How I Got Here, part 5: Planning for Decline

You can find the previous posts in this series here, here, here, and here.

Moving from a small house on 1/8 acre to a small house on 1 acre provided many advantages. The much larger lot would allow me to raise both a larger proportion and a greater variety of the foods we eat. A small flower garden near the house included several peonies, a favorite flower of mine, and a magnolia tree graced the front yard. The property was located in the loess hills created by glacial processes so I knew it had deep and decent soil, and it sloped slightly to the south and east for a good solar aspect. The house was located close to the street and faced south, suggesting a potential for some passive solar heating. Mike and I had invited his parents to join us when we toured the property with the owner before negotiations began; we knew his father would be sure to tell us about any structural flaws the house might have. While the house did not show well due to worn out carpeting and linoleum, peeling plaster and paint, old fixtures and finishes in both kitchen and bathroom, and evidence of mold in the basement and the two back bedrooms, none of us could find any serious structural flaws. The cosmetic issues meant we could get the house for a price we could (barely) afford. Both the refrigerator and clothes washer were 1960s vintage, thus well past their expected life span, so we could replace them with far more energy efficient versions. The stove and oven unit and the clothes dryer were relatively new so we would neither need to replace them nor would gain an energy efficiency advantage in doing so. The previous owner told us the furnace and central AC dated from the late 1970s, so replacing them with much more energy efficient versions also made sense. We could replace all of the elderly appliances from what remained of a small inheritance I’d received a few years previously. The only work we needed to do before moving in, in addition to replacing the appliances, was to remove the carpeting and linoleum layers to expose the wood floor we expected to lay beneath them and hire out the floor refinishing work. We encountered a few surprises while removing the old flooring: some of the rooms had two layers of linoleum, others had a layer of carpet on top of linoleum, and some of the flooring had been installed using ring shank nails, making for slow progress in removal and plenty of cuss words uttered during the process. Once we got down to the wood floor, we found it was pine rather than oak and in the living room it had been stained darker than the rest of the flooring but along the edges only. We learned this pattern of staining was common to houses built around the same time as ours (1928). Typically a large rug covered most of the floor area in the living room so only the edges of floor that the rug didn’t cover were stained to whatever color the owner wanted. Oddly, when the floor was refinished the stained area ended up lighter in color than the rest of the floor!

By the end of April of 2002 we moved into the current house and sold the previous house. I dug up a few of the plantings from the old lot -- most of the herbs, some native plants and daylilies, and a few of the smallest trees and shrubs -- and brought them to the new lot, planting them into the front and side yards to keep them alive until I knew where they would find a more-permanent home. After the stress of the move I wasn’t up to more gardening that year, and just as well because I wanted to take the time to produce a good design.

I’d been studying permaculture design on my own for the past few years and now I wanted to use the permaculture design process to create a design for our yard. I had the first edition of Toby Hemenway’s book Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture in hand as well as various issues of the quarterly magazine The Permaculture Activist (PCA). Hemenway’s book was the first book to focus on applying permaculture design in North America. It laid out a design process I felt I could follow without taking a permaculture design course that I didn’t have the money to take, so it became the main source I consulted in developing my design.

Part of the design process was to observe patterns of sunshine, wind, soil, and water flow for some time in order to best work with those crucial energies. The usual recommendation is to observe for a full year before beginning the design process. I didn’t wait that long to develop my design since I wanted to get the trees and shrubs I’d brought over, and others I purchased that spring, into their final locations by the end of autumn, but I did observe the energies from spring through mid-fall while I worked through the design process Hemenway described. When I was finished with the design, I’d laid out the bones for an edible forest garden for the front, side, and near back yards; a large sunny vegetable garden area occupying the middle back yard; and in back of the vegetable garden, on the highest, flattest, and most northerly part of the property farthest from the house, a prairielike area where the previous owner’s vegetable garden had been that will eventually be shaded out by large oak, pecan, hickory, chestnut, black walnut, and wild cherry trees, evocative of the oak-hickory savanna or woodland that was probably here before European immigrants turned it into an apple orchard and then a near suburb of St. Louis.

The next couple of years I concentrated on planting the tree and shrub layers and on getting the first few vegetable beds dug and planted. I did not design the herbaceous layer of the edible forest garden since I wasn’t sure what I wanted there and didn’t have the money for large-scale herbaceous plantings in any event. Instead I observed how what was there changed as the trees and shrubs grew. When I saw the lawn grass slowly weakening and violets, a favorite spring wildflower whose flowers are edible, taking over as shade increased, I was quite pleased (I’m not a big fan of lawns) and decided I could continue to wait to design the herbaceous layer while I concentrated on expanding the vegetable garden to the point where it provided us with the majority of the vegetables we eat. That basic design, with tweaks introduced as some plantings died and others proved disappointing, remains in place today and has proven to be well suited to the site energies and to our goals.

After the older appliances were replaced, we didn’t do any further work on the inside of the house. I wasn’t sure what to do about the mold problem and didn’t want to paint the walls till the mold problem was corrected. We knew the house needed to be sealed and insulated to further reduce energy usage and cold drafts but we didn’t feel up to doing the work ourselves, plus we were no longer saving money and did not want to reduce our interest income any further by using any of our investments to pay someone to do the sealing and insulation for us. For the same two reasons, we did not do anything further to enclose the south-facing front porch to turn it into a sun porch and solar heat source. While we didn’t give up on any of these projects, they would have to wait until we had the financial means to hire them out.

Until 2004 I hadn’t heard of the growing concern about peak oil (the time when oil production stops increasing from year to year because consumption has grown to the point where production can only keep up). I had kept track of our energy usage for the past 10 years, and we worked to reduce energy usage, for other reasons: because it cost money that we could better spend on things and activities we found more fulfilling; because we knew that fossil fuel consumption released carbon dioxide and that increasing amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere threatened to push climatic processes into a different state that would probably lead to hotter and drier summers for us; and because we were attempting to live up to our practice of voluntary simplicity, of using less of everything so there would be more to go around.  It was reading Richard Heinberg’s book The Party’s Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies that woke me up to the imminence of the peak of petroleum production and the difficulties we’d all face as we hit and passed its peak. A review of the book in the winter 2003-2004 issue of PCA inspired me to read it. It is one of only a handful of books I have stayed up almost all night to read. As a chemist I was already well aware of the ubiquity of oil as feedstock: after oil is broken down into a variety of components, those components are then combined into many essential materials such as textiles, plastic and thermoset polymers, medicines, pesticides, cleaning products, and many others. I also knew that agriculture relied heavily on oil in the form of diesel fuel and that natural gas contributes the hydrogen to form ammonia via the Haber-Bosch process; the ammonia gas thus formed is the fertilizer of choice for the huge farms of the Midwest in which I live. With all of this background, the information I gained about peak oil and natural gas from Heinberg's book, and knowing that the end of energy growth is also the end of economic growth, I immediately understood the seriousness of peak oil and peak natural gas. It was time for us to get serious about further energy use reduction.

Some internet research through the Energy Star website led me to a concept called home performance. Home performance assesses potential problems with moisture levels and other air quality issues, leaky ductwork and other sources of air leaks into a house, missing or inadequate insulation, improperly sized HVAC equipment, and related issues by doing home energy audits and providing the owners with a detailed report and suggested improvements. In some cases the companies can also do the work needed to fix the problems. Mike had recently received a small inheritance and was willing to use his inheritance to pay to have this work done on our house if I found a contractor. In 2005 I found a contractor who could do the audit for us and who could do some of the work the audit indicated should be done and subcontract the rest. Once all the work was completed, a drainage system and sump pump had been installed to keep the basement dry; the crawlspace under the two back bedrooms had been sealed; the ductwork had been cleaned and sealed; other air leaks into the house had been sealed; the basement ceiling, attic floor, and walls had been insulated (the attic to R-44 and the rest to the extent the cavities allowed); the moldy wallboard in the back two bedrooms had been removed and new wallboard put up; and the leaking electric water heater had been replaced with a natural gas water heater. Testing after the work was completed revealed that the rate of air infiltration into the house had been reduced by 41%, our contractor told us. My records indicate that electricity usage went from 5237 Kwh in 2004 to 3103 Kwh in 2006, a 41% decrease, while natural gas usage went from 477 to 338 Therms, a 29% decrease, in the same time period. It had been work well worth doing.

For the next few years our main efforts focused on the nonprofit organizations we were members of and in two cases on the boards of, and on continued expansion of the vegetable garden as I waited for the fruit trees to mature enough to bear fruit. While I slowly got better at vegetable growing, the lack of further progress in energy reduction and continued excessive driving to execute our various responsibilities to the organizations we belonged to were a source of some frustration to me. The frustration grew as we added another Stream Team to our list of organizations. In early 2009 we and three other people began what the Missouri Stream Team program calls a Cooperative Stream Investigation (CSI) project in our home watershed to better understand the amount and distribution of E. coli and chloride pollution in Watkins Creek and its tributaries. This entailed monthly visits from April through October to six different sites to collect water samples for E. coli analysis and to do the other chemical tests that we’d been trained to do ourselves; then we had to drive the samples across the county to the laboratory that could do the E. coli analysis because the lab had to begin that analysis within six hours of when we obtained the first sample. By this time Mike’s father had died and Mike picked up the additional responsibility of visiting his mother, who lives about six miles away, twice a week and driving her on her errands since she’d never learned to drive. Our gasoline consumption had jumped and we knew we were being pulled in too many different directions, but it took awhile until the stress built up sufficiently to jolt us into action.

