Seeds and seedlings 14 March 2009

This morning, I sowed most of the radishes and carrots (I decided it wasn’t worth risking the rare mixes on an experiment, so I am saving them to sow in a pot) and before heading out I did some thinking about the earliest greens.  I decided that since the ground is in a freeze-thaw cycle at this point, maybe it was worth experimenting with sowing some on ‘root days’ and some on ‘leaf days’ and then hoeing the ground (to give them a boost) and seeing if sowing on ‘root days’ provides good root development that helps them survive the freeze-thaw cycles.  So in addition to the radishes and carrots, I sowed a heap of greens – kale, chard, cress, purslane, mache/corn salad, mustard, turnip greens, and a couple of Asian greens I haven’t grown before (one is called “spinach mustard” but I don’t know if it’s really a mustard or just similar).  An arugula accidentally made its way into the pile, and I weeded it out of the stack.  It was only after I’d come inside and warmed up a tad that I realized it might have been an interesting experiment to see just how cold-hardy arugula really is.  One of the neighbors across the street came out onto his balcony (he was cold enough that he went back inside for a jacket) and looked around for a bit, and I saw him do a double-take when he realized someone was actually outside working, which I thought was quite funny.  I’m used to things like that; some years I’ve planted bulbs on days when the ground isn’t frozen but it’s cold enough to warrant a winter coat.  I like being outside when there aren’t many other people out, for whatever reason.  It makes it slightly easier to momentarily forget I live in a very urban area.  Plus, I just like the (comparable) quiet.

When I came back inside, I checked the seedlings for water needs and to see if anything new has sprouted.  There are more kohlrabis up (they have an extremely high germination rate this year!), and the lone okra seedling looks to have doubled in size just since I took that bad photo yesterday.  I checked the ground cherries, alpine strawberries, tomatoes, tomatillos, peppers/chiles, and other okras, but nothing looked to have sprouted yet.  On first glance it looked like none of the CowPot herbs had sprouted yet either, but upon a second look, I realized that the scallions were up!  There are several seedlings of ‘Evergreen Hardy Bunching’ and a smaller number of ‘Ishikura.’  A third look at the pots revealed that there were two seedlings of sweet Annie, two of the tiniest seedlings I’ve ever seen, each only about a centimeter tall so far, if even that.

This afternoon had passed on to ‘flower days’ and I sowed the flower seeds that need to be sowed earliest of all – the poppies (European and Californian), love-in-a-mist and other Nigella species, tassel flower (Emilia), clarkia…  I actually sowed half the clarkia and about half the poppies, the clarkia because I want to sow some more in a bit to stagger bloom and the poppies because I have so many of them and, frankly, I was tired and cold out there in the shade and stronger wind (this morning the garden had been sunny with a much softer breeze; by midsummer at least a portion of the front garden will quite literally be in sunlight the entire day, but the sun is not so generous at this time of year).  Plus, sowing poppies – especially Papaver rheos – in a stiff wind is really rather a pain.  The tiny (really, really tiny) seeds fly out of one’s hand at the slightest provocation.  I also sowed one of my two packs of bishop’s flower (Ammi majus) and one packet of annual candytuft (Iberis).  I am planning to sow more flowers tomorrow.

Checking on the seeds a short time ago, it looked like one more okra seed was pretty definitely sprouting and a third might be starting to.  They’re all ‘Dwarf Green Pod’ (including the one that sprouted yesterday).  I sowed six seeds of each of the five okra cultivars, so if there really are two more sprouting, that means that ‘Dwarf Green Pod’ has already had a 50% germination rate before any of the others have sprouted anything at all.  There are also more teeny tiny sweet Annie sprouts in their little pot.  I tried to take pictures of the seedlings, but none of them turned out.  Instead I just have a couple photos of the kohlrabi seedlings to share, taken yesterday.

Kohlrabi seedlings: The purplish-bulbed kohlrabis sprout with purplish stems (and sometimes purplish-tinged leaves), as can be seen here.

