On Sat, 01 Mar 2003 17:03:56 -0500, Minteeleaf
wrote:



Pat, what containers did you grow the lettuces in?
How deep, how wide? How many times a day did you water,
& what varieties?

We had a stroke of really good luck and found a huge pile of
big black plant pots at a dumpster - not pretty ones,
functional ones. We had lots for ourselves, plus enough to
share with a gardening friend here. There are two sizes:
large and VERY large. I used them.

The larger ones are probably about two feet deep and about
18" in diameter. I don't think you need most of that depth
though, especially not for lettuce. I put pieces of window
screen over the holes so the soil wouldn't wash out (I
always do that with potted plants). That way, you don't
need rocks in the bottom.

In the absence of finding containers, I think I'd use
5-gallon buckets if I had any, or laundry baskets lined with
a trash bag. Laundry baskets lined with a trash bag should
work pretty well. Storage containers (if cheap or if you
already have them) will also work well. Anything really.
For lettuce, you should be able to use much smaller pots.
I think even a gallon-milk jug (bottom half thereof) would
grow leaf lettuce OK.

We are also able to buy a pick-up truckload of
spent-mushroom-soil very economically and I used that to
fill the containers. It's great for container gardening -
light and fluffy and all the plants thrived, almost beyond
belief - everything did extremely well in it.

If you are having a sizeable container garden, I'd think
(unless you can find mushroom soil or something similar)
that the cheapest way to fill the pots would be to buy 40-lb
bags of top soil, and mix it about equally with peat moss
and sand to lighten it up. If you buy potting soil, you'll
go broke, besides potting soil alone is too heavy for
containers, IMHO. You can buy a big compressed bag of peat
moss pretty cheaply at garden centers and sand is cheap.
The 40-lb bags of top soil are pretty reasonable too.

I didn't need any fertilizer because the mushroom soil is
very like composted manure (has a lot of composted manure in
it), but with the sand/moss/top soil mix, you'd probably
need to feed your plants occasionally. I think any balanced
plant food (or even manure tea) would work. Miracle Grow
isn't organic, but it is cheap and it works.

I watered the pots every day (after things had grown a
little)- but it was easy, easy. There's an outdoor tap on
the deck, so I just used the hose to water. I bought a
watering wand, to attach to the hose end, so I could put the
water exactly where I wanted it. The watering wand is well
worth the money (about $5.99, IIRC).

Watering once a day was fine except for the Yellow Pear
cherry tomato. It grew to be a HUGE plant and required
watering three times a day in its black pot so we took a
large Rubbermaid storage container (22 gallons) and punched
holes in the bottom and transplanted the tomato plant - by
then about 5 feet tall - to the Rubbermaid container. We
had a tomato cage stuck in the container, for support. Then
it was OK. (I hadn't intended to grow the Yellow Pear
tomato in a container, it just sort of happened.)

Varieties - I didn't keep track last year (I will this
year).

I'll tell you what I remember though...Peppers - we bought
little plants, there were green peppers plus hot peppers,
variety unknown. I grew Black-Seeded Simpson lettuce, also
Tom Thumb (baby Boston-type), also a romaine. Bok choy:
bought the seeds at Agway, they just said 'bok choy'.
Beets: I think they were Early Wonder. Basil - bought it
as a plant.

Swiss Chard - the variety was Fordhook Giant. The Swiss
chard, even growing in a pot, btw, stayed happy and
productive until the temperature hit 12 F in November.

I pulled the lettuce out of direct sun into the shaded part
of the deck (part of our deck is roofed) on the hottest
days. During hot spells, I just left it there in the shade
for several days at a time. It did quite well like this.

Otherwise, the answer for lettuce, IMHO, is succession
plantings each week during spring and again in August for
fall growing - but not in mid-summer. It doesn't like
really hot weather.

You can plant lettuce around things: around beets, for
instance. A beet seed encircled by lettuce seeds. This
makes a good use of the space. I'll also do this with
carrots and lettuce this year. And of course, you can eat
beet green thinnings - they're the best green of all, IMHO.

Mintee, if you can get hold of a library book entitled
'Square Foot Gardening' by Mel Bartholomew, a lot of his
ideas are adaptable to container gardening. You can space
things VERY closely in containers, because they're having
such ideal conditions. There's a website too:

http://www.squarefootgardening.com

I found that cabbage moths did find the plants in containers
and they ate the collards and some of the bok choy (we'd
already had a lot of the bok choy ourselves). This year,
I've bought floating row cover (Reemay) and I'll cover my
cabbage family plants with this in an attempt to foil the
cabbage moths. I bought it at either Gardens Alive or
Mellingers, I can't remember which. (URLs are the obvious
ones in each case.) I had no other insect pests at all in
the container garden.

That's about it, I think. Have fun with it!

Ooops, I see now that you were specifically asking about
lettuce - well ... you'll probably have more info here than
you wanted... 'cause I've written about other things too.
Oh well. Better too much info than too little.

Pat
--
CLICK DAILY TO FEED THE HUNGRY
United States: http://www.stopthehunger.com/
International: http://www.thehungersite.com/