Well, so far, at least. The lettuce, on the other hand, appears to hate my guts.
It’s hard to believe we’re less than two weeks into the planter experiment. It feels like… I don’t know. Months. But you know, this gardening thing, I think it’s starting to (ahem) grow on me. Ba dum ching.
The gritty peat mix that I ended up using for the planter (very roughly approximate 80% sphagnum peat, 10% perlite, 10% vermiculite) appears to be wicking generally successfully, now that I’ve force-introduced the peat to water by top-watering for the first little while.
Almost everything appears to be doing OK in the planter, but my gosh, the spinach. It’s not been two weeks with those transplants, and already it looks like I could harvest individual leaves on a couple of the bunches, if I were so inclined. Out of the 12 bunches, I only lost one. To be honest, that one was no surprise, as it was small and weedy looking to begin with, and I think it lost too much root mass because a couple of the starter pots were somewhat rootbound, and had to be pulled apart. The others? Healthy, lush, green, and growing like nobody’s business.
The onions, and herbs I’ve planted appear to be OK, if not particularly thriving yet. My pea seeds have only just began to break ground at 12 days, but they did germinate fine if somewhat late. The cucumber seeds have been above ground for about three days now, and have two leaves each. The peppers are holding their own in spite of the cool weather we had last weekend. I’ve got some deadness going on at the tips of a couple of the tomatoes’ leaves, but it doesn’t look like it’s spreading, and so I’m not inclined to think it’s pest. They are on the lower fronds where they may have touched dirt, and maybe contact with the ground was somewhat detrimental.
The thing that’s not doing well is the lettuce, and given that it’s smack up against the spinach, and the spinach is doing awesome, I’m not 100% sure why. Unlike everything else, it seems to be having trouble drawing sufficient moisture. Around noon today, I went to check on my lovelies, and found the boston lettuce a sad wilted sack. I think I’m going to lose them. In fact, I’m not sure they’re even worth trying to salvage at this point, knowing how bitter dehydration makes the lettuce. Even before today, though, it didn’t seem that it was as happy in the gritty mix as the other plants were. Similar to the tomatoes, I was getting lots of dead spots on places where the leaves came in contact with the ground.
Perhaps the Ph is off? There is a lot of lime in the soil, but I admit I didn’t do a full on Ph test. Anybody with more gardening experience than me, feel free to weigh in, please. 🙂