Kohlrabi seedlings

Somehow I forgot to include two of the peas yesterday.  I am adding them to that post, but posting them here too for anyone who already read the other post and thus might miss the edit:

SNOW PEA Corne De Belier A delicious French snow pea that pre-dates 1860! Wonderful, gourmet flavored, large, flat pods are perfect for steaming, sauteing and nibbling on fresh from the patch. A historic variety that is finally available in America. Creamy-white blooms. (Baker Creek)

SNOW PEA De Grace A lovely dwarf variety that was grown in America before 1836, and likely much longer ago in Europe. This variety has been extinct to the North American seed trade for more than 20 years, so we are happy to bring back this great pea. The pods are medium sized and sweetly flavored, crisp and tender. The vines produce over a long season and are more frost hardy than many modern varieties. (Baker Creek)

Hoop houses, tomato seedlings, and root vegetables 12 March 2009

There were two talks at last night’s garden club meeting.  The first was on hoop houses.  I mentioned that one here yesterday as I was excited to hear more about them, and hoped the speaker would be good.

I felt like they (a couple) did a very good job of explaining how to construct a hoop house, but I was surprised by a couple of things.  Firstly, what they grow in the hoop houses doesn’t really make any sense to me.  They grow things like kale and other greens (kale was the one they mentioned by name) and garden peas.  In my experience, those kinds of things are pretty tough by springtime in my climate – I’ve had kale, some other greens, and some cultivars of garden peas all quite literally growing through snow in past years – and I’m not sure why someone would expend the effort to build a special growing space only to grow things that would likely be OK outside, especially since they said they don’t start using it till around this time (they said that if they hadn’t reconstituted it last week to take pictures for the talk, they likely would do it within the next couple weeks).   The other thing, which I only retrospectively found frustrating, was how much they downplayed the problems that can occur with hoop houses.  I recently got something in the mail offering me a free issue of Countryside Journal, and, intrigued, I filled it out and mailed it back.  The free issue happens to have an article on hoop houses and cold frames.  I hadn’t read it before the talk, because I wanted to hear the talk first to better understand the short article.  This morning I read the article and I realized all these potential problems that the talk had completely glossed over.  The author talks about how much hotter it gets inside a hoop house than the ambient air temperature, and how by the time it warms up a bit in spring you have to regularly take the time to open the hoop house and then re-close it.  He talks a lot about wind (I’m guessing from the article that he lives in a fairly windy area); when someone asked about wind problems at the lecture, they said that they didn’t have any but added that their back yard is very sheltered so they wouldn’t.  The third major problem mentioned in the article – and to me, the most glaring omission in the talk – is that hoop houses are apparently extremely prone to damping off, particularly after a lengthy bout of rain.  The talk made the moisture-holding sound like a good thing (you don’t have to water as often, they said, because the hoop house will literally collect water that drips down onto the ground) but it makes sense to me that it wouldn’t necessarily be a good thing.

However, all that having been said, the set-up in the talk made more sense to me than the one in the article.  It took me a couple reads of that portion of the article to figure out his set-up because he was using the term “PVC pipe” to mean a different kind of constructing material than the speakers had.  The speakers used PVC plumbing pipe attached to the wood frame to hold the PVC flexible non-plumbing pipe/piping (I’m not sure what it’s called; the article calls it “PVC pipe”) sturdily, which I do feel would likely help lessen wind problems vs. the article’s suggestion to just put the piping directly into the ground.  But, yes, this is the biggest problem to me with both of these – PVC is not an environmentally friendly material; it releases bad stuff when it’s being made and when it’s being eliminated, and there are some questions as to whether it also might leach.  I know that green builders try to avoid PVC plumbing in homes, so I’m not particularly comfortable adding it to my garden, most especially around food crops!  I tried googling for “hoop house without PVC” but I just got a bunch of PVC hoop house plans that happened to have the word “without” on the page.  Then I tried “hoop house -PVC” but that didn’t work either, as my top hits were pre-made hoop houses for sale and articles that talked generally about hoop houses without talking about anything specific about how to actually build one.  I’ll keep looking.  I did also find a couple recommendations for a book from the magazine Growing for Market called The Hoophouse Handbook.  Here is the page selling it.  When slim books (60 pages in this case) cost a decent amount of money for their size ($12), I try to balance how much it costs with how unusual the information is to find in print.  I haven’t made up my mind yet on whether to purchase it, but it does seem to be the only widely available English-language book with hoop house in the title. If you know of another book that covers hoop houses extensively, please let me know.  The speakers adapted their own hoop house from a plan in Jeff Ball’s 60-Minute Vegetable Garden, but they already printed out the plan for us, and I wouldn’t want to invest in an unrecommended general gardening book without flipping through it first.

