Friday was a low-motivation day. Some issues at home (not with the bf) have led to me doing very little work-work this week, and they affected my motivation on this last regular work day of the week. After three scattered meetings over the course of 5 hours and doing nothing but read the news or Fa’Bo’ between them, I went to take a nap. I got up at 4:00 and decided that, since I wasn’t going to do work, I might as well start what I had chosen to be my big weekend task: Redoing the hydroponics.
With the pandemic, we cut down grocery shopping, which meant we would be out of vegetables towards the end of our 5–6 week cycle. So, I wanted to try to re-start the indoor gardening. But, nothing was growing. Like, seeds weren’t even germinating, despite trying different companies. So, I thought I would eliminate one of the variables: Maybe the soil was bad, let’s try hydroponics.
After getting all my water-testing chemicals and the hydroponic nutrients, I tested the household water: pH was 8.2. That is way too alkaline for plants, which prefer stuff more neutral (7.0) when in soil, and more acidic (5.5–6.5) in hydroponics. Still, I’d already gotten the hydroponic stuff, so testing ensued. Since August, I’ve grown a variety of things, but the tomatoes (from seeds from the cherry tomatoes I got at Costco) just completely took over my metal rack area, and then I planted a single Queensland blue squash and that just took over from the tomatoes. It took the fun out of things when I couldn’t reach other stuff and the squash and tomatoes blocked all the light from other plants.
So, over the last week or three, we’ve been planning to tear out everything and start over, better planned, now that I have a better idea of what I’m doing and space requirements for certain things. There is one rack for 6 – not 25 – tomato plants, and one squash, which we will pay better attention to and guide the vines where we want. I also put some beans there in ONE pot and we’ll see what happens. Basically, that rack is the “vine” rack.
On another rack, on the bottom in big bins, are spots for 6 broccoli (which we’ll stagger, so only 3 are there now), and 8 peppers. Above that are smaller bins for varieties of basil and for some lettuce and spinach. Above that are the same smaller bins for re-growing scallions from their bottoms (regrow in about 4 weeks to something useable) and for other herbs, like mint, parsley, oregano, thyme, and dill. The dill and parsley staggered because I only use dill for pickles and I only use parsley for one dish.
What I thought was going to be maybe a 2-hour job ended up being 8 hours. So, I’m kinda glad I got it done when I was unmotivated to do anything else. Though, that also meant I didn’t get a distinct time to exercise, though certainly at some points during that effort, it seemed like exercise! Also, another good thing about doing it was that I was actually focused on that instead of the other stuff going on, and it meant that I wasn’t even tempted to snack! I ate half of what’s on the infographic for this post after about 8pm.
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