Thursday, April 30, 2015

How to Grow Lettuce in a Bottle

Lettuce is pretty easy to grow. It's forgiving. It wants you to succeed in growing it and ultimately killing it. It's basically masochistic.

Lettuce also needs very little soil to grow, which makes it an optimal container plant. Unlike tomatoes, which need lots of soil, lettuce can probably survive in softball-sized amount of soil.

So making tiny greenhouses for your lettuce is very easy. You could do it with an empty water bottle.

Simply take the a bottle (this is a Dasani bottle), remove the wrapper. Using a box-cutter, slice the bottle right below where the neck begins to curve. Fill the bottle about half-way with moist potter's soil (you can buy a small bag of it about $5).

Plant three tiny little lettuce seeds by just placing them on top of the soil and pressing down with your finger. Lettuce doesn't really need to be "buried." Then place the top of the bottle back on, leaving the cap off. Use a spray bottle to keep the soil moist and place in a window or anywhere there is sunlight. The bottle will protect your baby lettuce from getting eaten by critters, so you can be more daring with where you put these. Once they start growing full size, it's fairly easy to pull the rootball out and replant it, if you want. You can also harvest baby lettuce straight from the bottle.

This lettuce shown here is baby black seeded simpson. Each packet of seeds (about $1-2) could probably cover at least 20 bottles if you got ambitious.


No comments:

Post a Comment