Another PCA book review led me to Sharon Astyk’s first book, Depletion and Abundance, in 2008, but it wasn’t until we upgraded our computer to a slightly less obsolete model that could handle Mac OS X that I could read her blog. Reading her book and blog got me interested in trying to achieve the 90% reduction in average U.S. usage that was the goal of her Riot for Austerity project, discussed in that book. For us that meant reducing monthly electrical use from about 233 Kwh to 90 Kwh and reducing yearly natural gas usage from about 377 Therms to about 100 Therms. And those were the easier targets ... we were so far above the Riot gasoline target of 50 gallons per person per year it wasn’t funny. I didn’t see how we could reduce our usage any farther in any of these categories. Meanwhile, now that the vegetable garden was over 1000 square feet in size I found I didn’t have enough time to properly care for it and still execute my responsibilities toward the groups I was involved with and the two bands we now played in. Once the work started on our Zen center’s major fundraiser in the summer of 2009, a fundraiser for which I had taken on the overall organizational responsibility for the past several years, I knew something had to change; I was stressed out to the point of it affecting my health. I’d enrolled in Astyk’s online Adapting in Place course during that time, hoping that I’d learn something to help us further reduce energy use. But instead I learned that our first goal had to be prioritizing our responsibilities. Until we did that, no further progress in energy reduction or reducing the complexity of our lives would be possible. Over the next two months we dropped out of the food co-op we had belonged to for 14 years (it was too far away and took up too much of Mike’s time) and the Dances of Universal Peace band. In 2010 I dropped the farther away Stream Team in order to concentrate on the CSI project on our home stream, a project which continued through last October. In early 2012 I resigned from our Zen center’s board and we reduced our attendance there from once a week to once a month. With these changes our lives came into better balance.

It was through Astyk’s blog that I learned of John Michael Greer’s Archdruid Report blog and his book The Long Descent. Mulling over what I learned from Astyk and Greer, I realized that in the long run we’d do better to cash out some of our investments so we could hire out the work to glass-in the south facing front porch. We’re quite pleased with our sun porch, completed in December 2010. Even though the large pin oak trees in our neighbors’ yards to the south and west shade our sun porch too much in the afternoon, reducing the solar heat gain, it still gives us a place warm enough to overwinter subtropical plants such as citrus trees and rosemary as well as a warm spot to enjoy a cup of tea on a sunny winter day.

Astyk’s and Greer’s examples kind of shamed me into lowering the thermostat to 60F most of the time in the winter. I dislike feeling cold more than I dislike feeling hot, and I have difficulties with circulation in my feet and hands during heating season, but taking Astyk’s online course (now available in book form as Making Home) helped me figure out how to dress to manage in a 60F house. I still don’t like it but I can tolerate it, at least on most days. Having the sun porch warm up to near 70F on a cold sunny day in December and January really helps ... and opening the windows and door between it and the house can raise the temperature in the living room by 2F as well. When the sun is stronger in fall and again in late winter and early spring the porch warms up the house even more. With the addition of the sun porch and lowering the thermostat our electricity usage dropped to 2384 Kwh and our natural gas usage to 201 Therms in 2012. We’ll need to install a wood stove to achieve further reductions, something we hope to have done sometime this year or next.

It has been from Astyk and especially from Greer that I’ve come to fully appreciate the extent to which we not only live in a (declining) empire, but how much I myself have benefited from living in that empire. The five parts of this series have been inspired by this realization. While I have not benefited as much as some people, I still have to own up to my own part in keeping empire going and living off its spoils. At the same time, as I hope this series also shows, I have been slowly owning up to my responsibilities to reduce energy and material consumption, and we plan to continue doing so.

The story isn’t ending although I have caught it up to the present. With winter coming to the slow and sputtering end typical of the Midwest, another gardening season is beginning. I plan to share more of our daily lives here at Living Low Acre, more of our efforts to use less energy and materials, and also more about the slow evolution of the permaculture design and the fruits (and veggies, and mushrooms) of our gardening efforts. In the meantime, I have a lovely mix of snow, sleet, and freezing rain to shovel off the driveway tomorrow morning. Gentlepeople, grab your shovels!

How I Got Here, part 4: Making Changes

This is the fourth in a series of posts in which I describe my journey from a more or less standard issue middle-class life to the lower energy, lower spending life that is the subject of this blog. Here are parts 1, 2, and 3 if you missed them. I pick up the story after I quit paid employment as a chemist in 1992.

After resigning, I had more freedom than I had had since I was a teenager. True, I continued to do the minimal housework I’d always done, but with no paid employment, no school, and no volunteer activities, I had time to read, to garden, to play music, and to think. At first I felt guilty about having so much time to myself. Mike encouraged me to slow down and enjoy the time, to not rush into something unsuitable out of perceived discomfort with being “idle.”  I was glad to have his support and he was glad that I relaxed and slowed down to closer to his pace.

One of the first things I did was to take a workshop on the process of designing an ideal job and finding a real job that was a close-enough match. I’d participated in a similar process while I was still employed. While both processes provided insights, I couldn’t see how to turn what I learned into a paid position without further schooling. After nine years of post high school education, the last thing I wanted to do was to park my behind in classrooms for however many more years that it would take to get another degree in a different field.

If the time needed for retraining hadn’t been sufficient as a demotivating force, the money needed for it would have been. Mike was making close to median income for the time, we had a cheap house with a small mortgage, utility costs were low because the house was small, and our cars were paid for. All evidence suggested we should have no difficulty living within his income. Nevertheless, within several months we’d gone through most of the savings we’d put aside toward what was supposed to be a temporary period of unemployment on my part. Any retraining I might pursue would require us to go into debt, something we refused to do.

I found home accounting software that would work on our aging Macintosh SE computer and began to track expenses in an attempt to figure out what expenses we could cut in order to live within Mike’s income. But that wasn’t the main focus of my efforts during the first couple of years after quitting paid employment.

Instead, I started to spend much more time outside, caring for a tiny prairie garden I’d started from seed and some perennial plantings as well as a container garden consisting of a few herb plants and a tomato vine. After we’d had the property landscaped, I’d planted the flowers and the bit of prairie, and I took over lawn-mowing from Mike. Mike didn’t mind the flowers, but he’d grumbled about the lack of anything that he could eat in the garden. I hadn’t planted any food plants because I had an idea that I would not be successful at growing them. But now I decided to try growing a food plant or two in containers; if they failed, we wouldn’t be out much, and succeeding would make Mike happy. The tomato plant was for Mike as I didn’t care for fresh tomatoes at the time but he loved them. The herb plants were for me. I’d begun to learn a bit about herbs and wanted to plant a small herb garden; growing a couple of herbs in pots seemed like a good way to start. The first time I snipped herb stems and hung them up to dry, I felt a sense of satisfaction that seemed much larger than warranted by the amount of leaves obtained. I could grow something useful to us after all! Even though the torrential rains of that summer rotted some of the tomatoes (the Flood of 1993 was historic in the St. Louis region) and squirrels took most of the rest, I felt the same sense of satisfaction with the few that I picked. I decided that in 1994 I’d dig and plant a vegetable garden in the side yard, a small rectangle of land that got more sun than what level ground remained in the back yard.

Accounting for what we spent didn’t bring the hoped-for reduction in expenditures, but it did make it even clearer that we didn’t have too many months to go before we’d have to tap into our retirement accounts if our spending kept up at its current rate. Meanwhile, the reading, learning, and thinking that I was engaged in pointed clearly to a like overspending of nature’s accounts. In the mid 1990s, the concept of sustainability, meaning a way of life that could be maintained on nature’s resources for many generations, was surfacing into discussion. I caught wind of it from a local radio show, went to the reference area of the county library’s main branch to find out more, and learned of a periodical called In Context. I subscribed and in one of the first issues I received I read an interview with Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez on their recently published book Your Money or Your Life (YMOYL). What I learned intrigued me enough to check out the book. And once I read the book, I was a woman on a mission.

