Winter Gardening In Iowa and Prepping for Spring

This winter was hard on both my wife and myself. Very hard.
Not only did we have a high workload, but the weather was intensely lousy and oh so bloody cold.
So to mitigate it a little we set up a window garden to grow our favorite lettuce, called “bib lettuce” or “buttercrunch” the latter of which may be a brand. I’m not really a lettuce enthusiast but this stuff is really really good, it just melts on your tongue.
So last year we bought one in the store in a so called “living container” where the lettuce is grown on a small plug of soil with a nice root ball in the bottom center. The lettuce cost about $4 if I remember correctly. We ate most of the lettuce and then planted the remainder in the garden where it produced even more lettuce. We then let it seed and collected the mini-dandelion-like seeds for the following year.
Then, last month, we planted a lot of these parachute seeds in a 3′x6″ window planter and put them behind the couch which is right in front of a south facing window.
Now we have enough of the stuff to enjoy 2-3 great salads a week just by trimming it away. Quite a bit of food out of $4, and grown completely indoors under the light of the sun.
Sprouting Tomatoes, Weak Stems
The big problem with starting your tomatoes and other things from seed in an enclosed germinator is that they’ll not develop thick stems like they would outdoors.
The reason the stems thicken outside is mostly because of the wind. So the solution is to create wind inside the box.
So I came up with a novel solution. I set a small solar panel in the window (12v) and ran a wire to an old 12v computer fan glued to an old credit card which was set inside the container. Now an irregular wind blows through the sealed container every day as the sun lights up the panel with varying intensity.
One improvement I may make is to add a diode so it only conducts when there’s enough voltage. It may be that it will overheat the motor’s fine wire coils if there isn’t enough voltage to get the fan moving, I’m not sure.
There are a few ideas to get you green folks through the last stretch of Old Man Winter.