So I said I was thinking about messing around with some hydroponics, and I totally wasn’t kidding. About a week ago I started some Lavewa spinach and some Mesclun lettuce, here’s how they are looking this morning:

Hmm, could be time to water the spinach, it’s there on the left. A couple of days ago I also started some “Salad Bowl” Lettuce, it’s looking pretty good so far:

I found that the Wal-Mart deli puts out small amounts of take-away food in these cool little containers and they leave it under a heat lamp next to one of the registers. Get there at the right time of the day, and it’s 50% off, so you can get a neat little greenhouse for sprouting, plus three or four chicken wings for a buck or so. Win-win for me. 🙂

Once these get big enough, I’ll transplant them into some coco-coir in net pots suspended in recycled coffee cans full of hydroponic solution, and see how they do. Funny story about the net pots. I was buying four-packs of Lemon Italian Ice at Dollar Tree and saving the little cups, thinking I’d drill holes in them to make my own net pots. Then I found out there is a Hydroponic store in town that sells real ones for 18 cents a piece. I think I’ll just use the real ones.

If all of this works out, I think I want to move up to something like this: