Life Skills

How to Plant an Indoor Lettuce Cart in 5 Steps

A Convenient and Satisfying Addition to Your Salad Routine
Filed Under > Everyday

How to plant an indoor lettuce cart, Waiting on Martha

I’m not sure if you remember, but this time last year I was falling in love with growing herbs in my garden.  That love for gardening, the taste of fresh-picked greens, and the fulfillment from seeing something grow and prosper at my very fingertips has only doubled, as can be expected.  So this year, I set out to expand my home garden by learning how to plant an indoor lettuce cart.  

The idea of an indoor lettuce cart struck a chord with me; I loved the thought of cultivating some of my most-used vegetables in the kitchen at home, and the wheeling the cart up to my counter whenever I wanted to use them.  And the fact that it’s INDOORS helps make it possible to enjoy homegrown greens all winter long.  I was in love with the idea of just with a little snip-snip-snip, having homegrown spinach in my salads, arugula on my flatbreads, cabbage in my slaw and broccoli on my plate!  

I did a little research, and after buying this super convenient salad garden on wheels, I set out to plant the already-sprouted varieties with fresh soil and fertilizer.  I visited my local nursery and bought already-growing vegetables: spinach, red leaf lettuce, cabbage and broccoli.  But you can, of course, grow the lettuce from seed and a seed starting mix (one that’s gentle enough to grow the crops from seed).   I really wanted to do arugula since it’s one of my all-time favorites, but sadly the nursery didn’t have it when I looked. And I know broccoli may be a little ambitious this time around, but I’m willing to give it a shot! 

You’ll find that lettuce is a very low maintenance vegetable to grow, but it does need a lot of sun.  One of my favorite things about this lettuce cart is that I can fit a lot of vegetable varieties on it, and since lettuce can grow pretty close together, I don’t run the risk of overcrowding the sprouted plants.  Since we may still get another frost here in the A before it’s truly springtime, it’s nice to have this cart that I can wheel in and out of my garage to get optimal sunlight. 

Tell me friends, do you have plans to grow an indoor lettuce cart this year?  Find a few essentials as you get started on your own indoor lettuce cart in the scrolling widget, and read a step-by-step tutorial below!  Truly, MKR


P.S. We just added these amazing Organic Grow Kits in the shoppe! Get started with your lettuce cart with one of these…so fun! xo

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Scout Your Location

Stack-n-Grow Light System

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You want to find a place in your house that gets 12 hours of bright sunlight every day. For lettuce especially, a south-facing window is apparently best.  Try to find a place that won’t have any cold drafts or too much heat (and of course, away from curious furry friends!).  If you can’t find enough light from a window, you can grow your crops under special lights like these

Gather the Container, Soil & Seeds

Organic Seed Starter

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Next, you’ll want to find good containers for your crops.  Look for flat, shallow containers that allow for good drainage. 

For the soil, stay away from “potting soil” – it’s usually too rough/course in texture for growing your plants from seeds.  Instead, this organic seed starter works great. 

 

Plant the Varieties

3-Piece Garden Tool Set

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For those of you (like me) who bought their crops already-growing, transfer them into the containers with the seed starter mix.  Otherwise, moisten the soil and fill the containers a few inches with the mix.  Next, scatter the seeds about an inch apart.  Top them with a thin layer of planting mix. 

You’ll want the containers to maintain moisture, so you can cover them loosely with plastic wrap to create a greenhouse-effect.  Keep the seedlings moist but not overwatered.

Watch Their Growth & Trim If Necessary

Easy Grow Fertilizer

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Check the crops daily for signs of sprouts, and once they appear, you’ll want to remove the plastic cover.  Thin the seedlings out with a pair of scissors so that they have about an inch around them to grow.

As soon as the plants start to have their first set of true leaves, you can give them liquid fertilizer like this one. Watch their moisture level, and make sure the seedlings stay moist but don’t ever get drowned in too much water.  

