Garden Prep and Seedling Transplant 2012

What a good week it's been, with a focus on seed planting and transplanting those started Feb 14. How quickly they mature.

We're planting every way possible this year. Up on the roof in the unheated greenhouse, I winter sowed some cress, tatsoi, and parlsey...and some Amish snap peas from Seed Savers Exchange. The greenhouse hits 80 when the sun is out, but otherwise it's cold.

See the peas starting to pop?

(yeah I know it's a rotten photo, but thrilling nonetheless)

A good February chore: cleaning the fabric tapes we now use in our SIPs to wick up water from the reservoir. First I brush off the dried roots and potting mix, then into the laundry with soap and vinegar.

The agretti germinated near 100% in a homemade portable microgarden sitting on a low-heat mat, which Art picked up for nada at a resale shop.

This week I started fennel, leeks, and chives in two portable microgardens, covered each with a produce bag, and nestled them together, vying for space with the agretti on the warm mat. At Root Simple, Nance Klehm shows an easy recipe for making coconut coir seed-starting mix.

Then it was over to Bruce's, where the seeds we planted Feb 14 were ready for transplanting. He's been tending and befriending them on his grow stand (shop lights+shelves).

I used screened compost to fill small recycled spinach containers (at right, with holes melted in the bottom for drainage courtesy of the ever-useful soldering iron) and pot up those fragile greens, which will buck up under Bruce's lights and be ready for hardening off in the next couple weeks. Then they'll go out into the cool spring air they love.

 This lacinato kale seed (Wild Garden Seed)

is from 2009, but germinated like a champ

Carl kept me going

with many kisses

I can tell I'm going to like this tronchuda cabbage (Bountiful Gardens)

Ready for transplanting:
Aztec spinach and the lovely chards, erbette and ruby red

Who started all these seeds!

Starting Seeds: 2012 Seed Swap

What's not to like about the annual seed swap? Busy people mark tiny packets, open and shake a few to share, close and move on to the next.

A big donation of flower seeds this year, courtesy of Debbie's work with a children's garden. I took a few each of the full-southern exposure lovers and will plant them in our window boxes, along with a couple dozen herbs.  Kitchen garden beautification.

Did I mention there was food? We ate everything but Debbie's homemade BBQ sauce. Seed sorting is hard work.

Debbie also brought a plastic gallon milk jug with cuts made to show me how she uses them for winter sowing (more from her in an upcoming post).

 

Mmmm--some lovely new additions

I stripped some agretti seeds off their stems to share. We let them go to seed last fall and then dry out, at which point I stuffed whole stems into a paper bag and stored in a dry area.

Don't let anyone tell you saving seed is difficult. That pretty much describes it.

Starting Seeds: Free Heirloom Seeds from the US Government?

Well this is provocative. Bill Brikiatis writes at his blog Suburban Hobby Farmer...

Get rare heirloom seeds free. Many people start seeds indoors to save money, yet empty their pockets buying seeds. That’s okay if searching through seed catalogs is what you enjoy, but with a little more work, you can get rare varieties for free.  See how I got three unusual heirloom tomatoes from the USDA Agricultural Research Service at Rare Vegetable Seeds from the U.S Government. I didn’t even pay postage and the USDA would have sent me more seeds if I had asked.

Like many things governmental, the USDA Agricultural Research Service National Plant Germplasm System site is a tough search (and a mouthful to say).

Pride 

of Chicago

I used the search tool to find lists of available seeds for "tomato" and "pepper." I looked for seeds with a weather profile broadly parallel to that of Chicago's (whatever that means these days).

A costoluto

from Bruce's roof

In other words, I bypassed the Mexican, Brazilian, and California varieties in favor of those originally from the Northeast and, just for fun, ordered the IXL Bolgiano’s Extremely Early Tomato Bill mentions because, buddha knows, if we get scorched this summer like we did last year we'll want all the early fruiting varieties we can get.

Grab the salt!

I didn't spend much time on all this because, as Bill notes at the link, the feds ask you what kind of research you'll be doing. We submitted the following:

Research entails growing these seeds in sub-irrigated planters on my roof in Chicago. Results will be published at Green Roof Growers blog.

Wouldn't it be nice if (a miniscule portion of) my tax dollars could cover our seed order next year?

