At home: carrots and garlic

I wasn't sure what to do with the third LED grow light I bought. But I was making some soup a couple weeks ago and a project presented itself. I had a bag of carrots that had gone native in my crisper drawer. They had grown roots and were all tangled up with each other. There were a few stringy, sad-looking, pale orange sprouts coming off the tops, too. I wish I'd taken a picture. It was pretty pathetic.

I remembered from kindergarten that you can grow new carrots from carrot tops, so I thought, let's give this a shot. I chopped the tops off, leaving a bit of root still attached. I cut a few of them in half across the top, just out of curiosity, to see if they'd still grow. I stuck eight of them in two 8" pots, four in each pot. And I put a clove of garlic in the middle of each. Why not? I'm not sure if the garlic will sprout -- a couple other cloves from that head had gotten a bit dry and maybe even rotten. But, hey, what's the worst that could happen?

I've got them in my bedroom, stuck on a milk crate next to my bed. The light is hanging from the ceiling, and I turn it on when I get up and off when I go to sleep. So they're getting about 16 hours of light, which is pretty good.

Stuff is growing!

Wow, that was fast. It only took three days for the first crop to get going.

I got some mesclun, mustard, and Japanese mustard seeds from Arlington County (for free -- a pretty nice perk that I didn't know my taxpayer dollars were funding). I put the system together on a Monday night and sprinkled on some seeds. Not much to see on Tuesday. I was out of the office Wednesday. But on Thursday -- hey! Sprouts! If you look closely, you can see a little halo of rootlets surrounding each sprout.

I only planted on one-third of the box so far because I'm planning to plant three successive lettuce crops. I'll plant the second in a week and a third the following week. That way, I'll harvest the first and let it grow back, and once that's run out I'll harvest the second, then the third. Hopefully, once the third crop is harvested, the first will be ready to harvest again. We'll see.

the EarthBox

I'll be growing my lettuce in an EarthBox. It seemed like a good fit for this experiment because it's a compact, all-inclusive system; but also because there's some kind of tie-in with the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, an organization I deal with frequently at work. The boxes are aimed at people in all sorts of situations that aren't conducive to growing nutritious food -- from city school kids living in "food deserts" with no access to fresh vegetables, to African farmers trying to scratch out a living on lousy soils, to people living in refugee camps. (Not sure where cubicle dwellers fall in that continuum.)

The EarthBox has a reservoir in the bottom, which is supposed to make it impossible to under- or over-water your plants (assuming you don't forget to put water in it from time to time). The plants take up the water they need through capillary action. The black screen you see in the picture above separates the reservoir from the dirt, except for two patches in the corners where the dirt wicks the water up to the rest of the box.

I came across these things when I was working on a story at a farm owned by the Baltimore public school system, which has a lot of kids living in those food deserts. Someday I'll get to finish that story and post the link... Sigh...

I did a kind-of dumb thing and ordered the whole package, which runs into some pretty serious money: $115.80. But that includes everything: the box with organic dirt and organic fertilizer (about $60), the staking system I'm hanging the grow lights from (about $35), and shipping. I probably could've saved a bundle on the shipping if I'd gotten the dirt and fertilizer myself. The box alone is only about $30.

So, for those of you playing at home, adding in the $122.35 for the grow lights, so far we're up to $239.15.

As I mentioned with the lights, I'm paying full price for everything. I could've gotten a reporter discount on the EarthBox but I decided not to. And nobody's paying me to write about this project.

the grow lights

I found an LED system that looks promising as a cubicle grow light. LEDs use very little power. The unit I bought, the GlowPanel, takes 14 watts. So they're eco-friendly and won't be a huge burden on my employer when I leave them on 24/7. The unit is about a foot square and, according to the manufacturer, will illuminate 1.5 sq. ft., more than enough for my skinny cubicle setup.

An interesting note about the grow light: it only uses red and blue LEDs. Plants are green because they're reflecting and not absorbing that part of the spectrum. So no need to waste energy on wavelengths your plants can't use. It'll give off a funny purple light, though, which could be annoying.

(Another virtue listed by the manufacturer: "DISCREET - No thermal footprint - undetectable." I assume that selling point is aimed at the indoor marijuana growers.)

Except for the electricity, I'll be keeping a running tally of the costs and benefits of cubicle farming. We'll see how long it takes to break even, if ever. The lights weren't terribly cheap: $54.99 each. I bought two. Plus $12.37 for shipping, that comes to $122.35. (Actually, I bought three -- one for home. But I'm not counting that as part of the bill here because at home I'm going to use leftover pots and dirt and stuff, which would make the accounting weird. I'll write about the extracurricular stuff, too, but it won't be part of the running bill.)

By the way, I'm paying full price for everything in this project. No reporter discounts or anything. And nobody's paying me to write about it.

Cubicle farming

OK, I'm returning to this blog to document an experiment: I'm going to attempt to grow vegetables in the confines of my cubicle. Every blog should have a purpose (shouldn't it?), so let's say the goal here is to be self-sufficient in salad greens in...oh, I dunno, let's say 6 months.

Why am I doing this? Well, for one thing, I'm food and agriculture reporter for Voice of America, so it seems appropriate. But that aside, I've been wanting to get back to growing vegetables for a while. I live in a small apartment outside Washington, DC, with no balcony. Not a lot of space for growing stuff.

Like most of modern man, I spend most of my day, and most of my week, and, sadly, most of my life, in a cubicle, pictured here. I eat lunch at my desk just about every day. Lunch almost invariably consists of some kind of bread, some form of chicken or tofu, and lettuce. Growing wheat in my cube (or raising chickens) seems impractical. Growing lettuce seems do-able.

Except for the obvious shortcoming that I'm indoors. I have no arable land. I'll need containers.

And I get about 10 minutes of direct sunlight. I'll need grow lights.

So, as Tobias Fünke said, "Let the great experiment begin!"