Independence Day challenge, week ending March 21

Anyone who lives in the Midwest knows this has been an extraordinarily warm March. My apple trees are blooming. That's right - apple trees that don't usually bloom till mid April. Most leaf buds have broken open and the leaves are beginning to expand. Our last frost isn't generally until sometime in April, but the way things are going, we might not get another frost. Still, I'm keeping to my usual garden schedule. This is the Midwest, after all, and anything can happen.

Here's a photo of our front yard. You'll notice the redbuds blooming on the left (west) side. In a normal spring the redbuds would not be blooming for another two weeks or so.

Here is my Independence Day report for the previous week. Check out Sharon Astyk's blog for more on the Independence Day challenge.

Plant: two different varieties of potatoes, a total of 200 square feet. I've also been pricking-out seedlings into larger quarters.

Harvest: a couple of pounds of asparagus; shiitake mushrooms; and one bluegill from the pond in the nearby county park.

Preserve: my DH cooked up some of the stored sunchokes and froze them, as we need to use them up before they sprout.

Waste not: used corrugated cardboard and rotting wood from a former cold frame as mulch liner to kill some of the grass inside the newly-fenced portion of the vegetable garden. Re-used 100 feet of old fencing so we only had to buy 50 feet of new fence, and re-used posts so we didn't have to buy any new posts. Re-using cell packs for the pricked-out seedlings (and the cell packs were trash-picked to begin with).

Want not: purchased 50 pounds of organic flour from a mill in the upper Midwest. Finally purchased the latest version of Office that our computer's OS will accept, to add a few years of usefulness to it (and got the software on sale at that). Piped up the rain barrel overflow to the rain garden, and buried the drainpipe this time so larger critters won't be able to tear it up to get at the smaller critters that hide in it.

Eat the food: asparagus; the remaining unplanted seed potatoes; sunchokes and radishes from storage; shiitake mushrooms; (tiny) fillets from the bluegill.

Community food systems: doing my best to get the veggie garden planted and the whole yard looking as good as possible by May 20, when our yard is included on a local garden tour.

Skill up: nothing specific this week.

Herding Worms for Fun and (Garden) Profit

One of my friends wanted to know about homemade worm bins and about caring for the worms. Since I have a homemade bin and have been caring for worms and using their products for several years, I thought this would make a good blog post.

I do not disrespect the worm bins available for purchase. As another friend commented, it’s easier and less messy to remove worm castings and worm tea from commercial bins. If you have the money, you can buy a good bin and enjoy all the benefits of it. That said, those of us who are living low by choice or necessity may not wish to, or be able to, purchase a good commercial worm bin. I preferred not to and so rigged up the homemade version and learned how to work with the worms. If you’re willing to get up close and personal with worms and their products, you too can keep worms in a free or cheap bin and enjoy the benefits.

Worms are a form of livestock - a small, pink, and wiggly form that’s easy to manage in a small space. As with any livestock, you must meet their needs in order to be a successful worm herder. Your worms need food, water, shelter, and each other, and they need to have their waste products removed before too much piles up. You can provide all of their needs in a small enclosed space located in a cool area like a basement, closet, or cabinet under a sink, and you can use things you’d otherwise throw out to provide their food and bedding. Their waste products, known as worm castings and worm tea, make excellent fertilizer for container plants, seedlings, and gardens. The worms themselves are good fishing bait or can be part of the food source for other animals such as spiders, amphibians, reptiles, or chickens.

As with any gardening topic, lots of people have developed lots of different worm bins and methods to manage their worms. I’ll tell you how I do it below; you can search for worm bins on the ‘Net to learn more. At the end, I’ll suggest an improved version of homemade bin that some of you might want to try.

Below is a photo of my worm bin. It’s the familiar brand of blue plastic tub with lid. Dimensions are approximately 20 inches long by 13 inches wide by 8 inches high. There isn’t anything special about this size, except that the height is within the 8 to 12 inches usually recommended for a worm bin. We’d purchased it for some other reason but it wasn’t being used at the time I wanted to start a worm bin. In practice, it’s too small to accept all the fruit and vegetable wastes that Mike and I produce; a bin twice this size would be needed if we fed all this waste to our worms (we compost what the worms can’t eat). The bin is in our basement because it stays within the 50-80ish F temperature range that worms can tolerate. You can put yours wherever you have the space as long as that space stays within the temperature range.