One more thing about hoop houses:  The opaque plastic generally used to cover them helps even out the light, according to the speakers, so that the full hoop house gets the same amount of light the whole time it’s covered – the same principle behind most modern greenhouses.  I’ve read season-extending-book reviews that are critical of authors for not addressing cloud cover issues that plague some areas in colder months, but I feel that betrays somewhat of a lack of understanding of how things like hoop houses and modern greenhouses work.  The reason they’re opaque and domed is for precisely the reason the speakers said – that way, every area gets the same amount of light the entire time they’re closed.

The other talk was on tomatoes, given by the person who supplies the local nursery’s heirloom tomato seedlings.  I thought that talk was very interesting, and a sharp reminder that sometimes my reading so many blogs, magazines, etc. from other regions and countries really screws with my internal timeline.  She mentioned in the talk that when she first started selling the seedlings to the nursery, she would start them inside at the start of April, but that in recent years, as the climate has been changing more rapidly, she’s started them a little earlier.   It had been some years since I’d started tomatoes indoors and my own internal clock was completely off about it, with me feeling bad that I hadn’t started them earlier when in reality when I did do it (this week) is probably the very earliest I should have done it.   She added that it should be a far waning moon fairly soon (it was full yesterday) and that she had heard that that’s a good time to start tomatoes, so she was considering doing it then this year.  Another tip to pass on is that she uses an organic fish fertilizer for her tomatoes.  I know the same company puts out an all-seaweed fertilizer (since I try not to use animal products) so I think I will try that on them this year.  Lastly, someone asked her if she knew what the oldest heirloom is, and she said that she wasn’t sure but perhaps it was one of the Mexican varieties, since tomatoes originated in the region.  She said that when she went to Mexico, she saw a Diego Rivera mural about the history of Mexico that had tomato ‘Zapotec’ right there on the mural.  I thought that was great!

I potted up the multiplier onions yesterday, ‘I’itoi’s Onion.’  Here is Native Seeds/SEARCH’s (brief) page on them.  I don’t know if they are hardy here or not.  It did remind me that I had meant to order potato onions and forgot.  Unfortunately Fedco Co-Op’s Moose Tubers had already sold out of them (not surprising, as they said they had a limited stock this year), but I did order shallots (because I love them and, quite disappointingly, the farmers’ market didn’t have any this year after having them for weeks the previous year) and, in the continuing tradition of trying to plant more than I really should, the one sunchoke they still had in stock.  I was lucky to order when I did as Moose Tubers’ ordering season ends tomorrow.  This morning I came up with the possibly brilliant, possibly stupid idea to plant some of the seeds for the radishes and carrots in pots and some in the ground and do a trial seeing how they do.  I wouldn’t be able to do that with longer carrots or with the other root crops I have – parsnips, salsify, nor scorzonera, and probably not the turnips nor skirret either – because the soil is so rocky here in this garden that I just can’t guarantee they wouldn’t hit one.  Even with smaller root crops, it is a gamble to believe that they won’t.  But radishes germinate so fast and so easily that it is a gamble I am willing to take.  (I once heard a story about 100% germination in radish seed that was some absurd age like ten years old.)  The talk last night with the implication that kale and garden peas need heaps of coddling also made me want to race out in the morning and sow them with abandon just to prove their wrongness, but I don’t know as I’ll actually do that.  Back in ‘fruit days’ there was snow on the ground so that I couldn’t sow the peas (considered a fruit in biodynamics).  Now it’s ‘root days,’ but biodynamics does allow some flexibility in that if you can’t sow on the right day, you can work the soil around the seedlings on the right day and that should help give them an extra boost.

