Growing Lettuce Indoors

2024 Author: Gavin MacAdam | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:38

Those gardeners who are familiar with growing vegetables in indoor conditions do not have to miss fresh greens and vitamin salads in winter. Especially if varieties of lettuce grow on the windowsills. Fresh greens can be harvested already two to three weeks after sowing, and with the right approach, you can arrange a real vegetable container to harvest without interruption for a long period

Conditions for successful salad growing

First of all, when choosing a variety for growing lettuce in indoor conditions, you need to pay attention to the fact that the variety is not headed, but leafy. It is best to choose watercress, lettuce for these purposes. The first crop of watercress can be harvested as early as two weeks after sowing. And early ripening varieties of lettuce take up to 25 days.

Another important condition for which the salad is picky is lighting. Their seeds sprout quickly, and therefore you need to immediately take care of providing them with a place near the windowsill or arranging additional lighting under artificial light sources.

Among other things, you should stock up on nutrient substrates. Plants will thrive in the soil mixture left behind from these ingredients:

• sod land;

• humus;

• peat.

All components are taken in equal proportions. Compost is also used instead of peat.

Sowing watercress at room conditions

Watercress grows well at temperatures around + 10 … + 15 ° C, so it will give a pretty good result when grown near a cool window. Here the plant will be even more comfortable than near a heat source, because its greenery does not tolerate dry air poorly. For this reason, it will be helpful to regularly spray the lettuce with water.

The culture is convenient because it is successfully grown in shallow containers. The soil mixture can even be poured into saucers about 3-4 cm thick. The seeds are laid out on the surface of the substrate, and then crushed with earth a little more. After this, watering must be carefully watered. It is better to moisten the soil mixture by spraying.

Seeds germinate quickly, so containers with crops are immediately placed in a well-lit place. If some of the emerged seedlings are in shade, the "beds" will need to be periodically rotated so that the plants do not stretch out.

Care consists in regular watering. If the soil is allowed to dry out, the greens become rough and bitter.

How to grow lettuce indoors

Lettuce also requires good lighting, but keep your garden out of direct sunlight. Also, the plant does not tolerate extreme heat and dry land. In such conditions, the leaves begin to coarse, acquire a bitter taste, and if the situation is not corrected, the harvest will be lost.

Grow lettuce in deeper containers than watercress. For sowing this vegetable, boxes, deep bags, pots are used. Planting is carried out by the belt method in grooves about 1.5 cm deep with row spacing of about 7-8 cm. After that, the seeds are crushed with soil mixture through a coarse sieve. Care consists in watering. Moistening the soil is carried out from a spray bottle so as not to erode the soil and not to burrow the seeds.

When seedlings appear, too thick seedlings must be thinned out. There must be a distance of at least 6 cm between the plants.

Lettuce does not like drying out the soil, but waterlogging is also harmful to it. The optimal watering regime is 2 times a week.

To arrange a green conveyor in your house, you need to acquire two beds. One is used to produce lettuce seedlings, and plants are dived into the second. By the time the harvest is consumed, a new batch of seedlings of vitamin greens will ripen.