Research report: media evaluation for bench-top salad greens

I'm famous! 

At least if you can navigate through the Cooperative Extension website and find the section on fruit and vegetable research reports.  You can see the recent report evaluating media for bench-top production of salad greens here and I've added it to the Research Reports page.

Field Day: Media Trial

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!

What happens when the media is frozen:

You have to use a pick ax to get it out. 

The fall plan for wintergreen's

This past week it sometimes feels like fall.  Partly because I choose to wear shirts with actual sleeves, but mostly because I planted the first crop of spinach, lettuce and mizuna for the fall!  In the coming months I will be doing three major projects to expand on the data I already have and to address some new questions.

First I'll be looking at growth rate of greens throughout the fall, early winter and early spring.   This will be the same as the growth rate study I did during spring 2011, but instead of looking at the growth rate of ten varieties of greens I'll only be following three. (For more on good old spinach, lettuce and mizuna see here).  I'll plant these three greens eight times in the next two months and take leaf length and harvest weight measurements throughout their lifespan.  

Next, I'm going to try using different types of media to see how they affect yield.  So far I've grown everything in super nice, but very expensive compost.  What about less expensive compost?  Or potting soil (which is what growers often have on hand)?  Or potting soil with slow release fertilizer?  Again I'll be using spinach, lettuce and mizuna and again I'll be measuring their growth rate using leaf length and harvest weight.

Last, (and most exciting!) I'm going to do a variety trial of 25 different greens that are cool weather tolerant.  Some will be greens I grew last spring like tokyo bekana, tatsoi and outrageous lettuce.  But there are going to be a lot of new varieties that I've never heard of before like tatsoi savoy, wasabina and white russian kale.  And of course vitamin green, which seems to be what most people want to know about anyway.