Failure!

I haven't posted much lately because there hasn't been a whole lot of growth to report on. The lettuce in the Earthbox has utterly failed. Nary a sprout. Booooo!

(Do I really need to post a picture of nothing? Would you trust me if I just said nothing's growing?)

I even tried different seeds, and still nothing. It's possible it's because both of them were old packets of seeds. I honestly have no idea. I might try sprouting the lettuce in those little peat Jiffy Pots and then transplanting them into the Earthbox, just to see if they'll sprout at all.

In the other boxes behind my desk, there's some spindly spinach growing, albeit slowly.

Not enough light. A lot of seedlings sprouted and conked out, so I think I'm also not giving them enough water. That's easy to fix. I watered the soil real good and re-seeded. Same deal with the arugula. More appear to be sprouting in both cases. The arugula doesn't seem to mind the lack of light so much. So, too bad, spinach! You'll get what I give you! I'm not ready to sink more money into lights right now...

Speaking of money, I did buy one thing recently. See the yellow thingies holding up the lights in the picture above? I bought a $25 plastic Erector Set at Toys-R-Us. Behold, my custom-built light holder!

New Year, New Cubicle Farm

Give me convenience, or give me death!

That's the title of a Dead Kennedys album. It's also what I learned from the last season in the cubicle farm.

The old bookcase setup, with boxes under hanging lights, required me to pull the boxes out and kneel on the floor to harvest salad greens.

Doesn't sound like all that much labor. But at work, I'm usually stressed and harried enough that even that little bit was just too much. So I neglected it. Perfectly good mesclun went to waste.

This season, convenience is king. The boxes are right next to me, at waist level. And the lights are resting on a some supports, not hanging from chains. So all I have to do is lift them up to get at the greens.

In the next iteration, I assume I'll have the boxes dangling just above my head on a bungee cord, so when lunchtime arrives I can simply pull a box down and stick my face directly in the lettuce bed.

Small leafy greens grow great in the cubicle farm, so I'm sticking with them. This season, it's going to be arugula and spinach.

I planted them on New Year's Day (Happy New Year, everybody!) and they've already sprouted.

 

Cubicle farm flashback

When we last left the cubicle farm, cherry tomato plants were courageously striving to produce fruit. Those plucky little bastards flowered and, with a little pollinating help from yours truly, went right ahead and produced little green tomatoes.

But I pulled the plug on that experiment for reasons having nothing to do with the cubicle farm. I was growing the same variety in my home garden. And they tasted like crap.

It's just a lousy variety, bred to be compact, not to taste great. So if it couldn't produce a good tomato in full sun, it was doomed in the cubicle farm.

Return to lettuce

With a heavy heart, I cut the plants down and replanted with head lettuce. Black-seeded Simpson, if I remember correctly.

And light was again a problem. While the plants grew and produced perfectly tasty lettuce, they were long and lanky. They even fell over and grew more like snakes than heads of lettuce. (Unpublished results. No photos. You'll have to take my word for it. )

More light. Need more light.

So I'm actually going back to something like the original setup, with the lower-power square LEDs, which I'll hang directly above the heads once they sprout -- much closer than the UFO was hanging. Brightness diminishes with the square of the distance. Hopefully that'll make up for the lower power.

I bought these from my sister, who, I'm flattered but sorry to say, put enough faith in my abilities from the get-go to buy the exact same setup I started with. I forget what she tried to grow, but I don't think it was small leafy greens. She didn't get very far.

No guarantee these low-power units will work as well for heads of lettuce as they did for small leafy greens, though. We shall see. Stay tuned!

Flowers!

Can you freakin' believe it? These things are actually blooming! They're trying to make tomatoes!

Here's what they look like with the LEDs off -- under lighting you're more accustomed to.

Yep, those are undeniably tomato flowers.

So, now what? At the present time, there are no bees at VOA. I haven't brought it up with the General Services Administration yet, but I suspect they'd frown upon a swarm of bees flying through the Cohen building. So who's gonna pollinate these flowers?

Me. That's who. With an eyeshadow brush. I'm comfortable enough with my masculinity to peruse the cosmetics section looking for a brush that'll do the job. This was the smallest one I could find.

I kinda dabbed the flowers with the brush. And thus begins my career in artificial insemination.

Did it work? Who knows? Probably would be a good idea to get a primer on tomato flower anatomy to figure out where the boy bits and the girl bits are, and how to get the pollen where it needs to be. I guess I'll know in a few days, if the flowers shrivel up. Regardless, it's still going to be a long, long time before these things become tomatoes, if they ever do.

Buds! OMG!

Hey, check this out -- the cherry tomatoes are actually putting out the beginnings of flower buds!