Harvest Your Crops

Gold Scissors

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Indoor baby lettuce will be ready to be harvested after 3-4 weeks (it will be about 4″ tall). To harvest, cut the outer leaves first, trimming the base about an inch from the soil.  You’ll want to leave the rest of the leaves to grow a few days longer.  When the plant is completely harvested, you can plant another from scratch.

Photography, Rustic White for Waiting on Martha

The Tech & Tools We Use As a Team Every Day

Your Team Needs to be Using These Small Business Project Management Tools
Filed Under > Everyday

Small business project management tools, Waiting on Martha

If you’ve ever worked on a team, then you’ll know that it really does take a village to get the good work done.  And no matter the size of your team, the tools and processes you use to stay on track can be complete game-changers when tackling the never ending to-do lists.  Fortunately, we’re at a very exciting time for dashboards, apps and programs that promise higher productivity and increased efficiency, with convenience and organization at their core. 

At Waiting on Martha, Inc., we’re always trying to work smarter with small business project management tools, and when we find some that work—like, really work—for us, we want to shout their names from the rooftops.  With 12 employees and various bodies of work—the shoppe, the blog, The Well Code and more—it’s become vital to lean on technology to ensure that everything is getting done in the best way possible. 

Our discovery and implementation of Asana a little over a month ago has completely blown us away.  This dashboard allows for us to keep track of all work, separated in different teams and appropriate projects, and keep the back-and-forth out of the email inbox. Our organization, accountability and overall work flow has dramatically increased since devoting time to using it as a team, even, and maybe especially, for those of us on the team that are working remotely from Atlanta. 

In addition to Asana, I’m including a few other essential tools that the team uses on an everyday basis below.  Some you may have heard of, others that you have yet to use on your own team. It’s especially important to note as you’re looking at them that all of these tools are continually improving and evolving.  It might be worth your while to revisit the unpaid and paid offerings of ones you had ruled out before. 

I’d love to know what small business project management tools that you use everyday, and if there are any we should add to the list.  I’m a nerd with this kind of stuff, and I always like to find ways to do my job better!  Cheers, Kat

P.S. Do all of these tools get you in GSD mode?!  Dress your desk for the part with our top desk essentials HERE. xo 

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Asana

A project management dashboard that has changed our lives

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Oh my gosh.  Asana has absolutely changes our lives at Waiting on Martha, Inc.  I honestly don’t know how we functioned without this project management tool.  If you’re part of a small business, no matter if you’re a 2-person team or crew of 10+ people, you need to be using Asana.

First, this project management dashboard lets users keep track of work on separate teams.  We separate our teams based on different arenas. Since we have the shoppe, the blog, The Well Code and more pillars of work, we keep those projects visible to only those who they pertain to. 

We then create projects within each team, with corresponding tasks within each project.  Projects and tasks can be visible to only me, or I can assign others on the team to “follow” their progress and updates too. It’s all highly customizable, and it’s actually all a bit FUN to create and structure!  To-do list lovers, this is your tool. 

Maybe my favorite features about Asana is the actionable conversations within each task.  Sometimes I need to ping MKR with a quick question or request before completing something on my plate.  I’m able to keep this in a conversation within the task, with necessary files and attachments included too.  Game-changer.

We can also keep track of our results and progress a lot easier in Asana. This is especially important for us in quarterly initiatives, blog partnership ROI reporting, etc. and eliminates our inbox overflow tenfold. #thankgoodness

P.S. Asana has a GREAT app for work on-the-go, too. 

Google Calendar

Our standard color-coded team calendars

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Google Calendar is a free online calendar that is the easiest way for us to keep track of our editorial content for the blog, upcoming in-store events and promotions for the shoppe, any team members’ appointments, brand partnership calls, etc.

We have 3 different calendars (Editorial for the Blog, Shoppe work schedule for employees, and WOM All for meetings, appointments, events, birthdays, etc.) that different team members have access to.  And each separate calendar is color-coded up the wazoo, and we use this simple everyday tool in tandem with Asana.  We’ve realized how visually based we are as a team, and we appreciate the ease of access of Google Calendar for all of our scheduling needs. 

Planoly

A visual planner for Instagram

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Planoly is incredibly helpful for visually planning Instagram content.  We love this tool since we take our Instagram “grids” and the flow of images very seriously. Since Instagram can really become a time-suck, it’s nice to upload pre-planned content ahead of time to allow for more time in the present.

Planoly also works for Instagram Stories, a somewhat recent update that proves my point that you should revisit apps you may or may not have used in the past.  Anyway, if you have the “Swipe Up” option on your Instagram business account for Instagram Stories, you’ll know that it also is time-consuming to upload links with images on the go.  Planoly cuts down on the time it takes to get these posts up by allowing you to add the hyperlink with the image in the dashboard.  

Ahalogy

An integrative tool for amplifying our Pinterest strategy

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Ahalogy maximizes our Pinterest strategy, which is incredibly important to us as Pinterest continues to be our #1 traffic referrer to the blog.  We’re able to schedule pins for optimal posting times through the dashboard, using helpful “lift” words in our captions that Ahalogy recommends to boost our searchable content.  We can pin directly from the dashboard, and we can use a convenient bookmark widget to pull images from specific posts. 

This tool has proven to be a promising way to tackle ongoing Pinterest initiatives without taking up too much valuable time. 

Being an approved content publisher in Ahalogy has been a fruitful component of our editorial strategy, too.  We can partner with brands on sponsored content and use Ahalogy’s impressive content analysis and data tracking to make it a successful, mutually beneficial collaboration. 

CoSchedule

Our #1 editorial marketing calendar tool

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We’ve used this editorial marketing calendar for years now.  It’s linked directly to our blog via WordPress, and it allows for us to schedule Facebook and Twitter posts at triple or quadruple the speed than we could manually on each platform.  We’re able to promote current content as well as archive old content very efficiently.  

It’s also a great at-a-glance tool for us to keep track of editorial content that’s coming down the pipeline. And lastly, we’re able to see helpful insights and analytics about social shares from our original blog content (including Pinterest, too).

This tool works really well for small businesses like ours; we have several logins that let a few of us work in it simultaneously.  There are also great plans designed for professional marketing teams and agencies.  Beyond our standard editorial calendar and social sharing, there are many, many more features available at different price levels, including a social automation tool that uses data-driven intelligence to reshare your best messages to every major social network, workflow management that could be used in place of another dashboard, integrations with Evernote, Google Docs, Google Analytics and more.

Seriously, this tool is a game-changer!

Shopify

An easy-to-use ecommerce platform

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Shopify is an ecommerce platform that’s perfect for your business, whether you sell online, through social media, in-store or even out of the trunk of your car.  It features an incredibly easy platform to navigate, and it allows many of our team members to access our shoppe products, revenue insights and point-of-sale technology in an instant at our new brick & mortar store. The integration is one less thing we have to worry about, which is great. 

Shopify Support and the Shopify blog are also amazing.  The Shopify blog also offers countless resources that help us evolve our business strategy and grow every day.  I highly recommend checking it out! 

MailChimp

Our email marketing automation

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MailChimp is the world’s largest marketing automation platform, and for good reason.  It’s very, very simple to navigate, and it offers everyone from small ecommerce shops to big online retailers a chance to reach their customers and grow their business.  

MailChimp utilizes an easy “drag-and-drop” functionality that allows us to upload .jpg or .gif files and a hyperlink for direct traffic referrals back to the blog, shoppe and links around the web.  

And with the paid feature, you can automate optimal sending times, which is nice if you’re every wondering what time is really the best for open and click through rates. There are also many opportunities to segment your lists and strategically send customized messages. 

Featured image, Rustic White for Waiting on Martha

6 Easy Healthy Habits to Add to Your Daily Routine

Easy Ways to Improve Your Health Day In and Day Out
Filed Under > Everyday

Ritual Vitamins, Waiting On Martha

We have the tendency to dive right into wellness topics here—some well known and some not so well known. Everyday mind-and-body wellness is something both MKR and I are both passionate about learning and always improving upon.  But sometimes we need to take a step back and get back to the basics.  