You’ll be herding red wigglers, a type of red or fishing worm that goes by the scientific name of Eisenia foetida. If you know someone who has a worm bin, ask her/him if you can have some worms to get your bin going. If you don’t know anyone to ask for some worms, buy one or two pounds of fishing worms (not nightcrawlers; that’s a different species) depending on the size of your bin from a local bait supplier.

Bedding for the worms is waste paper. Any sort of paper works, including newsprint, junk mail, and office paper, although you might prefer to avoid glossy ad inserts as some of the inks may have toxic ingredients. Colored newsprint uses soy-based ink which is supposed to be nontoxic. You’ll need to tear the paper into strips about 1 inch wide since your worms can’t do this themselves. If you’re shredding paper for security reasons, the shreds make excellent bedding and save you some work. If you can find a hand-crank newspaper shredder like the one Mike found among his dad’s tools (see photo below), use it to shred paper. Autumn leaves also work as bedding, if you don’t have sufficient waste paper.

Your worms’ food and water source is the fruit and vegetable waste that your household produces: all the parts that you don’t eat can be fed to worms. If it’s rotting or moldy, the worms won’t mind. Our worms do fine on tea leaves and coffee grounds; in fact, these constitute a large percentage of their diet. Our worms don’t get along well with excess citrus waste, like one or more citrus fruits’ worth of waste for two or more days in a row. I don’t know if it has to do with the citrus waste being too acidic or if there might be something that is toxic to worms in the waste. The occasional citrus peel may not be a problem, but I keep it out of our worm bin (it’s fine in our compost pile). The only veggie waste I might not feed to our worms are peanut shells, and only because it takes a long time for them to break down. You can put fruit pits in the bin, but they are too hard for the worms to eat, so you’d do better to compost them separately.

As for other food waste, the worms don’t mind eggshells, but they don’t break down rapidly. It might be best to crush the shells before you put them in the worm bin, or a compost pile for that matter. All the worm bin information I’ve read says not to put meat, fat, or dairy waste in the worm bin. In my experience, the occasional bit of salad waste with an oily dressing, or the occasional bit of a cheese or meat sandwich that didn’t get eaten, doesn’t seem to bother our worms, but they might not appreciate a steady diet of these. For all I know, the live worms might be eating the dead ones. Something must be, since the bin doesn’t fill up with dead worms.

Our worms seem to do fine on the water which comes in with the various sorts of wastes that they get fed. If the bedding ever seems too dry, you can sprinkle some water on it - but be careful if you do. Worms like some moisture but not so much that they can’t breathe.

Look back at the photo of our bin, and you’ll notice that the bin appears to be sitting inside a larger tray. It’s actually propped above the tray by two bricks. I drilled holes into the bottom of the bin so that excess liquid, known as worm tea, can drain out of the bin and into the tray. We were fortunate that Mike had scavenged the large tray before we started the bin. You’ll have to drill holes in the bottom of whatever you use for a bin, too. If you don’t have a large enough tray-like object that the whole bin can sit above it, find whatever container you plan to use to collect the tea, and drill holes in the bin in such a way that the pattern of holes are all above the container you are using to collect the tea. The articles I have suggest drilling at least twenty 1/4 inch holes in the bottom of the bin to allow for sufficient drainage.

Bricks can easily hold the bin above whatever container you use for collecting worm tea; if you don’t have bricks, stacked pieces or blocks of wood or any other dense, thick material should work. Whenever you see liquid in the container, pour it off and use it (I dilute it with water to the color of weak tea before using it). You can water container plants or garden plants with the diluted worm tea to give them an extra boost of nutrition.

