Week 5 - Progress

This week going to review the progress of the "crops". We have a three seasons room located on the west side of our house. The room is about 85% windows and doors so it has plenty of light. The room is not heated or air conditioned. When the house needs to be heated or air conditioned we can close this room off from the rest of the house. In the winter time the temperature hovers around 50F. If the outside temperature falls much below 0F for more than a day or two the temperature in the room can approach freezing. When that happens we run an infrared heater call SunTwin. Since we bought our heater SunTwin was acquired by EdenPure. When it runs the fan is loud but it does a good keeping the temperatures of the room in the 50-55F area and doesn't seem to cost an arm and a leg to do so. To learn more about the heater click here. Also a company by the name of SunHeat makes a heater that looks almost identical to ours.
With this room's temperature in the 55F area that is really an ideal temperature to grow cool season crops like lettuce and spinach. Below is this week's update on the progress of the spinach and lettuce crops.
At beginning of this week I moved the Earthbox with lettuce out to the west room. Because the box has casters it was just a matter of rolling the box out to the room. I placed the lettuce under some grow lights. The grow lights are held by a stand made from two eight foot 2x4's.

The lettuce is growing quite nicely as you can see below. Notice how red several of the plants are. They are so red and dark they are hard to see in the photos below.

About three days after planting the spinach the plants started emerging, see photo below.

And a few days later the spinach has completely emerged. Probably should thin to an average of one plant per inch, but will wait a few more days before thinning.

That's all for this week. Next week I will write about my plans for starting plants for the summer growing season and update progress of the lettuce and spinach.

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