Indoor Lettuce

Growing food indoors, especially lettuce, is a big topic in lots of homesteading groups. People have designed setups ranging from simple and inexpensive to ones worthy of commercial operations. I can grow lettuce easily either in the greenhouse or outdoors from about March to October. The winter months are the problem.

[The greenhouse can be heated with propane, but the lack of light is the limiting factor. We just don’t get enough sunlight during the winter months to grow anything out there. Also, because of its location, the greenhouse can be difficult to access when there is a lot of snow on the ground.]

I bought the supplies last year to set up an indoor growing system but didn’t get to it. This year, I was determined to give it a go. I planted lettuce seeds just after Thanksgiving. This is what they look like now:

That plastic tub is filled with a liquid growing solution and the plants are in net cups that sit down inside the lid. The roots grow down and access the solution. A Barrina light is suspended above the plants. The husband joked that this was enough for one serving of salad for him. This is true. However, I consider my little experiment a success. Now we have to figure out how to scale it up about 500% and get a succession planting schedule in place. Kalispell has a store that specializes in aquaponics/hydroponics, so I plan to stop in there and see what systems they have available. This setup works, sort of, but not for the amount of lettuce I would like to grow.

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The husband took care of defrosting the freezer in the garage for me over the weekend, so that’s all clean and ready for pork. The pork won’t be ready for another week or two yet. Tera said she’d go with me to pick it up. I haven’t seen her since we went to Salt Lake City in September.

I used some of my birthday money to order a few Accuquilt Studio dies. They always have big sales around Christmas, and the Studio dies are 60% off until December 24. I now have most of the strip dies I need, which are great for making sashing and churning through leftovers.

I want to get the backlog of tops quilted and bound by the middle of January. Our sewing group at church is also planning a comforter-tying party for a Saturday in February. We held one two years ago, just before the pandemic started (how long ago that seems), and it was a huge success. I took my bin of 5” squares to church so that some of the other ladies could take them and sew them into tops for tying.