The two kohlrabi seedlings on Death Watch are still fuzzy with mold, but I’m giving them the full 24 hours to see if they can recover.  The grow light is back on now that I’m up, and I’m still hoping the heat from it will help burn off the mold.  We shall see soon enough.

[ Note: I am feeling frustrated at how WordPress keeps saving my posts as drafts instead of actually publishing them when I hit ‘Publish.’  It just happened again with this post.  Luckily by now I’ve learned to paste the post into a file in case it happens, as oftentimes (like this time) the draft will be an incomplete version of the post.  I suppose I should write to the staff, since this problem has just been occuring in the past few weeks. ]

It worked! It really worked! 11 March 2009

The kohlrabis sprouted today!  The sprouting is uneven so far, but there’s at least one sprout of every cultivar.  Sources vary on how long it takes them to sprout, but depending on soil temperature, light, etc., it generally ranges from 5-20 days.  But I just started the kohlrabis on the 8th – only 3 days ago!  And I don’t have a heating mat under them, which would be more likely to put them in the lower range of germination times, as they prefer warmer soil.  Every time I go back to more closely following biodynamic growing, I’m amazed all over again at how well it works and kick myself for temporarily loosening my growing rules.

Two of them have a bit of fungus or mold on them, so I’ve put the growing light right on them, low and direct, and am planning to leave it there while I’m at the garden club meeting this evening.  I’m hoping that the heat generated from the lamp being so close to them (the lamp comes with a chart about amount of heat generated at each distance) will help dry out the plants and soil enough to kill whatever it is.  If the fungus or whatever isn’t gone within a day, I’ll just pull the seedlings that are affected and keep the others going.  I hate ever pulling anything I’ve started growing (it’s why I’ve always had trouble thinning plants, and am more likely to give extra plants away than to compost them), but it’s stupid to grow something that’s diseased when there are healthy seedlings AND more kohlrabi seeds that I can start if I need more plants.  The monthly lecture, by the way, is on hoop houses, and I’m hoping it’s a good presentation, because they’re something that’s always interested me.  All I’ve personally used thus far is the less structured option of row covers.

Seeds!! 8 March 2009

I finally started indoor seeds today!  Doing it biodynamically is a whole other ballpark from my recent years of seeding in, because of the way you start certain things on certain days and times and do certain tasks at certain times and so on.  So, this morning and early afternoon were considered part of a Leaf Day, in biodynamic parlance, and so I started the kohlrabis (which biodynamics considers leaf plants) and the leaf herbs – bronze fennel, basil, scallions (which I really should have started way back before I even got the package that contained their seeds, as they should be getting planted out shortly), and sweet Annie.  After a “no seeding” spell this afternoon, this evening is a Fruit Day, but Fruit Days continue tomorrow and beyond, so I’m going to start the majority of my indoor seedlings tomorrow.  Chiles, tomatoes, and strawberries are all considered fruit plants, and though the book I’m currently reading on biodynamics doesn’t mention tomatillos or ground cherries or eggplant or okra, I’m comfortably self-categorizing them as fruits (I also did self-categorizing with the leaf herbs). I started four basils, ‘Red Leafed’ from Turtle Tree, ‘Eritrean’ from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, and two from Native Seeds/SEARCH – ‘Mrs. Burns’ Famous Lemon’ and ‘Mayo/Yeome.’  I started two kinds of scallions, the very common and generically titled ‘Evergreen Hardy Bunching,’ and the more unusual ‘Ishikura,’ both from Turtle Tree.  I thought for a while about whether to categorize scallions as onions (and thus, root plants) or herbs and ended up deciding that since I primarily use their leaves, I’ll try seeding them as leaf plants and see how they do.  The bronze fennel is from Renee’s Garden Seeds, and I can’t recall offhand where the sweet Annie is from.

