Good Morning Seedlings!
March 20, 2009
I sowed 56 different varieties of tomato seeds on Sunday, March 15th and the winner of this year’s “First Seed Up” prize goes to Black from Tula on Wednesday, March 18th! Honorable mentions go to Black Krim, Purple Russian, Brandywine Cherry, Martino’s Roma and Juliet for a Thursday morning showing.
There’s a fair number of varieties that don’t have any seedlings as of yet: Goose Creek, Matt’s Wild Cherry, Pink Pink Pong, Eva Purple Ball, Evan’s Purple Pear, Brandywine Pink (Sudduth’s Strain), KBX, Zapotec Pink Pleated, Gold Medal, Break O’Day, Tommy Toe Red, Azoychka, Pink Berkeley Tie-Dye, Berkeley Tie-Dye and Cherokee Purple. I’m hoping they come up soon or I’ll have to do another sowing.
The ones that are doing really well (100% germination rate so far) are Black Krim, Purple Russian, Jaune Flamée and Brandywine Cherry. Woohoo!
I’ve also moved my entire grow-op into the living room upstairs. I decided that I couldn’t be counted on to go downstairs into the basement on a regular basis to care for seedlings (out of sight = out of mind, even though this is supposed to be one of my passions!) Here’s a shot of my 5-tier wire shelf with three pairs of shop lights on the bottom three shelves:
On the right-hand side, you can see a bit of my emergency blanket that I use to block the light at night. I’ve rigged it up so that it attaches to the shelf with rare earth magnets that are super strong. It’s less irritating when watching t.v.!
You can see six 72-cell trays with clear domes that are housing my tomato seedlings – I like to keep the domes on to help retain moisture and to aid in removing the seed coat if left on the seedling. Not shown is another 72-cell tray on my heat mat. There are also two more trays of hot peppers and cole crops such as broccoli, cauliflower and kale as well as parsley, onions and leeks.
I like having the shelf in front of the south-facing window. In the evenings, I turn the fluorescent lights and close the curtains. In the morning, I turn off the lights and open the curtains so the seedlings can still get sunlight throughout the day. The shelf is on wheels and I can swing it around or move it if I need to clean underneath.
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.
Tomato Christmas
June 20, 2008
Tuesday night I lugged all my trays of extra tomato plants over to my in-law’s garage to pass final judgment on the remaining 58 plants. I decided to keep about 10 plants for myself and had to find homes for the rest. I made a few calls and was able to find homes with Ottawa Hortiphillia (who asked for 4 so I gave her five), Hit Pay Dirt (who wanted 5 so I gave her 7) and a friend of a friend (who wanted 4 so I gave her 5). Ha ha, I’m Saint Tomatoless.
On Wednesday I dropped off the trays of tomatoes, putting a fierce dent in the extras back at home. Here they all are nestled in the trunk of my car:
There’s Old Flame, Mirabelle Blanche, Pruden’s Purple, Black Pear, Black from Tula, Hawaiian Pineapple, Bonny Best, Red Lightning, Color Mixture, Green Zebra and Arkansas Traveller smooshed in there. I also gave 10 plants to my mother-in-law to give out at her work.
I had a total of 25 left over of Mirabelle Blanche, Marmande, Earliest + Best, Hawaiian Pineapple, Color Mixture, White Wonder, Sausage-Opalka and Pruden’s Purple. I decided that they’d all get planted in the back yard at the in-law’s to be left to survive or perish. I did manage to save a few extra for my 7 year-old nephew who wants to put some tomato plants around his pool.
All I have to do now is to pot up my remaining 10 plants in storage containers, probably sometime this weekend. Busy busy.
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!
