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 (Unpublished results.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!
