Gearing Up
February 17, 2009
I finally got around to tackling the grow-op set-up that I have in the basement. Usually it’s upstairs in the living room this time of year, however, Maui’s dog crate takes priority. My plan is to start some herbs and vegetables in the basement, using emergency blankets wrapped around the shelving to keep things warm. In mid-March I’ll bring the grow-op upstairs to the south-facing window when I start the glut of my tomato seeds. By mid-April I’ll be hardening off seedlings during the day and then they’ll stay outdoors entirely by the beginning of May. But first, I needed to clean it up.
Here is it before the clean up and it’s not that bad, really. A stray bag of shredded newspaper for my vermicomposting (you can see the worm bin in the bottom left-hand corner), a drop cloth used for painting and some used pots that needed cleaning. I spent an hour re-organizing stuff (there was a whack load of gardening stuff in one of the bins) and I ended up with a tidy-looking set-up.
I got some help mounting the power bar (as seen on the left-hand side) and tied up all the unruly electrical cords. I have six shop lights, two per shelf, attached to the shelving with chains and S-hooks. The two bottom shelves have alternating cool (4’ Phillips 40w Cool White Plus T12 bulbs) and warm (4’ Phillips 40w Daylight Deluxe T12 bulbs) fluorescent lighting. I’m experimenting with the lights on the top shelf and bought GE Plant & Aquarium T12 bulbs last year. You can easily see that the lights throw a pinkish hue – I’m not sure if that’s a good thing. Opposite the grow-op (not seen) is a handy 8’ folding table that I plan to use as a potting and seeding station.
It looks a million times better in the basement now.
What’s Been Going On
November 14, 2008
I’ve been slowly emerging from my gardening depression this year. It started with striped cucumber beetles at the beginning of June:
Continued with some black spot on my apple tree at the beginning of July:
And capped off with devastating early blight on my tomatoes (it was so bad I couldn’t bring myself to take photographic evidence).
On a semi-happier note, I managed to harvest one overflowing bowl of tomatoes (though it was all at once instead of my envisioned continuous seasonal harvest):
Not that I know which tomato is which in this photo, or even my garden. The Sharpie marker had worn off the plastic label and I didn’t care enough to dig out my vegetable garden grid:
Here’s what it looked like back on July 2nd when I was still trying and before it all went to hell:
There’s my bean pole trellis, my soaker hose that’s since busted and my handy twine grids that I think I’ll do next year. Next year I’ll grow tomato plants in my satellite garden or in large pots on the deck – no more in this garden above as the soil is now diseased. I’ll also be taking down the concrete reinforcement grids next spring to set up a twine trellis for beans and peas. Yum, yum, 8′ of beans and 8′ of peas.
So, what have I been up to lately? Well, there was Halloween, a day that I’m crazy about:
Where we carved up these great little pumpkins that I grew called “Jack O’Lantern”:
I loaned a herb book to my favorite local restaurant that I’ve offered to start herbs for. I prepared their herb garden out back for next spring by topping it up with a blend of organic sheep manure and garden soil.
I brought in some herbs and plants from the chilly outdoors to overwinter inside. Left to right is Vick’s Plant, a white datura, lemon oregano, rosemary, and a poinsettia from last Christmas.
I bought a couple of books, one called Four Season Harvest by Eliot Coleman (who coincidentally is married to Barbara Damrosch, who’s book, The Garden Primer, was one of the first few gardening books I bought) and The Heirloom Tomato by Amy Goldman that made me salivate and wish it was spring so I could start a new batch of tomatoes. Truly, that book is gorgeous!
I’m getting interested in extending my growing season, the reason why I bought Four Season Harvest, so that I could learn more about building a cold frame and the types of vegetables I could grow in it. I’m now being exposed to new and exciting vegetables I’ve never heard before or know little about: chicory, endive, mizuna, salsify, mâche, and claytonia.
I’ve also purchased another 4′ wide chrome shelf for my gardening activities as my previous one was re-assigned as storage in the kitchen. I want to start growing some lettuce and mustard greens in my basement for the coming winter months and still need to find the chains for my fluorescent lights.
I saved a lot of seeds this year: cucumber, pumpkin, tomato (not from my diseased crop), coneflower, dill, garlic chives, and butternut squash. Somehow, my pole beans were crossed and 95% of the seeds I saved were white instead of the Cherokee Trail of Tears true-to-type black.
And my worms have been indoors in the basement for the last two months and they are happily munching along.
Looking forward to winter sowing and 2009 catalogues!
Sprouts, Shoots and Slips
June 25, 2008
A couple of months ago I started an experiment for growing my own sweet potatoes and so far it had been a positive experience. Unfortunately, I had no idea how to get the growth off of the seed tuber and into the ground. I started reading Ken Allan’s book, Sweet Potatoes for the Home Garden, and still had no clue how to process them. I finally found an informative article here that explained what to do.