To get your worm bin started, fill it with shreds and/or strips of paper or a mix of such paper and leaves to a couple of inches below the top of the bin. Mix in a few cups of garden soil; it contains grit and minerals that the worms need for good digestion and health. Put in the worms and some food waste so they can start eating. Then cover the food waste with more paper (the worms feed under the surface of the soil, so anytime you add food, always cover it with paper). Put whatever lid you’re using on the bin to ensure none of the more adventurous worms crawl out of the bin. Your worms will start eating and pooping. Every few days, open the lid and use an appropriate tool to pull aside some of the paper over the food waste (I use a short-handled garden cultivator). If your worms have eaten much or all of the waste, add some more, cover it, and put the lid on. The articles I have suggests that a pound of worms needs about a cubic foot of bin space to live in and can process about a half pound of food waste per day, presumably at room temperature. The worms eat more slowly at the cooler end of their tolerance range, more rapidly at the warmer end. As you get familiar with your worm friends, you’ll get a sense of how much they can eat and how often to feed them.

Worm poop is for some reason called worm castings. You’ll want to collect it on occasion, both because the castings are a powerful and valuable organic fertilizer and because too high a concentration of castings hurts your worm friends. The easiest way I’ve found to do this is to add food to only one side of the worm bin for about three months, then switch to the other side for three months and harvest all the bedding, now converted to castings, out of the first side at the end of the second three month period. Allow me to illustrate below.

Here’s what the inside of our bin looks like. You’ll notice the paper on the right side looks whiter than that on the left. That’s because I’ve been adding food on the right side, leaving the remaining food and bedding on the left side to be digested for the past couple of months. When the time comes, I’ll harvest all the material, now worm castings, out of the left side.

I’ve just added some food wastes to the right side of the bin.

I’ve covered the food wastes I added to the right side.

Then I put the lid back on. I’ll add more food wastes and bedding to the right side for a few more weeks. At the end of March, I’ll remove all the castings from the left side and put them into another container; most of the worms will have relocated to the right side, where I’ve been adding food and bedding. After I remove the castings from the left side, I’ll add fresh bedding, a cup or two of soil, and some food wastes to the left side, covering the food wastes as usual. Now I’ll add more food wastes to the left side of the bin for another three months. At the end of the three months, I’ll harvest the castings from the right side, add bedding, soil, and food wastes, and continue as above.

Once you have some worm castings, you can add them to the potting soil or seed starter mix that you buy to add fertility and organic matter, or use them as part of a homemade potting soil or seed starter mix. If you’re adding castings to a commercial product, use about 1 part by volume of worm castings to 8 to 10 parts of the commercial product. (You can use a flowerpot, yogurt container, old plastic cup, or suchlike as the “part” in these formulas.) I make my own mixes out of garden soil, compost, and worm castings. I use about 1 part of worm castings, 6 parts of compost, and 4 parts of garden soil to make a mix that I use for container plants and seed starting. I like to have more compost than garden soil in the mix in order to lighten the mix a bit; if I’m running low on compost, I’ll drop to about 4 parts of compost. If you have clayey soil, you’ll probably need less soil and more compost than I’m using. Mix the soil, compost, and castings together in a large bucket; I use a garden cultivator to mix them. The mix seems to be fertile enough to keep my container plants in good shape. It grows really healthy seedlings for the veggie garden!

If you want worms for fishing or food for another critter, take off the lid and poke through the side of the bin that you are putting food in. You should see worms. See if you can remove some worms and associated bedding using a trowel or a small container. So far I haven’t had much occasion to remove worms, so you’ll have to look up more information and experiment if you want to harvest worms from your bin.

Most of the time, you won’t have any trouble with your worm farm, as long as you keep the worms fed, not too wet, and remove castings at the right time. Sometimes you may find other insects or arthropods in the bin, but they aren’t cause for concern, as they are part of the bin ecosystem. The only trouble I’ve had is when the bedding gets so moist that the worms can’t stand it anymore. They go on a worm stampede, crawling en masse out of the top of the bin and onto the basement floor in search of more congenial quarters. They die before they find a better home. Trust me, you don’t want a mass of red worms dying on your basement floor. The surest way I’ve found to avoid this is to remove the castings every three months or whenever I notice an accumulation of worm tea in the tray, whichever comes first.

If you don’t want to keep the worms in a plastic bin, you could make a bin out of wood. An article in the May 1995 issue of Missouri Conservationist by Doug Newman describes his worm bin, a 1 x 2 x 3 foot box built from exterior grade plywood and finished with polyurethane varnish to help keep the wood from rotting. If you don’t want anything quite that fancy, use what wood you have, but I’d avoid treated wood (it might be toxic to the worms) and the stuff that’s made from pressed wood fibers (too weak and too susceptible to rotting). If you don’t varnish the wood, you’ll have to build a new bin every few years as the wood rots from the moist bedding. Even with varnish, the wood may rot eventually and the bin need rebuilding.