From the book I learned that we trade the finite hours of our lives for a paycheck, so that anytime we spend money, we pay for what we bought with the time we worked to earn the money for it. When we reduce spending we reduce the hours we need to trade for money and increase the hours available for the other activities of life. By figuring out exactly how much money Mike received for an hour of work, keeping track of expenses, re-calculating each expense in terms of the hours worked to obtain it, and then asking if the hours spent were either or both of satisfying and in line with our values, we could learn where spending reductions would have the most effect with the least pain or even an overall gain. As we reduced expenditures, we would free up money to pay off debts, then to save, and eventually to invest at interest. The final step in the process could be receiving sufficient income from interest to be able to leave paid employment before reaching official retirement age. As I read, I realized that since Mike and I already had considerable savings and only had a small mortgage debt, applying the steps could lead not only to my staying out of work but to making a dream of Mike’s, retirement before age 50, come true.

If you’ve read the previous post in this series, you may be wondering why I would be so excited about investing at interest. After all, since payment of interest and eventual repayment of capital require economic growth, and economic growth cannot continue over the long term on a finite planet, then in that long term investing at interest is as unsustainable as profit growth is. Dominguez and Robin raise the same point on page 325 of the first edition of the book under the heading “Yes, but what if everybody did it?” They then evaded their own question by posing a number of scenarios, all positive, that they claimed would be the outcome of more people following their program. (The current edition of the book, with Monique Tilford as coauthor and published in 2008, does not include this discussion.) Their evasion does not negate the validity of the question because enough people reducing their expenses enough would reduce economic growth enough to make the continued repayment of principal and interest impossible. I ignored that issue, however, so I could turn my attention to implementing the steps in the book. Since we’d already been tracking and categorizing expenses it was easy to add the other steps. At first Mike went along with the added steps grudgingly, as a favor to me. I’d tried explaining to him that I’d learned how we could retire him early, but I couldn’t get it across to him in a way he understood. A few months later I convinced him to read the book. As soon as he did he understood why I was so excited and became as dedicated to the program as I was. With both of us on board, we made fast progress in dropping expenses under his income. Over the next several years we paid off the mortgage debt on our house, began investing the savings we now had from Mike’s wages into interest bearing investments, and gradually cashed out the earlier investments we’d made, taking the tax penalties that applied, in order to re-invest the proceeds as the first edition of the book described. By the late 1990s we looked at our chart of income and expenses and projected it to a crossover point in 2001, when we could, just barely, live off the income from our investments. We decided that Mike would retire early that year once he passed his 10th anniversary with his employer.

Meanwhile, asking the questions each month about whether or not a particular expense category was fulfilling and in line with our values led to consideration of what our values were and then into a greater effort to live by them, pulling me back into volunteer work. Because I found the YMOYL program so valuable to us, I wanted to share it with other people who were ready to hear its message. Dominguez and Robin were offering materials for talks on YMOYL through a speakers bureau organized by their New Road Map Foundation, in order to further publicize the program. Since I like public speaking and the foundation would forward inquiries for speakers to me, I joined the speakers bureau, received the talk materials, and gave a few talks as inquiries trickled my way. As I became more engaged with the concept of sustainability, I started to pay attention to local efforts along those lines as well. In 1995 a nonprofit organization formed to advance sustainability within the greater St. Louis region. I heard about it within its first few months, joined it, and found I could publicize YMOYL through it. That led to more invitations to speak. In addition, I and two other volunteers formed a project within the nonprofit to offer group study courses within the St. Louis region. These courses, developed by a different nonprofit and organized around concepts such as voluntary simplicity, deep ecology, and sustainable living, offered people a chance to read about and then discuss various aspects of each topic with other people who were also interested in it. The group support helped people make changes in their own lives. Co-founding this project was a way for me to advance sustainability from the bottom up, as the more top-down work the St. Louis based organization was attempting to do was, not surprisingly, running into various obstacles.

As my economic literacy slowly grew and especially as I learned more about debt-based capital creation, I realized that our pensions and Social Security were as vulnerable to the effects of a slowdown in economic growth as the interest income gained from applying YMOYL to our finances. From studying sustainability, I knew that that slowdown in growth would likely hit while I was still alive to suffer from it. YMOYL was good as far as it went, but we needed to be prepared for a time when the collective financial hallucination wore off. I needed to learn some practical skills that would help keep us going should our income drop drastically below what our investments, pensions, and Social Security indicated we should expect in our old age. In addition, the more we put ourselves out as examples for living sustainably, the more we needed to do to live up to our example. So we started making a serious effort to reduce the amount of electricity, natural gas, and water we consumed in our household and the amount of trash we put out for collection as well as further reduce our consumption of material goods. Our efforts to conserve energy were made more difficult by the brick-on-clay-tile walls of our house that did not admit of a way to insulate short of building new walls and by the 1950s era leaky building shell. I did not feel up to the job of properly sealing the house and did not think it fair to ask Mike to do it since he had to work for pay. The less-efficient appliances we’d bought during the 1991 remodeling were too new to replace. While we did replace the furnace with a 92% efficient model and we made some simple changes to reduce our energy and water consumption, we were frustrated by the compromises we had to make. If nothing else, however, I learned enough to sympathize with similar difficulties other people faced in their efforts to live more sustainably.

Through the 1990s I expanded my gardening as far as the 1/8 acre lot would allow. I enjoyed the activity and I thought it was the best candidate for a useful skill to acquire, yet I was also frustrated because the yard was so tiny, strongly sloped, and shaded that I had little space to raise food. As I practiced gardening I explored various ways to grow a lot in a small space, such as square foot gardening and Ecology Action’s method, including taking a three day workshop offered in Fairfield, Iowa by Ecology Action in 1999. The more I learned, the more I wanted to do, and the more obvious it became that finding a small house on a larger lot would be required for me to make more than a tiny contribution to the food we ate. We started reading real estate ads and Mike made inquiries on a couple of houses he saw for sale while at work (he worked as a meter reader and thus saw a wide range of houses across the metro area). It soon became clear that it would be difficult to find a good-sized property with a small old house at a cost which would not lower our interest income too much to be unaffordable once Mike retired as planned. Besides that, neither of us looked forward to the work of moving. Instead I began to explore the possibilities of permaculture design to try to squeeze more food out of the shadier areas of our lot.

We wanted to reduce the amount of gasoline we used to reduce our contribution to urban sprawl and pollution. However, because I was giving talks and starting study groups and attending organizational meetings and we had started practicing Zen, and since the St. Louis region is sprawled out and we lived miles away from the areas where all of these events took place, we drove a lot. It bothered me since I well remembered the oil crises of the 1970s and knew that the trends were pointing toward a similar crisis in the not too distant future. I gradually started to pull away from the top-down projects in the organization I volunteered for in an attempt to reduce meeting attendance, but it was harder to give up the study circles since I had helped to bring that project into existence.

2001 brought major changes for us. First, Mike retired in February, making his dream, and mine for him, come true. Almost immediately he joined a small band putting on the Dances of Universal Peace once a month. I attended as a dancer and found them enjoyable enough to join the band myself later on. Around the same time as Mike retired, the project to offer group study courses ended after we received pressure from the organization that had developed them to expand the number of courses given more rapidly than we felt was sustainable. While I understood the sense of urgency expressed by that organization to spread the concepts widely, the conflict that resulted from driving to offer courses that counseled not driving bothered me enough that I could not continue the work. Not long after that I also resigned from the local nonprofit and became a member of a Missouri Stream Team which started working on a short stretch of one of the local streams. And by the end of the year, Mike and I bought a small house on an acre of land a few miles away so that I could put my gardening dreams into practice. Mike had seen the house and met the owner when he read her meter a year or two earlier. She told him that although she loved the house and yard, her children wanted her to move near them and she realized she’d need to do so within the next few years. Mike wrote his name and home phone on a card which he gave to her and told her to call him when she was ready to move because he’d like to buy her house. In September of 2001 she called; by December 31st the house was ours. With that purchase we had more opportunities to respond to the challenges of our energetic, economic, and environmental predicament. I’ll bring the story to the present in the next and last installment, which I plan to post within the next couple of weeks.

Seed starting the Living Low way, part 3

In the first two parts of my series on seed starting, I discussed creating a good environment for starting seeds and purchasing or preparing a good medium for seed-starting. In this, the last part of the series, I’ll discuss containers in which to hold the seeds and growing media and the trays that will keep leaking water from damaging anything. As before, I will stress using what you already have or can make or scrounge for free, and also consider what is best for the scale you are working at (anywhere from raising a few tomato plants up to raising a thousand or so seedlings, scales that I have experience with). Finally, I will briefly consider other aspects of seed starting in which my experience is different from conventional seed starting advice and tell you why I do things differently so you can decide what to do in your own situation.

I’m not going to get into the details of sowing seeds since those have been well treated elsewhere. The best single book on seed-starting, one I recommend to anyone who intends to start at least a few seeds every year, is Nancy Bubel’s The New Seed Starters Handbook. For an online guide to seed-starting, see here.