It's gonna be a long, long time before they're tomatoes. But it's a start!

What if this thing actually works?

Back in the lettuce patch, I forgot to mention that last week I harvested a 1 1/8 oz. salad from the second box. That's 42 cents not spent on Whole Foods mixed greens. Woo hoo! At this pace...uh...never mind.

When I harvested the first salad, I carefully snipped the ripe-looking leaves and tried to avoid the tiny little baby leaves to give them a chance to grow back. For the second salad, I said screw it and just clear-cut the whole box.

This week, they've both grown back fine. So I'm clear-cutting from now on.

I snipped another 5/8 oz. of lettuce from the upper lettuce patch today. Yep, that's nearly one quarter of a sawback that remains in my pocket.

There's a mystery plant growing among my salad greens. It kinda looks like parsley, but I don't think it is.

Could be a weed. But it tastes OK, so I'll let it live.

The control plot

Every experiment needs controls. A cherry tomato plant that I started at the same time as the two in the cubicle farm currently is basking in the sun outside my apartment, in an Earthbox it shares with a regular tomato. How's it compare to the cubicle-farm tomatoes, you ask? I'd say growth in the cubicle farm is somewhat less vigorous.

The cherry tomato is on the right. Trust me.

Yes. A bit less vigorous, the cubicle farm is.

Food security solidarity

Another experiment from outside the cubicle farm: my food security crop, potatoes. International-development types promote potatoes for farmers in developing countries because you get a lot of calories and a fair amount of nutrition without needing much of land, water, or fertilizer. So, in the spirit of solidarity, I'm going to see how food-secure I can make myself growing potatoes in a couple 20-gallon trash cans.

The idea is, you drill some holes in the bottom of the trash can, put some dirt in there, and bury your starter potatoes. As the plants grow taller you bury them up to the top leaves with soil. Potatoes are tubers -- horizontal stems -- that branch off the vertical stem. So the more vertical stem you give them to grow tubers, the more potatoes you'll get. Or so I'm told. We'll see what I get come harvest time, whenever that is.

Postscript to a mission aborted

Loyal readers will recall that last December I aborted the first cubicle farm due to a gnat infestation. I took the Earthbox home and dumped the soil on the then-bare ground next to the front steps of my apartment. Well, there must have been some seeds left in that soil because this spring, among my landlord's lilies and whatnot, some red lettuce and mustard have popped up and thrived.

I'm not planning to eat them, though. It's an old building, and god knows what lurks in the ground there. Possibly lead.

Bigger. Limper.

These guys just don't stop growing. I was out for about a week, and when I came back the plants were...well, they were bigger. A lot bigger. I don't know what I expected, but they're really getting pretty sizeable. You don't need me to point out where they are in the picture anymore.

But the bigger they get, the crappier they look. Look at this pathetic specimen. The stem gives practically no vertical support. Its posture is so bad, it's slouching away from the light. And the leaves are limp as wet dishrags. 

The other one's no better.

There's absolutely no sign that these things plan to bear fruit. (Their sibling at home, in an Earthbox in the actual sun, is going nuts with flowers.) I've put in the webbing system (EarthBox calls it a staking system, but it's really more of a webbing) to which I'll strap these sad, flaccid specimens and hope for the best.

A couple possible fixes: 1) The obvious: more light. I'm tempted to throw a few compact fluorescents at them. Sinking big money into another high-power LED seems like overkill. 2) A bigger fan. Maybe that would help stiffen up the impotent foliage.

On the brighter side, the lettuce has gone completely bonkers in my absence.

Both containers are completely full. So, it's harvest time!

I got quite a decent salad out of this first trimming! And it was tasty...if kinda limp. There's that word again. I think those fans aren't cutting it.

Last time, I tried calculating when the cubicle farm would break even based on what I'm not spending on spring mix from Whole Foods at $5.99/lb. This particular salad weighed in at 7/8 oz. That means I saved...33 cents. Yep. One third of one Yankee greenback. Let's not talk about what this experiment has cost so far.

I take some solace from the fact that I can cut another one tomorrow, from the as-yet un-harvested second tray. And we'll see what's grown back by next week.

Growing? Definitely. Thriving? Well...

The cherry tomatoes have continued their remarkable growth. Here they are last Tuesday:

And today:

They're still leggy, though. Look at how much space there is between branches.

(Abid Aslam at the International Food Policy Research Institute pointed out that leggy tomatoes could be a good thing, but only if you're talking about women.)

The leaves are pretty limp, too, even though I've got the fan on them 24-7 in an attempt to toughen them up. Still, onward we go.

Across the cubicle, the lettuce is coming along, too. Here's the first batch, planted about three weeks ago, out from under the grow lights:

And here's the second batch, planted about two weeks ago: