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So uhh... I grew this. It started off awfully, as you can see, because I was very negligent of them. I was putting in the effort I should have, or any at all really.
In the first photo, after weeks, this was the only growth I had seen out of these seedlings, and they were dying. I was going to take two of them to "my guy", but he wasn't around, so I let them sit out and die on my dashboard of my car since I just didn't care. The remaining two stayed with my basil seedling and after replacing the nutrient solution with a much weaker concentration, they started to do really well.
They lived but they were growing very slowly. This is because my light had to be moved away from them to accommodate the growing basil seedling. Since it wasn't doing great, I tossed it out because I valued my lettuce more. Now the light could be a couple inches away from it rather than several.
They stayed at the size of the second picture for I think two months. They weren't going anywhere fast. I had been moving their raft in and out of the water every night because I thought that was all the aeration the roots needed rather than buying a $15 air pump for the airstone that I already had. Their roots never grew out past the bottom of the 1.5" coconut husk plugs. I finally bought that airstone, and within two weeks, they went from about the size in the second picture to the size in the third and fourth.
I used a paper towel roll as comparison since I figured it was the most common household item. They're still fairly juvenile romaine lettuce plants that haven't filled out like the mature ones at the grocery stores, but I decided to just eat them and start a larger batch to work on sometime soon.
As you can see, the older leaves near the bottom are dying, and they always were through this whole process. I don't know if it was a nutrient deficiency or a sign that they needed air circulation.
This took about four months which is absolutely awful by almost any standards.