Let’s suppose you are just beginning to grow from seeds and plan to grow something along the lines of a few tomato or lettuce seedlings. You’ll have to purchase the seed packet (unless someone you trust gives you a few seeds), and if you don’t have any compost or want to avoid “weed” seedling confusion you’ll need to purchase a small amount of a seed-starting mix. But you won’t have to purchase anything else as long as you have on hand or can scrounge a smallish plastic garden pot or similar sized plastic container. If you save plastic containers such as those that, say, onion dip or ricotta cheese or margarine or any number of other processed foods come in, you have excellent containers in which to start and grow on seeds. Any container with a depth of around 2 to 3 inches will work for starting seeds (it needs to be this deep to accommodate the seedling’s root system). I rummaged through our kitchen cabinets and found three such containers of a size to hold about 16 ounces of food. Each is a bit more than 2 inches deep and a little over 4 inches in diameter. Imagine them sectioned into quarters, as if you were dividing them into pie slices, with a seedling growing in about the middle of each section. You could grow four seedlings to transplant size in one container like this. Or you could use a container like this to start a larger number of seeds, later removing each seedling and replanting it into its own container to grow on to transplant size. Gardeners call the removing and replanting pricking out; you can use a repurposed chopstick to carefully tease out each individual seedling (a table knife would also work). You can avoid the pricking out operation by sowing a few seeds into the middle of each of the four quarters of the containers of my example, then thinning to one seedling per quarter and growing the remaining seedlings to transplant size. To remove them, use a knife to section out the quarters of mix and remove each quarter with its seedling; plant the seedling with its quarter of mix clinging to its roots. If you have 8 ounce plastic containers like those used for yogurt, you could plant three to four seeds in each, cut out the weaker seedlings after each seedling has at least 4 leaves, and grow the remaining seedling to transplant size. This size container would grow a fine tomato seedling as well as something like lettuce that has a less-extensive root system.

If you have a gardening hobby and have a collection of various sizes of pots as a result, you can use those pots to start or grow seedlings. You can start a number of seeds in a larger, say 6 inch pot, and prick each out into a 2 to 4 inch pot to grow on to transplant size depending on the size of the seedling when it is transplanted, or start a few seeds in enough of the smaller parts and thin to one seedling per pot. As a general rule, things planted in cool spring weather, like lettuce and cabbage, are usually grown to smaller sizes than tomatoes and others that are planted after the last frost. Smaller-sized plants need less root room and can be grown in smaller pots. You can use terra-cotta or ceramic pots as well as plastic pots; just be aware that the mix in a small terra-cotta pot can dry out rapidly in your heated living quarters or on a warm sunny day on a glassed-in porch.

If you don’t have any of these sorts of things on hand, check with folks you know for extra garden pots or processed food container or save the right size of processed food containers when you purchase such foods. If you live someplace where trash is put out on the curb or in dumpsters in the alleys, check for these in the discards, or ask someone you know who lives in an area with alley dumpsters to look for you. You might think that recycling centers would be a good place to scrounge this sort of thing, but at least around here, you’d be wrong; materials in recycling centers are considered the property of the recycler.

If you are repurposing a processed food container, you need to poke drainage holes in it so the mix doesn’t get waterlogged. Poking four holes in the side a quarter to half inch up from the bottom, using a knife or scissors blade, should be sufficient for the size containers mentioned. It’s best to poke holes in the sides rather than the bottom; holes on the bottom that are in direct contact with whatever is holding leaking water often will not allow proper drainage through them.

Unless water leaking out from your containers or pots won’t damage whatever they are sitting on, you’ll need to put them on a non-leaking tray. The pot trays you can buy at garden centers will work, but almost certainly you have something on hand that will work just as well. Pie plates are about the same size and shape as pot trays; you could use the thin aluminum pie plates from commercially-purchased pies as long as you didn’t poke any holes in them while getting the pie out, or if you bake your own pies, you can use glass or metal pie plates you have on hand. Anyone who bakes has a collection of different sized containers (8x8 and 9x13 inches are common sizes); as long as these don’t leak, you can put your seed-starting containers inside them. Similar sized containers you may have on hand for leftovers would work just as well as long as they don’t leak. If you are raising a number of seedings on a tray table in front of a window and you have a cookie sheet with raised sides, put the cookie sheet on the table and your seed starting containers on the cookie sheet. (You could as well put the cookie sheet on your glassed-in porch or under a fluorescent light fixture.)

If you are growing more than one variety of plant, you will need some way to label containers so you know what is in them. Garden centers have materials you can use to make labels. Homemade versions could be writing the variety name on the side of a processed food container with a waterproof marker, cutting similar plastic containers into the size you want and labeling them with the variety name, repurposing a popsicle stick or making a wooden stick from scrap wood and labeling them, or in my case, repurposing the metal slats from discarded venetian blinds (plastic blind slats would work as well) and labeling these. In the last three cases you’ll put the marker next to the seeds of that variety if you have more than one kind of seed in the container. Use a pair of strong scissors or tin snips to cut blinds into smaller pieces. I use a special marking pen that can withstand sunlight because I re-use many of the labels from year to year, so I want the name to be legible for years. You can use an ordinary waterproof marking pen, but the writing will fade over a period of weeks or months when exposed to sunlight. That may not be an issue if you are writing on wood or plastic that itself rots after a period of time. If you want something more permanent and you can scrounge metal or plastic blind slats, a non-fading pen is best to use. Be sure to cap it tightly after each use! A china pen might also make a long-lasting mark; if you have one, try it and see.

If you get to the point where you are starting several tens to a few thousand seedlings of many different types of plants, cell packs and other specialized seed starting equipment will begin to look attractive to you. It’s a lot easier to handle one tray with 36 plants or a single wooden flat with 300 or so onion seedlings than multiple containers with smaller numbers of plants. You could buy these new, but you may be able to scrounge or make some or all of what you need. The four or six packs that garden centers sell seedlings in can be re-used for many years if you take care to not rip them when you remove the plants and you store them under cover when you are not growing plants in them. Even ones with a rip or three from previous rough handling can generally be reused for a few to several years, until the rips get so large that the individual cells no longer hold the seed starting mix. I started with the equivalent of a few hundred seedlings’ worth of different sizes of four and six packs and various sizes of trays to hold them, all scrounged by me or gardening friends who already had enough. I still have about half of the packs, and all of the trays, after several years of re-use and keeping them inside when they don’t have plants in them, some of them with rips they have always had. You probably know someone who buys and plants annuals that are sold in these packs; ask them to save the packs and trays for you if they don’t need them. Those of you who live where there are alley dumpsters should be able to find them in or around the dumpsters during prime annual-planting months (April and May around here). Until I started to collect these, I didn’t realize that six and four packs come in many different sizes, as do the trays that hold them. You may need to mix and match packs and trays that you scrounge.

Now that some of my scrounged packs have deteriorated so much I cannot use them, I have purchased a few sheets of six packs from Fedco as replacements. These should last much longer than the scrounged packs because I am very careful not to rip them and I keep them in the basement until they are pressed into service and upon removal of all plants.

Because the plastic the packs and trays are made from is processed out of oil, I think it’s imperative to take the best care possible of them and to re-use them as many years as you can. They may seem as if they are cheap and disposable, but in actuality they come at a high cost. Use them in a way that respects that cost.

At the several tens to a few hundred seedlings scale, you may find it easiest to start and grow all of your plants in a motley collection of packs in trays. You can start a few seeds to each cell of the pack, thin to 1 seedling per cell, and put markers in individual cells or packs as needed to distinguish plants from one another. You’ll want to check each tray to see if it has drainage holes or not. Trays come both ways. If you put the trays on top of something that will be damaged by leaking water, be sure that the trays do not have drainage holes. If they do, you’ll have to put the trays on top of something larger that won’t leak. A large cookie sheet might do.

If you are starting several hundred to a few thousand seedlings, as I now do, you will probably want to start the seedlings in flats (boxes in which you start rows of seedlings, like a miniature raised-bed garden; the photo at the top shows one of mine from last February). You may want to start one or more flats with all of the seeds that need cooler temperatures to germinate and grow, and one or more flats with all the seeds that need warm temperatures to germinate and grow. Then you can put the flats in different places that match the environment each seed needs to grow well. As seedlings become crowded in the flat, you can prick them out into individual cells of a pack and keep the packs in trays, moving the trays as needed so the seedlings grow in the right conditions. This is what I do now. I start the flats on the glassed-in porch during winter or early spring. The flats with cool weather seeds like lettuces and cabbage family plants get put on the floor where it is cooler. The flats with tomato, pepper, eggplant, and other seeds needing warmer conditions for germination are put on the heat mat and the heat mat is turned on for the two or three weeks that it takes for all the seeds that will germinate into healthy seedlings to do so. As I prick out plants into cell packs I put the cell packs in their trays into the cold frame, or keep them on the porch if it is too cold in the cold frame. Seedlings that grow too large for the cell packs get potted-on into individual 2 or 3 inch pots. I prick out a few more of each kind of plant than I need in case some of the plants die before it is time to transplant them to the garden; the remainder of the seedlings get eaten if they are edible in that state or composted. Onion and leek seedlings stay in the flat until they are large enough to plant directly into the garden. This system is economical of space and of the various components and it allows me to care for many seedlings easily.

