The lettuce is taking off. We will actually have something to harvest. It seems that they do very well in a water culture system. The basil that we planted is not doing so well but it is still alive. We have algae forming in the tank. If we were going to have the system running much longer, it would need a good cleaning. The ph of the system is still around 7. The nutrient solution is still at an appropriate level. Overall the system is working well, mostly for the lettuce.
What a relief the plants have turned around. They are looking good again after adding that water. The basil has actually came back and the lettuce looks green again. Im glad we learned our lesson without killing all of our plants. We did not think that they would come back so quick, but they have. We are amazing that we were able to turn them around.
It seems that our idea to add more nutrient solution was a bad one. It seems that we have too many nutrients in the system because the basil is all but shriveled up. The lettuce is a yellowish green. Too many nutrients are not good for the plants and that seems evident here. I poured some of the nutrient solution out and have added regular water. The ph is around 9 so we added ph down to fix that.
We checked the system and once again it seems to be doing fine. Looks like it may work out for use after all. Our lettuce continues to grow at an alarming rate. The basil is growing a little slowing but is still looking great. We checked the ph and it is around 7. We did not add anything to change the ph. We added almost a full gallon of nutrient solution to fill up our system because of the tour on Monday.
I checked our plants briefly after our mid-term exam. they seem to be doing well and the lettuce has already outgrown our basil. We still have plenty of nutrient solution in our system so we left it alone. Everything seems to be doing fine aside from a little bit of mold forming on the rock wool.
WOW!!! the lettuce is looking great for only 5 days. It has already caught up to our biggest basil plant. Im glad we chose lettuce because of the quick growth rate. It seems to do well in a water culture system. We added more nutrient solution and checked our ph. It is around 4 with is not good. We added some ph booster and got it to around 7. This should help them maintain their growth.
Our plants do not seem to be doing so well. We have decided to take action and plant more lettuce in the empty rock wool. We added more small rocks underneath the rock wool because they are still getting moldy. I think that they are getting over saturated still. We planted about 5 lettuce seeds in each of the three empty rock wools. Hopefully with some luck we will have plants when we come in on Monday. The ph was checked and was around 7.
Only one of our basil plants seems to be growing at all. We have checked the pH and it is right around 7. We did some research and we believe that the problem is that it is getting to much water and solution. We added small rocks under our rock wool so that it would not be so saturated. According to my research this should help the plants grow faster.
Our basil seems to be doing much better than our lettuce but the growth is slow. We are on the end of the table with a light that is constantly moving back and forth. We rotated our system so that it receives more light than before. If no growth has occurred by Monday we are going to make changes to our system. Our pH is around 5 so we added more pH up.
After two days of germination our seeds have grown a little. We can see that they are germinating in the rock wool. We feel comfortable not adding any solution since our water culture system is on a floating platform. We are excited to see how much they have grown when we return from spring break.