See, I can talk to you for hours about purple plates, mushroom coffee and nootropics I’m currently trying at home, but I can also forget simple healthy daily habits just like the rest!  So today I’m slowing down and revisiting six easy things that we should all be doing every day.  

From changing the way we think about multi vitamins thanks to Ritual Vitamins, getting back to setting a bedtime, and to taking the time to get outside and enjoy some fresh air in those new kicks, these healthy habits should become so in-grained in your routine that they don’t even feel like to-do’s anymore.  That’s the goal, right?!  But let’s discuss; what do you struggle with every day?  

I can sometimes forget to drink enough water if I’m on the go or somewhere new.  I also forget the simple power of walking around the block outside to get the juices flowing and give my mind a breather!  Not to mention how often I find myself reaching for my phone even when I shouldn’t be.  Is there anything you’d add to this list?  Tell us about your healthy habits in the comments below.  Cheers, Kat

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Ritual Essential for Women

Ritual, $30/mo

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Tip #1: Nourish Your Body

By now we generally understand the importance of nourishing our body with whole foods, and avoiding processed foods while working to limit sugar and alcohol. Taking a daily multi vitamin is a good, and easy, way to round out whatever the body may still be deficient in. 

Ritual came out with a visionary vitamin that has the nine essential ingredients most women don’t get enough of out of their diets alone. It also doesn’t include the vitamins that most of us are pretty good on already, which is a new approach for many multi-vitamins.  By taking it everyday, you’ll likely experience an improvement in mood, more energy, anti-aging effects and healthier skin. 

Ora Organic Trust Your Gut Probiotics

Amazon, $39.99

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Tip #2: Prioritize Good Gut Health

Hippocrates once said “all disease begins in the gut.” And he was on to something; one of the most important functions of our body everyday is digestion. And believe me, when you have poor gut health, it affects your life dramatically. That’s why it’s important to focus on small steps to improve your gut health by fueling the good bacteria in there with a probiotic.  It’s an easy way to get started on the road to good, healthy digestion.  After reading this post, I was a changed woman when it came to prioritizing my gut health every day. 

Sony Alarm Clock Radio

Amazon, $22.45

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Tip #3: Set a Bed Time

Our bodies crave consistency.  And that includes a daily routine with a bed time and wake-up time. When those are at generally the same time every day, our body systems naturally fall into a pattern like clockwork. 

Creating a calming bedtime routine and target time to go “lights-off”, you’re setting your body up for a better night’s sleep, which will ultimately affect your next day and the one after that.  My advice: make it enjoyable; light some candles, turn on a diffuser with soothing essential oils like lavender and chamomile, drink some nighttime tea, and read a few pages in bed.  

Essentia 9.5 pH Drinking Water

Amazon, $31

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Tip #4: Hydrate, Hydrate, Hydrate

Drinking enough water every day is really crucial to staying healthy.  By hydrating properly, you’re helping to maintain the functions at every system in your body. A lot of times when we feel out of whack, drinking more water helps. 

Nike Zoom Pegasus 33 Sneaker

Nordstrom, $110

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Tip #5: Get Outside

During all of the hustle and bustle of everyday life, sometimes it can be easy to forget the power of getting outside to feel happier and healthier.  Consider ways you can soak up some Vitamin D from the sun and breathe in fresh air throughout your day and you won’t regret it…even if it’s for just a few minutes!

The Universe Has Your Back

Amazon, $24.99

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Tip # 6: Put the Phone Down!

There’s no denying it; we’re all too connected all of the time.  It’s affecting our everyday thoughts and health more than we may realize.  Don’t believe me? Check out this segment with Anderson Cooper discussing the hold that phones have over us. 

Instead, work to leave the phone in the other room, replacing it with books and activities like coloring and meditation that require you to be all there, in the moment. 

Featured image, Ritual 

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