If you want to use wooden flats like the ones in the photo to start seedlings in, as always, you can buy them or make them yourself. The flats you can purchase from Bountiful Gardens are made from repurposed redwood and should last for many years. I have one and like it. Since then Mike has made five more of the half size flat out of scrap wood, and I now start most of my seeds in these flats plus a few smaller wooden and heavy paper flats I purchased some years back. I suggest using the half size flat, about 11x14x3 inches, as larger flats will be very heavy when full of mix and plants. You can make flats from any solid, untreated scrap wood you have lying around. As long as you remove the soil and dry the flat when all the plants have been removed and store it in a dry place, scrap wood flats should last a long time. You need to have a little space between the bottom boards to allow water to drain out of the flat; about 1/4 inch of space is sufficient. Before you put seed starting mix in the flat, line it with paper you would otherwise recycle to keep the mix from falling out the bottom. The paper doesn’t prevent drainage and it will slowly rot away as the seedlings grow. To sow seeds into a flat, you can put a sheet of 1 inch chicken wire on top of the flat and use the wooden end of an unsharpened pencil to make a shallow hole in the mix at the center of each hole in the wire, then remove the chicken wire and plant seeds into the holes, labeling each row as needed. Or use the edge of a thin board to make a shallow depression in the soil of a filled flat and sow your seeds into the depression, again labeling each row as needed with the seeds in the row.

Many seed starting directions say you should cover the container with plastic after you sow the seeds, then remove the plastic once you see tiny plants emerging. I don’t cover the containers, however, except for those on the heat mat. The very humid conditions on the surface of the mix in covered containers will encourage molds or diseases that can kill seedlings. The only reason I cover the flats on the heat mat is because the added heat dries them out faster, but this year I am planning to try growing them uncovered and monitoring the moisture level more closely as I sometimes have trouble with seedlings in these flats dying from disease. Most seeds should be planted with something like 1/8 inch of mix over them to keep them moist (and dark if needed). Some seeds, mostly the very small ones and often those in the aster family (lettuces) and the mint family (basil), germinate better in sunlight. These should be covered, if at all, with the thinnest layer of mix you can manage. Check with the seed retailer or garden books like the one I linked to above for more information on the needs of the seeds you want to grow.

As for watering, you want the mix to be moist but not soaking wet. Using a watering can to water your carefully planted containers risks dislodging the seeds, a serious problem if you have planted multiple kinds of seeds in a single container and depend on their staying where you put them to know what they are. It’s much better to water your containers from the bottom. Just put them in a larger, water-holding container (a stoppered sink is convenient) and add water carefully, avoiding getting it into the container with the seeds, till the water level is just below the top of the mix. You may need to hold down the container with the seeds while you add water as dry mix will be less dense than water so the container will float. Once the mix has absorbed enough water so that the top surface of the mix is moist, remove the container and let it drain in a safe place; in a sink you can remove the stopper and let the container drain. After the seedlings appear and grow a couple of leaves, they will be well enough rooted that you can water from the top with a watering can if you prefer. The bigger the seedlings grow, the more often you’ll need to water.

Finally, many garden books and sites say that if you are re-using containers from year to year, you should soak them in a mild bleach solution to kill “germs” that might harm your seedlings. I never do this. Chlorine bleach is very energy-intensive to prepare and ship, and the gaseous chlorine from which it is made is extremely hazardous. If you are worried about carrying over “germs” on the containers, try washing them in soap and water and letting them dry in sunlight. I don’t even do that much, however, and I don’t have excessive problems with seedlings dying. Generally I sow enough extra seeds to make up for any seedlings that die. The best prevention for “germs” and disease is not to over-water the containers and not to cover them.

This completes my series on starting seeds. Happy growing!

Seed starting the Living Low Way, part 2

In the previous post I discussed how you can create a good environment for growing seedlings in a number of different ways, with attention to how to do this using no or a minimum of fossil fuel energy. In this post I will look at appropriate growing media (soil or a soil-like mix) that will allow you to grow the strongest seedlings you can.

You might think that the best medium for seed-starting would be the soil right outside your door (if you own the property and can legally dig up that soil, of course). The advantage to using soil is that it is free and costs only your own energy to dig it up. Presumably it is already growing something, or did so at one time, so it should be able to grow the seedlings you want. And that might be true if you have a very light, loose, fertile soil. However, most of us, myself included, find that soil straight from the yard does not work well in containers; it is too heavy and often is not fertile enough. For those of you who have not grown seedlings before, another disadvantage of using soil is that it harbors lots of seeds of various kinds of plants already in it - you may call them “weeds” - that are as happy or more so to germinate as the seeds you planted. You may find it difficult to determine which are the seedlings you planted and meant to grow from the forest of others that pop up.

If you have not grown seeds before, or if you have but you cannot obtain the materials mentioned below for homemade media, I suggest you stick with the seed-starting media that are available for sale through a trusted local garden center or through a good mail-order site like those I have mentioned in previous posts. These media are formulated to work well in small containers and they harbor very few, if any, weed seeds. The lack of weed seeds is the major reason I recommend them to new seed-growers. Buy only as much media as you need and change over to a homemade mix once you are confident that you can recognize the seedlings you want to grow. With the commercial seed-starting mixes you will need to pay careful attention to the proper moisture level in the mix. Some of them are very difficult to re-wet if they should dry out. (If this happens, put the container in a larger container of water that comes almost but not quite up to the top of the mix, and leave the container in the water until the mix is moist again.) Also, it is best to purchase seed-starting media as opposed to a mix formulated for potted plants. Seedlings have somewhat different needs than established plants. Some seed-starting media may not have high enough nutrient levels to sustain seedlings for several weeks, so you may need to water occasionally with a dilute solution of (preferably organic) fertilizer. The better mixes may not be an issue in this regard. Check the label and ask garden center staff or the staff of your favorite mail order company what they recommend in this regard.

Once you are confident you can recognize the seedlings you mean to be growing, whether from having grown them before or from photos (search using a phrase like "picture of tomato seedlings"), and if you have access to the needed ingredients, you can make your own seed starting mix for free. At a minimum, you need well-made compost. By well-made compost, I mean compost made from a reasonable mix of dry, highly carbonaceous materials like autumn leaves or paper and wet materials like fresh grass clippings, food scraps, or garden weeds. The compost should have aged enough that you cannot recognize the individual materials that went into it and and it should have an earthy smell. Any good gardening book including the ones I discussed in last winter’s posts, and probably your state Extension office on the web (see here for Missouri’s), has directions for making compost if you don’t already know how to do this. Someday I might write a post on how I make compost as it seems to be good quality compost and requires little effort on my part. But for now, let’s assume you have your own compost on hand and go from there.

You can use straight compost as a seed-starting medium if you sift it or otherwise remove the large lumps. Some garden suppliers offer a screen that fits on top of a bucket for this purpose. You load compost onto the screen and push it through the screen with your (gloved) hands. The sifted compost falls into the bucket. Continue till all that is left on the screen are various pieces that are too large to go through the screen. You use what is in the bucket to start seeds and dump what is on the screen either back into the compost pile to further decompose or elsewhere in the yard where it can re-enter the ecosystem. You can fashion a sifter of your own by constructing a shallow bottomless box that will fit over a bucket or, for larger quantities, over a wheelbarrow or garden cart and attaching 1/2 inch square hardware cloth to the bottom of the box.

Although you can use the sifted compost by itself for starting seeds, it can be extended and improved by mixing it with garden soil. John Jeavons’ book discusses making seed starting media from a mix of garden soil and compost; this is the method that I use. You don’t need to double-dig to get the soil as he does; just dig some up out of your garden when you need it. You may need to experiment to find out how much garden soil you can mix with the compost and still have a light enough material to work well in small containers. We have a silt loam soil and I find the best mix is about two parts compost to one part soil. If you have a clayey soil you may need to use a higher proportion of compost. If you have a very light sandy soil you may find a higher proportion of soil works better. I keep large plastic containers of garden soil and sifted compost in the basement, where they will be unfrozen in winter when I begin making seed-starting mix. To make the mix, I measure out the components into a bucket, using a plastic cup as the part measure, and mix them together in the bucket, using my hands and a cultivating tool that fits in the bucket to get the components as thoroughly mixed as possible. I don’t sift the soil because we have so few rocks in our soil as to not be an issue; you may find you need to sift the soil as well as the compost to make a non-lumpy mix. I do remove any sticks, rocks, and other debris that I see and crush big lumps of soil before and while mixing.

