Too many simple carbs:
As a person of south indian origin, rice is our staple food. Our family used to eat everything with rice. Also being a vegan, we our meals were mostly carb loaded. As you know having too many simple carbs is dangerous. It is the main cause of diabetes and cardiovascular diseases. This inspired us to improve the meals we had. Long story short, we tried reducing the amount of rice by having more salads. Once we found great dressings like this olive oil vinaigrette, olive oil sesame seed dressing and maple vinaigrette it was not tough to make the switch.
Getting organic greens a hassle:
The fact that we are eating the lettuce and spinach raw, we decided it is better to have these organic. We had some trouble having these things available in store. If we buy a lot of supply, something the green were getting damaged too.
Can we grow it ourselves ?
So we were inspired to try growing lettuce ourselves. We figured that should be economical too. The only problem was that we live in a cold place, so we can't really grow it outside. The only solution was to grow it indoors if we want to grow it.
We didn't have the experience before, but was still excited to give it a try.
The setup:
It seems to grow it indoors, the light we from the windows is not sufficient. So we need to buy a grow light for that. I bought a Mars Pro Sp 150 light. It was a good light with the accessories to hang it easily.
Next I headed over to the home microgreens store to buy the soil, containers and seeds for growing. They have very helpful videos about how to plant and grow lettuce. These videos were very helpful to me in getting started. We planted them in a tray with holes in them (planting tray) and put them in another regular tray (watering tray). This way we can water it in the tray under and the roots from the top tray will absorb it. The seeds germinated in three days. We turn on the light around 7 am in the morning and then turn it off when we go to sleep around 10 PM at night. We water it once a day in the watering tray. After three weeks the lettuce was well grown and is ready for harvest.
Results:
I grew it in a small container to see how it grows. You can see the results for yourself below. It grew very well and now we are planning to grow in bigger containers so that we have enough supply for our fresh salads. Not only lettuce, we also want to grow herbs like cilantro, basil and mint.
Conclusion:
Once the initial setup is figured out, I am pleasantly surprised how easy it was to maintain them. If any of you are considering it, hope this shows how easy it is. Let me know if you grow something indoors or outdoors!
