My lettuce got fried after just 3 days on the balcony

Last week I stuck some romaine starts out on my south-facing balcony after hardening them off for 2 days. By day 3 they looked like crispy brown paper. I think the afternoon sun plus the concrete reflection just nuked them. My neighbor in the unit below has a huge shade cloth setup that she swears by, but I don't want to spend $40 on one for a tiny 4x6 space. Has anyone found a cheap way to filter out the harshest midday rays without killing your whole budget or blocking all the light?

2 comments

2 Comments

james66116d ago

Hold on, aren't you overthinking this a bit? You bought a 6 dollar pack of lettuce starts and they got crispy. Big deal. That's like 4 bucks down the drain. For the cost of a shade cloth you could buy a dozen more packs of romaine and just treat them like a rotating crop. Stick em in a spot that only gets morning light, or just accept that south facing balconies in summer are basically pizza ovens. Not every dead plant is a crisis that needs a DIY engineering project. Sometimes the ground just don't cooperate and you move on.

river_bailey215d ago

Hold on, you honestly think $4 worth of lettuce is nothing to be bummed about? A whole pack of romaine starts is a tiny garden in itself, and watching it turn into compost in 72 hours stings way more than a trip to the grocery store. A rotating crop of lettuce on a south balcony means you're just feeding the sun a continuous buffet. You'd spend the whole summer buying new plants every week, which adds up to way more than the cost of one shade cloth over time. A few bucks down the drain every week is still money down the drain.