Before I go any further, for my own sanity, let’s get the terms down right. From what I understand a sweet potato seed tuber sprouts, then grows shoots that you cut off to root in water to make slips. There. Got it? It took me a while to figure it out as folks seems to use these terms interchangeably.
You can remove the shoots once they grow to a height of 8″ – 10″ tall. The shoots in this somewhat blurry picture were well over 18″ tall so I was good to go:
There were about five shoots growing on this seed tuber: three below the water line and two above. Here’s a close-up of what I was dealing with:
Lots of roots from both the shoots below the water line and the seed tuber. Holding the seed tuber firmly with my left hand, I found the base of one of the shoots with my right hand. I firmly twisted and pulled the shoot, disentangling its roots from the rest of the root system. Here’s a blurry photo of it:
You can kind of see where the shoot snapped off, leaving a yellowish patch on the seed tuber. Here’s the slips that I pulled off:
Whoo! Look at those roots! I’m actually a couple of weeks behind planting these slips out, mostly because I was too scared to wreck them. Here’s all the roots I was left with at the bottom of the seed tuber once I pulled off all the shoots that were below the water line:
The shoots that grew from below the water line already had nice root systems (see above). There were two shoots that had grown from the very top of the seed tuber and didn’t have a root system at all:
I snapped those shoots off and put them in a large tray of water to help them develop roots (apparently this takes a few days). I also put the other slips into the tray as well, ensuring that their roots were covered with water while the leaves and stem were dry:
I tossed the spent seed tubers into the trash. The next step is planting the slips in your garden. More on that later.
Putting in a Flower Garden
June 17, 2008
Earlier this year I offered to help put in a new flower bed in at a friend’s house. She told me the colors she liked, I did a bit of research, got the seeds and grew them in cell trays. Here’s a list of all the ones I started from seed:
- Aubrietia ‘Large Flowered Mix’
- Cerastium ‘Snow in Summer’
- Viola ‘Comedy Mixed’
- Forget-Me-Not
- Pinks ‘Old Fashioned Mix’
- Lavender
- Sheperd’s Scabiosa ‘Jasione Laevis’
- Coreopsis ‘Early Sunrise’
- Catananche ‘Coerulea’
- Chrysanthemum ‘Crazy Daisy’
- Echinacea ‘Purple Coneflower’
- Delphinium ‘Pacific Giant’
- Wild lupines
They were busting out of their cell trays and we finally put them into a new home this past weekend. Here’s a shot of the location:
I picked up 6 bags of black earth and 3 bags of sheep manure and brought my spade and shovel as well as my watering can and all the flowers. I placed the flower packets on the ground to get an idea of where to put the seedlings:
This isn’t a very good angle as the bottom of this picture is actually the left side when you are standing with your back to the road. In this picture, I put most of the taller plants in the bottom left with a dip in the middle then back to some taller plants at the top left. The two plants in the middle were mid-size with the plants on the right being shorter.
We used a garden hose to lay out the shape and then used the spade to cut into the sod.
Next we peeled back the sod, flipped it and stamped it down, a really difficult task due to the number of shallow tree roots:
Once that was done, we re-applied our mosquito repellant and started to spread the black earth, topped it with sheep manure and mixed it in:
I don’t know what it is about freshly spread dirt/manure that mosquitoes really like, however, I got a zillion bites that are still itchy. This is how we left it before jumping in the pool:
Had a nice dinner and a few drinks then headed out to finish the bed off by filling it with flower seedlings. This is how it looks from the front:
Overall it only took an hour to prepare the soil and then 15 minutes to plant the flowers (thanks in part to being eaten by mosquitoes). It was a nice and quick project.
My Sweet Potato Project
June 13, 2008
In mid-April I was given some Georgia Jet sweet potato seed roots from Ottawa Hortiphilia. Georgia Jets are the most productive variety for northern climates as it has the shortest growing period of 80 – 90 days. Of course I had no idea how to grow them and promptly potted them in soil with a drink of water.
I found out later that was the completely wrong thing to do. I emailed Ken Allan, author of “Sweet Potatoes for the Home Garden”, who told me to stand the seed roots up in containers using toothpicks, fill with water to the 1/2 to 3/4 mark on the tuber and to keep in warm place (window sills are not good because they are cold at night). So I did that while I waited for his book to arrive. This photo, taken on April 17th, shows the correct way to prepare your seed roots:
I would move them to the windowsill during the day for warmth and then move them onto the dining room table at night so they wouldn’t get chilled. On May 1st, the seed roots looked like this:
Exciting!
Everyday I would check the water level, topping it up when it got below the 3/4 mark of the seed root. Sometimes I would change the water when it got kind of yucky-looking. It wasn’t a very satisfying task until mid-May when I spied my first slip shoots:
You can clearly see two little shoots on the top left and right of the seed root. Woohoo! It was working! Over the past month, these little seed roots sent up so many slips they had to be given bigger containers to hold more water and give more room for some of the side slips. Here’s how they looked about 4 days ago:
They’re huge! Now I have to figure out how to plant them!
