A Lettuce Grow Farmstand Update
Well fam, we've been growing in our Lettuce Grow Farmstand for over a year now, so I feel like I've got my sealegs and can give a more thorough review of the Farmstand itself.
I haven't had to purchase greens from the grocery store or market in over a year, which is a great thing! If you recall (no pun intended) in my original post about the Lettuce Grow Farmstand, one of my main motivators for growing my own produce was because of my apprehension with store-bought produce due to frequent contamination-related recalls.
So the burning questions I'm sure you're all wondering: allow me to answer.
Does it really only take 5 minutes per week for maintenance?
Eh, no. The maintenance time listed on the Lettuce Grow website is a little misleading. While it does take far less time than traditional gardening, it takes me more than 5 minutes per week. On average, I would say it probably takes around 15 minutes a week, and on full harvest weeks, it takes about a half hour. On weeks where I'm doing a full reset (taking the entire thing apart and cleaning it), it takes about an hour. They recommend a full reset once every few months. So all in all, it takes a very short time to maintain--far less time than traditional gardening and less time than making a trip to the grocery store to buy salad fixings.
My maintenance schedule is checking water levels and topping off when necessary (usually once a week or once every two weeks, depending on how big the plants are), checking the PH levels and adding PH-down (we have hard water), adding the two parts of the nutrients, scanning the plants and Farmstand for pests (there usually aren't any), and snipping off browning or otherwise unhealthy-looking leaves (decaying plant matter attracts some pests like spider mites). On full harvest weeks, we pull everything out, wash it up, and put it in containers in the fridge with some dry paper towel (an earth-friendly, sustainable bamboo paper towel is found here or a reusable bamboo paper towel can be found here.) And on full reset weeks, we do a full harvest, tear down the farm stand, and take it outside for a good scrubbing and cleaning and then set it up again with new seedlings.
Are you saving any money with it?
Yes! I purchase new seedlings about once every six weeks to two months. We use the "cut and come again" harvest method for the first several harvests and when we're ready to replace the crop with a new seedling, we harvest the entire plant. Seedlings cost $2.50 each, so to fill my 36-plant Farmstand (the biggest size they have), a full seedling order comes to $90. That calculates to between $11 and $15 a week on the crops I'm growing (primarily kale, spinach, multiple types of lettuce, bunching onions, chives, basil, and arugula) and my yield is far greater than what I would purchase in the store.
What are the harvests like?
Abundant! I would highly, highly recommend you also get the Glow Rings™ offered by Lettuce Grow, as they work immensely better than the grow lights we had purchased from Amazon. They are a little pricey, but they pay off in the long run. I'll show you two pictures; the first is our very first harvest from our Farmstand. How cute! This was a cut and come again harvest. These were grown with the Amazon grow lights.
The second is our most recent harvest. It was a full harvest of four lettuce plants and a cut and come again harvest of some kale. These crops were grown with the Lettuce Grow Glow Rings™.
Another great thing about the harvests is that this produce lasts much longer than the store-bought. That's because by the time the produce from the store gets to your home, it's probably been cut from the plant for a week, so it's already lost a lot of its nutrients and longevity. I've noticed our lettuce lasts at least twice as long as the store-bought kind, and I'm having to discard and compost much less often. It just doesn't spoil as quickly.
Do you prefer indoor or outdoor growing?
This one I can't have much of an opinion on which is better because we exclusively grow indoors. I've never grown anything outdoors in this stand. So my preference is definitely indoors, and the benefits are that there are fewer pests (insects, birds, squirrels) trying to eat my food and the climate is much more easily controlled. I've seen Lettuce Growers lose crops when growing outdoors because they had a heatwave or a cold snap, and growing indoors I just don't have that problem.
However, there are some drawbacks to growing exclusively indoors. The first is that there are some crops I can't grow as well. Certain berries and plants like cucumbers and zucchini are recommended to be grown outdoors, so it limits my produce growth to mostly leafy greens and herbs. But that's fine in my case, because that's what I intend it for. We grow tomatoes, blueberries, and raspberries traditionally in our backyard. Water maintenance can also be a bit tricky for indoor growers. For a long time, we filled a stock pot with water with the laundry room faucet and then hauled it over to the Farmstand and filled it up and made several trips back and forth until the reservoir was full. Thankfully, we purchased a hose that we can attach to the spigot and now it's much easier, but for some indoor growers, they may not have access to a spigot that fits a hose.
What about pests?
Again, I can only speak from my experience growing exclusively indoors. We have had one infestation, and it was spider mites. (They look horrifying if you put them under a microscope, by the way.) This infestation was due to operator negligence in our learning curve. We hadn't been checking the farmstand regularly for pests, and they're so tiny that we didn't notice them until they were infesting the whole stand. We ended up having to completely reset our farmstand during that infestation and we also lost all our crops.
Now, after that hard lesson, we examine every new seedling before we put them in the stand and we do regular pest checks--just small inspections several times a week. We also clean up old leaves and decaying plant matter because those things attract spider mites. And we allow the friendly spiders who have made their home near the farmstand to stay and help us if there are any unwanted pests.
Some growers use neem oil, but since we also grow food that we feed our tortoise and our birds, we choose not to use any sort of pest deterrent at all.
Is it something you can use to feed a family, or is it more a hobby?
This question came up the other day in a Lettuce Grow group I'm in on Facebook. I was surprised at how many growers were saying it was a hobby! I mean, it's great if you're having fun doing it, but its fullest potential isn't being reached. On our 36-plant stand, which is the largest one, we can feed our entire family all the leafy greens we need. I still purchase broccoli, zucchini, cucumbers, carrots, sweet potatoes, etc. from the grocery store, but it 100% feeds us all our salads, sandwich toppings, and egg scramble veggies that we need. I'm actually considering a second farmstand in the future so we can have even more to share with family members and an alternate stand for when we do our resets. The drawback with the single stand is when we do a full reset, we go a couple weeks without new harvests as the seedlings are getting established, so a second stand would help in the rotational logistics of harvests.
Overall, I'm so pleased we made this investment last year. It's incredible knowing where much of my produce comes from. I also like to meditate with the Farmstand (the water pump makes a peaceful sound of water falling), interacting with it energetically and imbuing it with magic. ✨
Charlie Nichols is the founder of WHE and a staff contributor. Charlie studied Journalism & Mass Communication, Marketing, and Psychology at Madison College in Madison, Wisconsin. She has practiced witchcraft for over two decades and is a certified spiritual empowerment coach, a certified ethical psychic, and a certified crystal healer. Charlie lives on the shores of Lake Michigan in Wisconsin, USA with her partner, daughter, and animal companions.
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