Started with https://aggressivelyorganic.com/ kit (pods, light, nutrients, etc.) Found some issues. (See timeline) Moving towards recycled glass peanut butter jars, 3" net pots, and experimenting with moving away from the peat seed starter pucks to either rockwool or pumice beads.
Lettuce varieties for indoor growing: (Seeds from Aggressively Organic did poorly, so now I am using)
- Generic red romaine lettuce that I had
- Little Gem Romaine (available in this seed pack on Amazon. This is often recommended for indoor growing.
Baby bok choy in a 4" starter filled with coconut coir potting mix. Started Feb 25th.
- Eros smaller bell peppers, supposed to be good for containers, which I grow in.
- Cupid the red pepper baby bell pepper to Eros' orange pepers.
- Sakura F1 (Johnny's Seed) -- medium-sized, "Salats", recommended by Curtis Stone for greenhouse growing.
- Sun Gold - I grow these every year. Great cherry tomatoes, indeterminate, sweet. Lots of fruit to harvest.
- Black Cherry (Johnny's Seed) - recommended by Curtis Stone, as well. Darker purple-to-black.
- New Girl (Johnny's Seed hybrid) - I always grown "Early Girl" to get sandwich tomatoes as quickly as possible for our short growing season. But I had some issues with my Early Girl plant last year. This new variety from Johnny's is supposed to be improved.
- Indigo Cherry Drops (Johnny's Seed) - found these through research, as well. Supposed to be good for hydro and greenhouse growing.
- Sunburst - "pattypan" summer squash, recommended by Curtis Stone. Going to try to grow them as compactly as possible.
- Butterscotch butternut squash.
- Honey Bear F1 acorn squash hybrid, very small. Hoping these grow well.
- Tetsukabuto (Johnny's Seed) -- these have blown up in popularity. A hybrid between butternut squash and kabocha squash. Needs a butternut squash for pollination, which is why I'm also growing butternut squash. Really excited to use this for making curry, etc!
Red Russian kale, some seeds I already have
- Whatever I already have in a self-watering planter, if they survived the winter. They had very little fruit last year due to poor placement and issues with watering. I plan to double or even triple the amount of strawberry plants I'm growing this year and locate them vertically stacked on a south-facing wall.
- Jan 8: First set of lettuce + herb seeds (from Aggressively Organic) failed.
- Jan 24: Second set of lettuce seeds started
- Feb 10: Had a small leak in one of the aggressively organic pods, which caused several cardboard pods to soak up water and topple over. Started experimenting with recycled jar growing instead of Aggressively Organic Pods.
- Feb 10: removed leaky pod, moved things around.
- Feb 12: (3.5 weeks since starting seeds)
- Feb 21: Lettuce doing well. Soon will be ready for "first cut" harvest.
- Mar 3: Started Cilantro and Basil seeds in rockwool plugs as an experiment. Planning to grow these indoors, in pods.
- Mar 4: Started Cupid and Eros peppers indoors.
- Mar 11: Basil and one of the cilantro seeds have sprouted. Waiting for them to grow deep enough roots before I move them to a nutrient pod. Peppers haven't sprouted yet.
- Mar 14: Peppers are just starting to come up. None of the basil or cilantro have roots coming out yet. (At that point. I'll transfer them to hydro jars)
- Mar 15: Cilantro and basil plants are in the jars now.
- Mar 19: Peppers replanted in 4" pots; some of them died under the lights. I might need to buy more peppers from a nursery. I also started tomato seeds: Sungold, Sakura, Indigo Cherry, Black Cherry, and New Girl.
- "Greenhouse" shelf that I have had for ~5 years - don't have a link. In the future, I hope to replace this with an Amazonbasics chrome kitchen rack, which appears to be far sturdier than the flimsy greenhouse shelf I have.
- Cheap grow light: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01IVQ96KY/ that only has red and blue LEDs -- I recommend getting true white LEDs not just red + blue LEDs. The Aggressively Organic light is true white LEDs. This light was cheap, though, so I'm working with it.
- 4" square pots for starters (tomatoes, peppers, etc that will get transplanted outside): https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00TERXHA0/
- "Grow bags" from Amazon - https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0746KXXYR/ -- in the past, I built up a collection of around 15 of the home depot 5-gallon buckets with holes drilled in them, for growing tomatoes and peppers. But, UV is slowly breaking these buckets down and they're technically not food safe. Going to try one pack of these "grow bags" this year and then replace the buckets if they work well. They're cheaper than 5 gallon buckets.
- Grodan 1" x 1" Starter Plug Rockwool Hydroponic Grow Media - https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01IKMJNG6/ for starting seeds and as "growing medium" in indoor hydro setup.
- small covered seed starter tray A covered seed starter tray that was better-sized for my 12" LED lights. Probably not necessary. I did get a decent batch of red romaine seeds with it, though.
- Worm Factory DS4BT 4-Tray Worm Composting Bin finicky and prone to fruit flies and pest infestations, even when sequestered in my constant-temperature basement, I've been attempting to do worm composting for almost a year now. I don't think it is worth the time/labor investment compared to outdoor compost piles.
- FCMP Outdoor IM4000 Tumbling Composter, 37 gallon Black I similarly think that tumbling compost bins like this are too much work and don't pay off. Prefer compost piles. I've had this model for ~2 years now. Has a tendency to either hold too much liquid or dry out completely and stop composting.
- Bosmere Haws Plastic Outdoor Long Reach Watering Can, 1.3-Gallon/5-Liter The world's best watering can, hand's down.