Before I had a worm bin, I made all of my seed starting mix with only compost and soil. Plants like lettuce and cabbage that don’t need a highly fertile soil did well enough in this mix. Tomato seedlings, however, grew quite slowly and had a purplish cast characteristic of lack of phosphorus. Because worm castings are high in nitrogen and phosphorus, I started adding them in small quantities to my homemade seed-starting mix. It made a big positive difference in tomato and pepper seedling health and growth. If you have access to homemade worm castings, use it in your seed starting mix (it’s worth keeping a worm bin going if you grow a lot of seedlings or container plants so you always have a free source of castings). A good ratio is one part of worm castings to a total of 8 to 12 parts of other ingredients; worm castings can burn your plants in too high a concentration. If you don’t have enough castings to make sufficient mix for all the seedlings you want to start, add castings to only the mix for plants that need a lot of nutrients to grow well (for vegetables, this includes tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants, probably okra as well). Some garden centers sell bagged worm castings if you don’t have your own and find that your seedlings need the nutrient boost.

Looks like I had enough to say on media that I need to make a separate post on containers. So be it; I’ll plan to write that post over the next week.

The Living Low approach to seed starting, part 1

Almost a year ago I promised a post on low-cost, low-resource ways to start and grow any seeds that you have determined will do better with an early start under controlled conditions. Now that seed starting time is approaching for those of us who garden in the St. Louis area or other places with similar climates, here is that post, the first of however many it takes me to give you the information I would have liked to have when I began.

I’ll be starting onion and leek seeds this week (crops I didn’t discuss in my earlier post on direct sowing versus starting seeds inside, but they are also good candidates for indoor starting and transplanting because they take a long time to sprout and grow and need to be planted early to grow well, in late March to early April around here). Some other seeds, such as cabbage family plants, can be started within the next few weeks. So purchase your seeds if you haven’t already, and start collecting materials you’ll need for growing them.

In order to start seeds early, you need these things (besides the seeds, of course):
1. A suitable environment in which to grow them;
2. Soil or a soil-like medium in which the seeds can germinate and grow; and
3. Containers to hold the soil and seeds that will fit into the environment in which they will grow and not cause damage to anything you care about in that environment.

I will deal with each of these in turn, emphasizing using what you already have on hand or can obtain free or at low cost. This post discusses the environment seeds need. I’ll discuss the next two issues in the next post, planned for later this week (if needed I will continue into a third post next week).

A suitable environment is one which can be kept at the temperatures at which your seeds germinate and/or grow best (these are not necessarily the same), has sufficient lighting for good seedling growth, is not damaged by water leakage from the containers, and is easy for you, the gardener, to work in. Very generally, you want an area that you can keep above freezing and not so warm it cooks your seeds or plants (40F to 90F works for most seeds and seedlings; some seeds need 70-90F to germinate but the seedlings grow best at somewhat lower temperatures), is lit brightly by sunlight or artificial lighting, and is protected from water by some means or will not be damaged by leaking water.

If you want to start seeds early and you don’t have any space except a windowsill, first make sure that you have a suitable window. Seedlings need a lot of light to grow well; that means a south facing window or at least whatever window faces most nearly south that you have. That window should not be shaded by outside plants and you should be willing to not cover it during the day. If your windowsill is very narrow, place a shelf or a small table (a tray table works well) next to the window that extends out from the window about two feet at most. Any farther from the window than that will not have enough light to grow seedlings well. You’ll want to turn your seedling containers every few days to keep your seedlings growing as close to straight up as possible, otherwise they will lean in toward the window and their stems will elongate as they grow. They won’t grow as stocky as will plants grown on a sun porch or in a cold frame because of the dimmer light even a south facing window has, but they will do OK. Since your south facing window real estate is limited, decide what is most valuable to grow as seedlings based on your gardening goals and what will do best in the conditions inside your living space. Often this will be tomatoes. They are a good choice for windowsill growing because you don’t need many plants to get a lot of tomatoes, they grow well inside most peoples’ homes in March and April, and you have a much wider choice of varieties available from seeds than from started plants. However, you can as easily start lettuce or cabbage or many kinds of herbs or annual flower seeds, for example, on your windowsill. Make sure that any water draining from the containers will not damage the windowsill or any extensions out from it and water the containers as needed. You’ll need to harden off the seedlings (acclimate them over a week or two to outside conditions by putting them outside for an increasing number of hours each day, then bringing them back inside for the rest of the day) before planting them. If you don’t, they will sunburn and dry out in the wind and may die from too-rapid exposure to harsh outside conditions.

If you want to start lots of different kinds of plants from seeds, you will likely need more space than a south facing window provides. If you have a glassed-in porch of which the longest wall faces anywhere but north, you have an ideal setup to raise a lot of high-quality seedlings. Most such porches will stay within the 40F-90F range without your attention during March and April except on the warmest days when you will probably want to open up the porch anyway. (If you do open the porch windows, be sure to close them again at night if the temperature will drop below freezing!) To start seeds like peppers that need more constant warmth than a sun porch provides in winter to early spring, you will need to use a heat mat. A heat mat is a rubber or plastic sheet with a wire embedded in it that is connected to a plug; electricity traveling through the wire heats up the wire and thus the mat. Containers with seeds are placed on top of the mat so they are heated from the bottom. A heat mat requires a fair amount of electricity (though much less than heating the whole porch!) so you will want to limit its use to just those seeds that most need the extra warmth for good germination (peppers, eggplants, maybe tomatoes, and certain herbs and flowers) and just during the time that you are germinating the seeds as the seedlings prefer growing on at ambient porch temperatures. Keep an eye on all the containers, especially any containers on a heat mat, to make sure they stay moist enough, and water as needed. If you are just beginning to raise plants from seeds, choose one or a few types of plants to try while you work out your system. If your porch has large air leaks to the outside, fix those before starting seeds so you can keep the environment more constant. Your plants will do better the closer you position them to the glass, but you won’t need to turn your plants often if at all and you can grow farther back from the windows than two feet because most porches have a lot more light entering than does a lone window. If you open your porch windows when it is warm enough, your seedlings will not need to be hardened off. Now that I have a south facing glassed in porch, I start almost all seeds on it except for the ones that need exposure to winter conditions to germinate.

If you don’t have a porch but you do have a reasonably flat and sunny space outside, you can build a cheap and effective cold frame for starting seeds. A cold frame is a bottomless box on which the top face is angled away from the horizontal (the north end is taller than the south end to catch low-angled early spring sunlight) and covered with glass or plastic. The cold frame becomes quite warm on sunny days and stays warmer than outside conditions at night. Below is a picture of two cold frames we used to have. Our current cold frame is located behind our garage and is about the same size and shape as the front frame in the picture.

Each cold frame in the photo was about ten feet long by three feet wide. On the frame in front the rear side was about eighteen inches high while the front side was about six inches high. The rear side of the frame in back was about three feet high as it was used to overwinter tall crops. The frame in front was only used for seed starting so it is closer to what you might want to construct; our current cold frame has its rear side about two feet tall, which I think works better. We constructed each frame from scrap plywood and 2x4s and salvaged glass windows and screens, so the openings fit the windows we had on hand. In order to hold the windows or screens on the frame when it is windy, I use salvaged bricks as weights, placed near the corners. You will find lots of design ideas by doing an internet search or looking at gardening books. The frames last a few years before the wood rots if you do not use any wood preservatives. Linseed oil might make a good nontoxic preservative, but I have not used it so far (maybe on the next one I will). If built from a rot-resistant wood the frames would last longer but we did not have any on hand when we built any of our frames. You could use UV resistant plastic instead of glass if you don’t have access to salvaged glass; check local gardening supply stores or catalogs or building salvage yards for this. Some gardening catalogs sell cold frames but you can make your own for a lot less money. Size it to fit the space and materials you have on hand and the number of seedlings you want to grow. A frame the size of ours holds a lot of seedlings (I grow about 300 seedlings each year). Build a one window frame if you are just starting out and expand as needed later on.

To use a cold frame, put it down on the ground or on whatever other bottom surface you have, put your seed-starting containers inside, and cover the openings with glass or plastic or window screen as needed, held down against the wind. The pictured cold frames sat on the ground in our back yard. Our current frame sits on a blacktopped area behind the garage. I prefer the blacktop because it holds heat better and doesn’t get moles tunneling under it or have as much insect or disease pressure as might be the case for a frame sitting on the ground, but either way works. You’ll cover the frame with glass or plastic for growing most seeds, but if you are starting seeds of native plants that need cold, moist conditions to germinate, cover them with screens like the front cold frame in the photo and start them by early January. You should monitor the cold frame daily (unless you are growing native seeds under screens during winter; you can leave them alone until warm spring weather dries the seed starting medium enough to need watering). The need for daily monitoring is the biggest disadvantage to a cold frame covered with glass or plastic. On sunny days such a cold frame can get very hot, up to 100F or higher, if you don’t ventilate it. Temperatures that high will kill seeds and seedlings. To ventilate, I push heavy windows like those shown on the rear frame either up or down a few inches to expose some space at the top of one or more openings and at the bottom of one or more, which allows cooler outside air to enter at the bottom and warmer inside air to flow out the top. Or I remove the windows entirely and cover the openings with screens. Or I prop up either the low or high end of the window to leave space for air circulation. You will find ideas for props in cold frame design publications. You must pay attention to the weather and replace the windows before the outside temperature drops below freezing! It’s best to replace the windows before sunset but it can be done afterward. Usually by early April it is warm enough most of the time that I replace the windows with screens except when the occasional below-freezing night is forecast; in that case I put on the windows at night and take them off the next morning. I also cover the cold frame with a tarp to keep heat from radiating out through the glass. The other thing you need to monitor is the moisture level of the growing medium; water as needed for the kind of plants you are growing. Sunny days that heat up the inside of the frame will increase your seedlings’ need for water.  Currently I move seedlings from the sun porch to the cold frame as I prick them out into individual cells of a cell pack or into small pots. In this way I can control the environment better during critical germination and early growth periods, moving seedlings to the frame when they can better take the more changeable conditions in the frame and leaving room on the porch for other plants and seeds.