Turtle Tree Seed (a new company for me this year) has more varieties of kohlrabi than I’d ever seen in an American catalog, and I rather sheepishly admit that I went a bit kohlrabi crazy.  In addition to growing the fairly common ‘Early Purple Vienna’ (which I got elsewhere), I’m growing Turtle Tree’s ‘Superschmelz,’ ‘Azure Star,’ ‘Logo,’ and ‘Lanro,’ which, yes, is their entire kohlrabi selection.  What can I say; I’ve never seen a kohlrabi for sale here – not at a farmers’ market, not at a store – so if I want kohlrabis, I have to grow them myself.  I’ve missed their delicious brassica-ness, and hope that they’ll grow out OK in pots.  If I have high germination, I’ll be able to give extra seedlings to friends.  (And if I have low germination, I’ve got seeds in reserve to try a second batch.)  I’m looking forward to doing an informal kohlrabi cultivar trial like I’ve done in past years with such things as peas, beans, and tomatoes.

Indoor plant update / New-to-me products I’m trying this year / Welcome back, Stella Natura 23 January 2009

Indoor plant update

The aphids appear to have completely killed the pineapple sage.  After decimating it, they moved on to a potted bulb garden I got for Christmas, where they have been feasting on the tulips and crocuses.  The tulips have beautiful blooms despite the aphids, but the crocuses have yet to bloom.  They’ve also (much to my lack of surprise) been feasting on the tweedia, which as I mentioned here a month or two ago, is a member of the milkweed family – and aphids love (love, love, love) to munch on milkweeds.

After I failed to notice that the gotu kola and lantanas had gone dry, they wilted.  I’ve continued watering them, but so far I have not seen any signs of recovery.  The lantanas were sharing a pot with the Aztec sweet herb, which has been thriving despite the dry spell.  It actually appears to have grown despite my inadvertant lack of care.

Two plants have been doing better indoors than they did outdoors (!) – the cestrum ‘Orange Zest’ (which fully recovered after dropping all its leaves, presumably from shock, when it was brought indoors last autumn) and the snail vine. (I got ‘Orange Zest’ from Select Seeds last year, but they appear to have stopped carrying it.)

The amaryllis ‘Vera’ and ‘Ferrari’ have fully opened their  first set of blooms, and ‘Vera’ is currently opening her second set.  ‘Ferrari’ looks to follow suit soon.  The ‘Chinese sacred lily’ paperwhites have leaves, but no buds yet.  (I did pot them up late though.)  I’ve yet to see a single bud on the amaryllis bulbs and paperwhites I oversummered in a closet.

New-to-me products I’m trying this year

I’ve already added some new-to-me products to my garden plans this year.  My nursery just started carrying Cow Pots (that’s the brand name they’re being sold under there), which are peat-like pots but are made from sustainable cow manure instead of deeply unsustainable peat moss.  I’m planning to start some of my most sensitive-to-transplant seedlings in those instead of in seedling trays. I just discovered while writing this post that they have a website – CowPots.

I’m also trying Southern Exposure Seed Exchange’s higher-quality wooden plant tags after I have had so much difficulty in the past two years with the cheap ones available at the local nursery.  They break easily, they fade easily, etc. etc.  I’m hoping the new ones will work much better, as is claimed, because the higher quality (understandably) comes at a higher price.  Additionally, I bought a marker from SESE that’s supposed to be less prone to fading than the one I got at the local nursery.

I’m also strongly considering trying Lee Valley’s “Self-Watering Propogator Set,” which you can see online over here.  I’ve found their other seed-starting supplies to be the best I’ve ever tried, and am curious to try starting some particular types of seedlings in the environs that seem to be provided by this particular set.  I have yet to definitively make up my mind, though.

Welcome back, Stella Natura

After using the Stella Natura biodynamic gardening calender for years in my old, beautiful garden, I went without it for the past few years.  This year I’ve purchased a copy and am planning to re-integrate its biodynamic advice into my gardening plans, especially since they are so ambitious this year.   In addition to being a guide, the calendar also contains articles and other information.  You can visit their website here, which includes a sample article (and some information on what biodynamics is, for the confused).