone else’s Basil taking some time to grow?  We have our under the light and the water is making its way up through the perlite.