wintergreens media trial

Now that it's March and the days are getting longer the greens are growing really fast.  The benches are filling up and I am eating lots of salad.

I looked back at my original fall plan for wintergreens and realized I never once wrote about the media trial I outlined!  This trial ran successfully in the fall, so I'm doing it again to see if I get the same results in the spring.  

It's a pretty simple experiment: there are five media types in which I grow mizuna, lettuce and spinach.  I measure leaf length and harvest yield while the greens grow and use that data to compare growth rate at the end. 

Looking at the overhead shots of each green in each media type you get a pretty good idea of the results.  The pictures were all taken on the 4th of March when the greens were 26 days old.  The two composts and peat with osmocote fertilizer have very similar growth.   Sustane is an organic fertilizer (you can tell, it smells like chickens) but it doesn't do so well in this setting.  Sungro is the name of the peat I use.  It doesn't have any fertility in it and demonstrates pretty well that greens need nutrients to grow!