Winter Garden

In an attempt to use up some of the older seeds I decided to try out an indoor garden this winter. I planted butterhead and loosehead lettuce, radishes, arugula and basil in late September for a January harvest. They grew under the fluorescent lights in our basement and despite all the work it took it was really fun! It gave me something to do the winter months in which there typically isn't to much gardening going on and it was really fun getting to eat some fresh homegrown greens in the winter. It also gave me a sense of what to plant in the the vegetable bed in the spring. My favorite plant out of the five I tried was the Butterhead lettuce. It has a fantastic crunch to it, beautiful ruffled leaves with deep purplish highlights and compact growth. I would advise against growing Loosehead lettuce, for at least in my hybrid it had next to no crunch, its growth was not at all compact and was really slow growing. I currently still have one Butterhead lettuce plant left and am planning on eating it some time in February to give it some more time to grow. As a whole I had great success with the older seeds with the one exception being onions. I tried planting them from seed in January to give them the 8-10 weeks they need before transplanting outside and did not get any to sprout. So I took this opportunity to do my first official germination test of the old seeds! More about this is above.