Salad Time

Aquaponic salad

One of the best things about indoor Aquaponic gardening is that salad is always available and just a few feet away. Plus, there's no dirt or bugs! I've been cutting the leaves off the lettuce with a small pair of scissors and tossing them directly into the colander for a quick rinse. Using scissors must seem like a pretty funny idea, for non-gardeners. But, the scissors make a clean cut, which promotes leaf regeneration. One benefit is less re-planting of baby lettuce, which means less work for me.

I've been growing most of my lettuce in expanded shale and have observed that my plant roots grow more horizontally than vertically, as with soil-based gardening. When I added the young lettuce transplants, a lot of their energy was spent establishing a root system. Now that the lettuce roots are established, the plants can easily uptake nutrients from the water, and seem to re-leaf quickly. But, so far, not as quickly as baby lettuce grows, and not all the cut lettuce leaves grow back.

Aquaponic gardening requires a continuous cycling of planting and harvesting both young and old plants for maximum yield and to balance water chemistry. The fish, providing the fertilizer for the plants, depend on the plant roots to clean the water. So, if I pull all of the plants out at the same time, the absence of an established root system would cause a spike in ammonia, which could harm the fish.

Lettuce will keep growing until the temperature gets hot enough for it to "bolt" or produce seeds (instead of leaves). At that point, the lettuce gets bitter. I read in the Farmer's Almanac that lettuce will bolt in the late summer when the temperature at night stays hot. Evidently, lettuce likes to cool down at night. Since it's only April, and not early August, the threat of bolting is a long way off. For now, it's salad time!