If your garden space grows beyond what you can plant with seedlings grown on a windowsill and you don’t have a suitable porch or space for a cold frame, using artificial lighting in a basement or spare room to grow seedlings can make sense. To do this cheaply, purchase or salvage a 4 foot long fluorescent shop light (far cheaper than the specialized lights the fancy garden catalogs sell for the purpose). Use one warm fluorescent tube and one cool tube in the light; the combo gives light close in quality to the expensive grow light tubes and costs a lot less. Plug the shop light into a timer and set the timer to keep the light on for 16 hours each day. Suspend the light over a table or shelf about 4 feet long and about 2 feet wide, the largest area one light can illuminate well enough to grow seedlings. We hung two lights on adjustable chains from the basement ceiling and put an old, fake wood rectangular dining room table covered with two 4 foot long and 2 foot wide trays (the kind sold for the very expensive grow light systems for sale in garden catalogs; you might be able to find or make something similar for less money) under the lights. You need to adjust the height of either the light or the plants so the plants are within a couple of inches of the light as they grow. You also want to protect the surface of the table or shelf from leaking water, hence the trays, and to supply the seeds and seedlings with the temperatures they need. In our unheated basement I could only start seeds preferring cool conditions to germinate without using a heat mat to heat the bottom of the containers. Those mats suck up a lot of electricity, as do the lights, so you will want to start no more seeds than absolutely necessary in order to minimize the material and electricity cost. You will need to harden off all the seedlings you grow under artificial light as described for growing seedlings on windowsills, and the seedlings will not be as healthy as seedlings grown on a porch or in a cold frame. I no longer start any seeds under artificial light because I have a porch and a cold frame that produce much healthier seedlings and lots more of them. But before I had either I started seeds under artificial light because I had insufficient window space for starting them.

More plans for 2013

In the previous post I described garden plans for 2013. In this post I’ll look at some ways that we hope to increase garden resilience to the effects of drought and reduce our usage of electricity and natural gas.

Reducing the impact of drought

St. Louis suffered from the drought of 2012; in fact, the most recent U.S. Drought Monitor continues to show the metro area in moderate drought. As I mentioned in this post, we used an excessive amount of water last summer compared to the same period in previous years. Even in a normal year we typically have anywhere from three to six weeks of hot, dry weather sometime in the growing season during which I rely on municipal water supplies to sustain my vegetable garden. That’s fine as long as the municipal system can reliably deliver the water and we can afford to pay for it, but we cannot count on either continuing to occur every year. Last year the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers from which most of our municipal water is drawn had good flows from sufficient rains in the previous few years. This year, however, both rivers are at low levels, and there has been little snowfall so far this winter in their watersheds. Should we experience drought this summer, we might be faced with water restrictions. I’d rather design the garden to need less water and meet a higher percentage of its needs through the rainfall we do get. At the same time, 2008 had the highest yearly precipitation total and 2009 the fifth highest measured in St. Louis, so whatever I do needs to be resilient for possible above-normal rainfall as well as drought.

While I haven’t taken a permaculture design course, I have tried to design our yard according to my understanding of permaculture principles. A permacultural viewpoint suggests increasing our ability to catch and hold rainfall where my garden plants can access it. Increasing the organic matter content of soils, mulching, and designing swales to catch and soak in rain that hits the ground are all included in the permaculture toolkit. Since the biggest need for municipal water during drought periods is for the vegetable gardens, I am considering how I might do a better job in all three areas.

With regard to organic matter, some complications arise from sustainability requirements. I could add more organic matter to the gardens than I have been doing, but I’d have to import it from other locations. I’m trying to use only what compost and other organic material I can make or have on hand. If I rake more leaves from the front yard to make compost, those leaves won’t be mulching my front yard plantings and they might need watering in that case. I do, however, have a pile of plant stems from past years’ herb and flower gardens slowly decomposing elsewhere in the yard. I might try to make more compost from the pile materials for use in the vegetable gardens, as the herb and flower beds require very little if any irrigation. I have also sown some of the vegetable beds to crimson clover for the winter, which should hold more nutrients in the soil (and hold the soil during windy periods). The clover can be dug in or composted before planting the next crop to increase organic matter content. In 2013 I plan to try interplanting each bed with crimson clover seed to further increase nutrient cycling, reduce weeds, and increase organic matter content over time. However, I will have to watch in case the interplanting increases water needs in summer; if so, I’ll remove the clover and compost it, then return the compost to the soil later on.

As for mulching, I use mulches (wood chips, autumn leaves, and/or a living mulch of violets and other groundcover plants) on the herb and flower gardens, but mulching doesn’t work in my more traditionally managed vegetable garden, which I cultivate with a broadfork or shovel and weed with a hoe. The crimson clover interplant may, however, act as a living mulch if I can plant it at the right density. Permaculturists look askance at digging for its disruption of the soil’s mycelial network, but a traditional vegetable garden in full sun might be best viewed as a disturbed meadow which is prevented from succeeding to forest by further disturbance. In this case a mycelial network does not form. However, if I can get a crimson clover living mulch established in the vegetable garden, I might be able to reduce or eliminate digging and weeding and also increase the capacity of the soil to hold water.

While I have been collecting information on designing and digging swales, so far I have not put this information to practical use. I will be looking more closely at the situation this year.

A different approach to decreasing irrigation needs is to increase spacing of the plants in the vegetable beds to be more compatible with available rainfall. While Ecology Action claims that closely-planted beds actually require less water on a square foot basis than traditional row-based spacings and that small amount of water can be supplied through irrigation in many cases, Steve Solomon claims that it is better to space plants much more widely if one is relying on (possibly insufficient) rainfall. The wider spacings mean each plant will not be competing for others and will thus yield more food than the same number of plants grown at closer spacing. A compromise position, one that Steve himself suggests, is to start with the closer spacing but then remove enough plants to create the wide spacings he recommends if rainfall proves to be insufficient and irrigation is not available. This approach makes sense to me. I should have done it last year, but I could not bring myself to rip out plants after I’d put so much effort into them and since we were not under water restrictions. This year I will do it if we get hit with water restrictions, and I will consider doing it if the Drought Monitor shows us at severe or worse drought and the weather patterns suggest that insufficient rainfall is expected to break that drought for a few weeks or more. If I am in the mood for a real scientific experiment, I can increase spacing for a portion of one of my crops and keep separate records of yields for that portion compared to the normal spacing, watering them (or not watering them) the same amount. 

Last month our new tool shed, shown in the photo at the beginning of this post, was installed where a dying silver maple tree had been removed last spring. With the tree gone, the vegetable gardens receive more afternoon sunlight and suffer less competition for nutrients with the maple roots. The tool shed is located closer to the gardens than the garage and the basement and has enough room to hold all the garden tools and supplies that used to be scattered across those two locations. A further benefit is that the tool shed is located at the highest point of the yard. This year we will add gutters and downspouts to the shed roof and direct the rainwater from the roof into a 500 gallon plastic tank. From there we can gravity-feed collected rainwater onto the gardens when needed and direct overflow to mulched garden paths or, if I get swales dug in time, to the swales for infiltration into the soil. The stored rainwater should replace a portion of the municipal water we’d otherwise use for irrigation.

Reducing use of electricity and natural gas

Mike and I cook on an electric stove, cool with a central air conditioner or electric fans, obtain winter heat from a forced-air natural gas furnace that requires electricity to operate the thermostat and the igniter and to power the blower, heat water with natural gas, keep foods cool with an electric refrigerator, and wash clothes with an electric washing machine. Through means such as setting the thermostat to 60F most of the time in winter and 82F for air conditioning, setting the water heater to 125F, insulating the hot water pipes and adding insulation to the walls, attic floor, and basement ceiling, sealing air leaks, and replacing inefficient old appliances with very energy efficient versions, we have reduced natural gas consumption by about three-quarters and electricity consumption by about 40% compared to what we used for a comparably sized house in 1990. However, we’d like to reduce consumption of each further and to be prepared to do without each for periods of time. Our biggest vulnerability is winter heating; our only backup source of heat at this time is a small kerosene heater. We use heat most days from November through March. While we use air conditioning for many fewer days than heating, it accounts for a considerable fraction of our total electricity use and cooking accounts for some of the remainder, so we need to work on these as well.

