I wrote back at the end of August about building your own self-wicking garden container. I set mine up in my kitchen bay window and planted a variety of things. Some worked out better than others so I'd thought I'd share.
First, the spinach worked but I think I chose a bad variety. It was very leggy and bolted quickly, not a great amount of actual spinach leaves for cooking. I'll do more research on spinach varieties and try to find one that grows better for cooking with.
Second were the lentils. They grew great on the chicken wire trellis that I installed in the bin, but they never formed any bean pods. I gave it 90 days and didn't see a single pod. So that didn't work out.
Next was a mixture of lettuce, arugula, cabbage, radishes, and beets. The radishes, cabbage, and arugula never really matured. The lettuce did okay but not great. I got one harvest from it.
What did incredibly well though were the beets. Not so much for the beet root itself but the beet greens. They were incredible. I had as many beet greens as I could handle for smoothies and sautéed greens. The beet plants closest to the window also produced a small size root that I will use in a salad. I will definitely grow beets again using this method.
The only other thing I learned was to watch for fruit flies. I ended up getting an infestation which started to irritate me. I could have tried to trap them but with nothing really growing well except for the beets, I decided to just take the bins outside for the winter. I'll try them again indoors once we get a deep freeze to kill the fruit flies and anything else in the soil that needs to be killed.
I'm sorry I don't have pictures to show you. I thought I took some before I pulled the beets but they are not showing up in my photo album. I'll do a better job next time of documenting what I grow.
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