We’re still cruising through summer. Steady as she goes. Lettuce output the past couple years has generally been poor during the months of July and August, but whatever we’re doing this year is working well, as output has remained fairly steady even during the hottest part of the year. We started the year on a 12-week cycle: 4 weeks as seedlings indoors, followed by 8 weeks outside in the garden. Back in mid-July, we reduced the garden time by 2 weeks (so 6 weeks outside vs. 8), as the lettuce was getting a bit long in the tooth after 8 weeks outside at that time of year. We anticipate upping the outside time back to 8 weeks later in the fall…. and to allow for that, we doubled our weekly sowing amount for a couple weeks recently.
Hoping to get an exhaust fan installed in our tomato house during the month of September, so that we can officially, for real put poly endwalls up and have it all be sealed. We’re hoping to power said fan with solar panels and a battery bank. We’ll see how that goes. This solar experiment, if it goes ok, could be a gateway to powering a number of farm stuff over the long term. We could get the lettuce house sealed and ventilated, maybe move our microgreens to a shipping container (ie move the grow room from our spare bedroom to a building external to the house)… get a walk-in cooler setup somewhere. We’ve even talked about playing with hydroponic lettuce vs. soil-grown. A number of possibilities.
Weather tomorrow looks awesome… high of 89 and sunny. Hope everyone is doing well. Come out and see us if you’re in the area!