Our house was built in 1928, when coal-fired furnaces were very popular in our area. Our house has a round platform on the basement floor that supported a coal furnace and an opening in the basement wall through which coal was loaded into the basement. Coal furnaces typically burned hot; I’ve heard most people with coal furnaces kept at least one window partially opened in winter to balance the heat from the furnace. With that kind of heat fireplaces weren’t needed, and our house has none, so we do not have an easy way to add a source of wood heating. The chimney is on the east wall of the house outside of the kitchen and has a double flue. One flue would have been used for the coal furnace. We believe the other was used for a coal or wood stove in the kitchen for cooking; the chimney’s location and double flue suggest this possibility. St. Louis regulated the burning of high-volatiles coal in 1940 to reduce its smog problem; as a result households gradually switched to natural gas, oil, or electric furnaces and cooking stoves. The previous owner told us the house had an oil furnace when she and her husband purchased it in the early 1960s, but she’d replaced it with a natural gas furnace in the 1970s when oil prices rose drastically. We replaced that furnace with a 94% efficient unit that vents into a pipe through the wall. The natural gas service was not extended to the kitchen, so we cook on the electric stove that came with the house. The house had an electric water heater in the basement when we bought it. We’ve since replaced it with a natural gas water heater that vents through an insert in one of the two chimney flues. Nothing vents through the other flue at present. 

For short term electricity outages we can cook on a camp stove and a fire pit, bake with a solar oven, and use flashlights, oil lamps, and a solar lantern for lighting. When we are not using heat we do not find going without electric service to be a burden, especially if we have some ice available so we can hold refrigerated foods in coolers (in the winter we can keep foods cool in our cold storage area). However, lack of electric service in the winter means no heat. For a few days we could use the kerosene heater, but that is a short-term solution at best. If we had a wood-burning stove that we could heat and cook on, we could better handle short duration electric outages and, as we accumulated a supply of wood, gradually reduce use of fossil fuels for heating and cooking. I wouldn’t want to cook inside on a wood-burning stove during the summer, but if we had a summer kitchen set up in a shady location, we could shift some of our summer cooking outside, reducing excess heat in the house.

For 2013 we will concentrate on providing ourselves with a shady sitting area that can double as a summer kitchen. We already have a patio on the east side of the house with a structure on which we can suspend a tarpaulin to provide shade. However, the cheap plastic tarps we’ve used in the past don’t last more than one summer. This year we’ll purchase a canvas tarp that should prove to be more durable. We’d also like to add an awning extending out from the north wall of the house to cover a larger area that would eventually become the main area for summer cooking and other activities. I am planning to build a small rocket stove to see how it works compared to the Weber kettle and hibachi that we already have for summer cooking. I’ll keep you posted as the summer sitting area and kitchen develops! I don’t want to consider replacing the electric stove with a wood heating and cooking stove until we have a summer kitchen set up that we actually use, so this will be the focus of our efforts in 2013.

Garden Plans for 2013

Now that the new year has begun and we are in the middle of winter, I have time to plan for this year’s garden and also to make plans for becoming more resilient overall. Here is a look at garden planning for 2013 at Living Low Acre.

Recently I created a spreadsheet of the highest yields I have obtained on a square-foot basis over the 12 years I have kept detailed records for each crop. For each crop I listed the variety, garden spacing (in one of three different columns depending on whether I used the square foot method, Jeavons’ triangular spacing, or Solomon’s row spacing for that variety), sowing and transplanting (if applicable) dates, the measured yield in pounds per 100 square feet, and a code of L, M, or H to indicate the correspondence of my yield to what is claimed in the 8th edition of How to Grow More Vegetables. My intention is to better understand the factors that affect yield in my growing conditions. For certain varieties of tomatoes, for instance, I can exceed the best yields in HTGMV by a factor of 2 in the best years. For most of the crops that prefer cooler growing conditions, on the other hand, I have found it difficult to obtain high, or even medium, yields. You can see the results for yourself in the two images below. (I had to print out and then scan each page of the spreadsheet because I don’t know Blogger well enough to determine if I can upload the spreadsheets directly. The column headings for the second image are the same as for the first image. The backgrounds are different colors because I printed each page on the back of previously used paper and the two sheets are of different ages.)

The only crops that met or exceeded my expectations for yield in 2012 were tomatoes, garden peas, blackeyed peas, leeks, and carrots. Tomatoes and blackeyed peas loved the hot, dry summer, and the blackeyed peas matured earlier than the Black Turtle dry beans, thus avoiding fall rains that caused some of the bean crop to mold or germinate in the pod. Garden peas do surprisingly well here, although I have not tried to save seed for them, which would reduce yields as I’d have to leave some of the patch unharvested until the pea seeds matured and dried. I think my success with leeks and carrots had much to do with my planting them at the right time and, in the case of carrots, leaving them to grow for the entire season instead of harvesting them in midsummer and then trying to sow them again in late summer for a fall crop. The carrots that I left to grow all summer long and harvested in fall grew quite large but still remained crisp and flavorful. Leeks continued to grow throughout summer and fall, unlike the onions which had to mature during much hotter weather than they prefer, lowering their yield.

As I looked over seed catalogs and pondered how to improve my garden, several things struck me as worth trying in 2013.

1. I’m going to stop trying to grow kale and collards as a spring crop. We didn’t use enough of them in spring and early summer compared to bok choy, cabbage, and broccoli. Once July hit, a combination of heat and harlequin bugs killed all of the kale and most of the collards. What I plan to do this year is to grow a spring and early summer crop of bok choy, cabbage, and broccoli.  All of these will be harvested in June through early July. Mike will turn much of the cabbage crop into sauerkraut for eating through winter. Then I will remove all brassicas from the garden until I direct-seed for fall crops in an effort to reduce the harlequin bug population. In the fall I’ll try growing bok choy, turnips, rutabaga, storage radishes, and very cold-tolerant varieties of kale, collards, tatsoi, arugula, and mustard greens. I’ll harvest the bok choy, turnips, rutabagas, and radishes before winter and leave some of each of the others in the garden, uncovered, to see if they will overwinter for me. Last winter the low never dropped below 10F at our house; varieties that are supposed to survive to 6F can be found here.

2. I plan to grow more carrots, beets, and parsnips in 2013. I’ll sow all of these in the spring and leave all of them (except for the Cylindra beets) in the ground until after the first fall frosts. My observations from 2012 suggests this should increase the weight harvested per unit area and allow me to store more food for eating in winter and spring of 2014. The Cylindra beets are fast-growing so I hope to get two crops, a summer and fall crop, out of them; if that doesn’t work, I’ll drop them and grow only the sugar beets after this year.

3. With the weird, changeable weather we get it’s hard to know whether to grow Irish potatoes or sweet potatoes. I like Irish potatoes better, but they prefer a longer stretch of cool weather than we get here in the spring or fall. It’s hard to store potatoes during our hot summer weather. Sweet potatoes grow very well during hot summers, but the year we got 12 inches of rain in October, the entire crop rotted before I could dig it up. While they store very well during the winter and I have been able to use stored sweet potatoes to generate the next summer’s crop, I don’t like them as well as Irish potatoes. This year, I’ll try both again, planting 75% of the space to Irish potatoes and 25% of the space to sweet potatoes, and let them fight it out for yield, storage, and kitchen use qualities. May the best potato win ...

4. I used the spreadsheet above to set up my garden calendar and garden plan, in an effort to obtain more-consistent yields from every crop. At the end of next year we’ll see if I was successful; I’ll refine the plan each year so I can provide more of the food we eat every year.

5. New garden crops I’m trying this year include tomatillos, ground cherries, rutabagas, parsnips, and peanuts; two new varieties each of tomatoes, eggplants, and cabbage; and one new variety each of sweet pepper, dent corn, lettuce, Irish potato, and sweet potato. I also plan to try a different trellising system for cucumbers, melons, and squash in hopes of increasing yields for all of these. I’ve set up two new garden areas in which I plan to try some perennial vegetable crops such as scorzonera, Siberian pea shrub, daylily as a food plant (flower buds), perennial onions, and chicory as well as add space for growing pole beans on trellises. I plan to try a few new herbs as well. Finally, I will try again to grow tea (Camellia sinensis) on the east side of our house in place of the bridalveil spiraea shrubs currently in that area. Wish me luck on the last; the tea plants I have in containers suffered from the heat in the summer, but I hope that their roots might stay cooler if planted in the ground on the shadier east side of the house. I’ll put a wind barrier up to protect them from winter winds. The tea plants I ordered are reputed to survive Zone 7 winters, a criterion St. Louis has met for the past 12 years.

I’ll put the rest of the plans in a second, hopefully shorter, post next week. After that I plan to (finally) write the post on low-cost ways to start seeds and then continue the series on how I got here.