Ninth Week: Observation on growth, mildew damage, tip burn & harvest

Dear readers,

Overall, a lot of them did not look very healthy. During the eighth week, I was away for the break so I was expecting them to be fully grown and healthy. A lot of them had mild to severe mildew damage. Some of them had mild to severe tip burn. For mildew problem, I am now suspecting that it is happening because of the weekend watering. (Since they are growing under the hydroponics system, these lettuce plants do not need to be watered on their leaves. However, I am assuming that people who are in charge of it in the greenhouse do it anyway. So, I decided to leave a note so that they do not water these hydroponic salad table anymore.) For tip burn problem, it probably comes from calcium deficiency in the nutrient solution. However, not all of the plants show this symptom so it could partially also be genetic problem. Also, I decided not to account any harvest which did not look edible since the main purpose of this project is to identify edible greens which yield enough.

Seventh Week: Observation on growth & notes on early death and mildew damage

Dear readers,

This week, I took some notes on growth on a scale of 0 to 2, early death on a scale of 0 to 1 and mildew damage on a scale of 0 to 1. Seeing some mildew damage (which is unfortunately hard to capture from my phone camera) is little concerning since they are still at the early stage of their growth. I will see how it goes in couple weeks. Other than that, they all look pretty healthy.

Sixth Week: First observation on growth

Dear readers,

Most of them grew enough for me to take some measurement so I did in scale of 0 to 2. (0=weak, 1=moderate, 2=vigorous). Some of them are growing very fast. I also took note of if each root grew enough to reach the nutrient solution in each bin in scale of 0 to 1.

Fourth & Fifth Week: More thinning & some observation

Dear readers,

Until these lettuce plants grow more, there is nothing I can do much. However, I did two things for fourth and fifth week. For the fourth week, I did additional thinning since there has been more sprouts after the first thinning. I replanted ones which I was going to throw away and brought back to my apartment for fun!

On the fifth week, I noticed that there were some pots which have concerning amount of algae growth in scale of 0 to 2. (0= almost to none, 1=moderate, 2=severe) So, I just took a quick note of it, since it might affect later. Also, I took some notes on root growth (whether root was coming out of the net pot or not) in scale of 0 to 1.

Third Week: Giving Them new home

Dear readers,

I hope you all did not forget about the surviving lettuce seedling from last time! They all look great and very healthy so it is the time for their moving. Unlike last time where I had to manually put holes onto the lids of bins, this time there is no need for that -- I am going to recycle those plastic bins from last time. So, I just put 1 table spoon of HyrdoFeed and a gallon water to each bin. After that, each net pot was randomly assigned to each spot on each hole. Then, each pot got its name tag.

Second Week: Creating more space for each seedling

Dear readers,

Thankfully, I got seedling(s) from most of the net pots. So, it was the same drill from the last time. Using tweezers, I thinned the seedlings so that each net pot gets one or two seedlings. This procedure will make each lettuce plant grow better since each has enough space for itself. No lettuce plants want to be crowded in one small net pot, just like people prefer to be on less crowded subway than crowded one. Now I just have to wait for may be couple weeks before they grow in size so that I can take measurements.

First Week: Brief introduction and seeding the second generation

Dear readers,

I must inform all of you some good and bad news. The good new is that we successfully got some of the seeds from the previous lettuce salad table project. The bad new is that we could not get the seeds from some of the most successful plants and from some of my favorite plants. However, we must proceed with the seeds which we got currently since not everything will happen as it is planed out, especially with the living plants.
Professor Tom Michaels and I will continue our hydroponics salad table project with the second generation seeds, to verify the validity of our seeds selection, for productivity. And this time, I will plant 30 different varieties from three previous populations (Philosopher, Freedom, and Morton) and 2 varieties for checks (dear tongue and outrageous, which have been proved to be successful.)
The procedure is almost same as the previous one. So, I will just briefly summarize and mention some of the changes that I have made. However, if any of you are curious and want to follow what I did, you can reference the following blog entry (http://dayswithlettuce.blogspot.com/2014/09/introduction-hydroponics-lettuce-salad.html).
This time, instead of using the tags of the same color for all the population, I color-coded as the following:
-pink for Philosopher's (PH)
-blue for Freedom's (FR)
-yellow for Morton's (MOR)
-white for checks

And here is the tip for placing a seed into a net pot. Instead of using forceps, I used a back tip of a ball point pen to make three holes on the perlite inside the net pots. Then, I simply dropped each seed into a hole. Yes, this is easier than holding onto those forceps!
Also, more firm plastic caps were used this time to cover the net pots in the greenhouse, instead of the plastic sheets.