And I would display my research

beautifully

Starting Seeds: Home Depot Offers Organic Martha, Burpee Seeds

Pretending to be looking at paint, I was drawn like a magnet to the seed racks at Home Depot this week. I rarely go there and it's early for spring garden supplies, but there they were, and so alluring.

I wondered if organic seeds could be genetically modified (GM) seeds or if the two were mutually exclusive. According to the back of the pack, Martha's organic seeds come from Ferry Morse.

 

Bruce did a little research into Burpee and found that its seeds are all GMO-free, per the chairman of Burpee who goes out of his way to thank Mr. Brown Thumb for giving him a platform to refute allegations that his company sells GMO seeds.

Bring on these luscious greenies...

Starting Seeds: Glossy Garden Porn via Hudson Valley Seed Libray

 Imperfectly perfect

Hudson Valley Seed Library, one of our favorites, muses on too-pretty seed catalogs in this post:

"Every farm or garden is a story with its own tragedy, slapstick, drama, sex, death, and delicious redemption. Where are the catalogs that communicate the stories of losing all your Brussels Sprouts over night to one woodchuck, giving a hummingbird a bath with the hose, finding self-sown volunteers from last year, wishing for rain, wishing for sun, having a stand-off with a young buck over an apple sapling, listening to pollinators, being stung, finding a lost ripe musk melon hidden beneath weeds, watching helplessly as your tomatoes rot from blight, forgetting what variety you planted and having to wait two months to find out, flitting from open flower to flower hand-pollinating with a freshly picked male stamen, sitting down to a meal your grew yourself, blemishes and all?"

Seems to me these shared stories of triumph and disaster are the reason garden blogs flourish, with ideas and potential fixes exchanged among neighbors across a virtual fence.

We who love growing often castigate ourselves for less-than-lovely outcomes. As if we're mostly in charge.

 Cracked, streaked, and delectable

Starting Seeds: Culantro Ngo gai

We were delighted when Debbie shared seeds for culantro.

This herb has lots of monikers. The Kitazawa site says:

Also known as Mexican coriander, thorny coriander, spiny coriander, fitweed, saw-leaf or saw-tooth herb, recao and Tabasco parsley, this herb has a similar flavor to cilantro although much stronger. Each leaf grows from the plant base, rather than a stem, and the leaves are harvested by cutting the entire rosette at the base before the plant begins to flower. In mild climates, the plant can be considered a short-lived perennial, but more often it is grown as an annual.

In Puerto Rico it's called Recao

Purdue University has this on cultivation.

Although the plant grows well in full sun most commercial plantings occur in partially shaded moist locations. Shaded areas produce plants with larger and greener leaves that are more marketable because of their better appearance and higher pungent aroma. In a study on the effects of light intensity on growth and flowering of culantro, a significant delay in flowering and increased fresh weight of leaves were found in plants grown under 63% to 73% shade... Although culantro grows in a wide variety of soils, it does best in moist well drained sandy loams high in organic matter particularly under full light. 

Culantro will be a fun addition to this year's herb selection. Apparently there's no end to the info available.

In Asia, culantro is most popular in Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore, where it is commonly used with or instead of cilantro for soups, noodle dishes, and curries. The Vietnamese use it to wrap other foods. Candied culantro seeds were popular in eighteenth-century Britain as a tonic, a cough remedy, and an aphrodisiac.

We're going to start our culantro seeds in a portable microgarden just like we did the agretti last year...

 

The growing medium is damp peat and coir with a little perlite, to ensure wicking.

On go the agretti seeds,

followed by a gentle tucking in + plastic greenhouse

Starting Seeds: Is Broccoli Worth it for Small Garden?

In our continuing seed conversation, Debbie writes: Have you grown broccoli? It takes an awful long time and takes up a lot of space no?

 DeCicco broccoli

from Seed Savers 

(48-85 days)

The Green Goliath below takes about 60 days. But I'd argue there's a big reason to grow broccoli that nobody discusses: it's a rock star of an edible teaching moment. The summer the photo below was taken we had a bunch of kids visit the roof. Without fail, seeing broccoli growing was the highlight of these visits.

"Really? It grows like this?" so many asked, as if we'd glued on the flowering stems.

My advice: grow broccoli in a SIP like we did below. Watch it thrive and watch kids get turned on to growing.

From this June 17, 2009 post...
I'm trying something new this year: overplanting a SIP that's finished hosting its original veggie. Here's the broccoli Green Goliath (with my pal Trish)...

...harvested and re-seeded with Climbing Emperor beans. These we hope will climb the arches Art designed. I didn't add fertilizer, reckoning that there might be enough remaining.

 

Starting Seeds: Seed Catalogs and Dr Terry Wahls

 Matador spinach

As predictably as sap rising in maples, right around this time of year gardeners we know get the itch to plan a garden, think about seeds, start seeds, swear they won't buy any more seeds...and then order seeds.

Even though, uh, they have a great big messy tray filled with many varieties of seeds from previous years.

How lucky are we.

A scant 15 minutes after emailing Debbie regarding seeds for 2012 and why we were both going to try to use up old seed instead of buying new, I was entering my credit card number at Bountiful Gardens. Look at this aztec spinach and tell me you would have done otherwise.

I don't buy much of anything except good food and good shoes. And I can't imagine a better way to spend $20 (OK, $27).  A lot of my order was spent on greens I've not tried before.

Here's my rationale, and if you can't sit through this vid (Minding Your Mitochondria--and FYI mitochondria are the tiny power plants inside your cells), just know that Dr Terry Wahls reversed her multiple sclerosis by essentially eating mountains of greens and other real food (including some of the calorie crops we don't grow but probably should).



After ordering, I went looking for seeds saved from last year's plants plus seed purchased in the last few years. As though blown by a stiff wind, they seemed to have scattered themselves everywhere.

In the roof greenhouse: harvested seed in paper bags and the agretti still on its stem. Plus some random seed heads stuffed into a bucket.

 

On our second floor I ran into a cache of seeds for cool-weather planting, set aside after starting the indoor greens last fall (plus some Jimmy Nardello seeds).

Downstairs in my gardening closet (aka, my closet) I found last year's warm-weather seeds--tomato, peppers, eggplant, and herbs.

 

Seeds, everywhere.

Starting Seeds: Lunar Planting

 New Moon Wednesday, Feb 21

(NB: corrected from an earlier version.)
Debbie writes...
The next new moon is Tuesday, Feb 21...just a couple weeks away. With the strange unseasonably warm weather we're having it might be a good time to winter sow some seeds.

More at Gardening By the Moon...

At the new moon, the lunar gravity pulls water up, and causes the seeds to swell and burst. This factor, coupled with the increasing moonlight creates balanced root and leaf growth. This is the best time for planting above ground annual crops that produce their seeds outside the fruit. Examples are lettuce, spinach, celery, broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, and grain crops. Cucumbers like this phase also, even though they are an exception to that rule.

Planting by the moon is an idea as old as agriculture, based both in folklore and superstition, but there are scientific ideas to back it up The Earth is in a large gravitational field, influenced by both the sun and moon. The tides are highest at the time of the new and the full moon, when sun and moon are lined up with earth. Just as the moon pulls the tides in the oceans, it also pulls upon the subtle bodies of water, causing moisture to rise in the earth, which encourages growth. The highest amount of moisture is in the soil at this time, and tests have proven that seeds will absorb the most water at the time of the full moon.

Starting Seeds: Lightly Sifted Compost

Today we're launching a conversation about seed starting, and we hope you'll join us. I'll start us off...

Good advice from Sharon Astyk--smart, prolific writer:

You see, I knew you could start seeds in lightly sifted compost - in fact, I'd seen Rodale Institute tests that showed that some varieties seeds did best in finished compost. So, the year before, I'd gone out in February, dug up some compost, let it defrost, and then sifted it through an old screen and used it, with lovely results. All those living organic bacteria made a very happy arrangement, and the seeds I started that way did far better than those I did in organic potting mix.

Today I'm going to shovel out some compost and sift it through a screen. I'll use it in containers to start seeds using the winter-sowing method Debbie and Little Green Girl showed us last year. Not sure if sifted compost would work in the portable microgarden shown above, as it's sub irrigated and relies on a wickable potting medium.

I like the idea of using the rich resource we have in compost...and not having to buy potting mix. Since it was 60 degrees Jan 31 in Chicago and should hit 50 today, it's definitely gardening weather, at least for now.

Winter-sowing relies on cold...but we likely have more of that yet to come.