A friend of mine made a worm bin out of a plastic bin she’d been issued by her trash hauler for recyclables. After St. Louis County issued larger rolling bins for recyclables, the older bin was no longer being used, so it became her worm bin. I have a similar bin, shown below.

This bin is deeper than 1 foot, which allows for the possibility of adding a hose bib to the bottom of the bin and constructing a false bottom to make for easier worm tea collection and removal. Plug the drainage holes in the bottom of the bin, add a hose bib so you can easily draw off worm tea when it accumulates, and put in a false bottom (with drainage holes to allow the worm tea to drain through) high enough up to allow for a one foot deep space for the bedding and worms, and you’d have a fine bin, I think. You can cover it with a piece of wood and put the bin up on a table or blocks so you can put a collection container under the hose bib. If I didn’t already have a working bin, I’d do this. You might come up with a better bin if you look at the various bins offered for sale and consider how you can make something similar.

Sow directly to the garden or start indoors: that's today's question

In the last post I considered when you may prefer to obtain started plants for your garden and when you may prefer to start your plants from seeds. Let’s suppose you’ve decided to start some plants from seeds this year. The next question is whether to start your seeds in the garden spot where they are to live versus starting them in flats or pots in a more controlled environment for their first few weeks of life. In this post I’ll help you decide which of these work best for the plants you want to grow and the particulars of your situation.

One of the difficulties in deciding whether or not you want to start seeds early in a controlled environment is that garden publications offer such a wide range of advice on the matter. I discussed Steve Solomon’s approach to vegetable gardening in my January 26, 2012 post. Solomon thinks you should start almost every vegetable seed where it is to grow, except for tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, and possibly melons and squash. His reasoning is that by starting almost every seed in the garden, you can either eliminate the costs and work of raising seedlings in a special environment by buying these few as plants, or at least you can reduce the space, work, and cost involved to a minimum by only starting these few in a warm place since the seeds need a lot of warmth to get started and the plants need a long, warm season in which to grow and fruit. On the other hand, John Jeavons (January 19, 2012 post) thinks you should start almost every vegetable seed in a controlled environment, with the only exception being radishes. His argument is that you can use the bed space more intensively by growing plants to transplanting size in flats (something else can be growing in the garden bed in the meantime); the plants you put out are pretty certain to be healthy and to grow well; you can space plants evenly more easily than you can seeds, and the plants will produce a better growing environment in the bed sooner than tiny seedlings will; transplanting stimulates growth; and seedlings in a flat require much less water per unit area than seedlings in a bed, since seedlings in a flat are growing very close and can produce a good growing environment in the small area of a flat. Both positions seem reasonable; in fact, they describe all the pros and cons of sowing seeds directly versus starting them early better than I could have. How can you, as a beginning gardener, decide between these approaches? What other factors should be considered that neither man addresses?

It’s important to realize that both men are gardening in very different climatic conditions than we are in the St. Louis metro area, and their climates influence their recommendations. Each kind of vegetable (and for that matter, herb, flower, and any other kind of plant) has its own range of climate conditions required for germinating and growing its seeds and for growing the resulting plant. You, as a gardener, need to meet the seeds’ and plants’ requirements as best you can within the climatic conditions under which you live. If you are growing in an environment like Jeavons’ with a lot of rain from late fall through early spring and very little rain the rest of the year, with a mild winter compared to St. Louis (the lows in Willits, CA don’t go under 20F) and with a wide daily temperature range during the dry season, you’ll do better by starting as many seeds as possible indoors or within a cold frame, then transplanting larger plants better able to handle wide temperature swings and dry soil in the garden. In contrast, Solomon used to garden in the Pacific Northwest and now gardens in Tasmania. In both places a cool maritime climate is favorable to sprouting and growing most kinds of seeds sown directly in the garden, and the only reason to start plants indoors is to give heat-loving plants the biggest head start possible so he can get something out of them. Here in St. Louis, where cold frames don’t get warm enough to start anything till March and then only cool-weather crops, where we have a short spring with wide temperature swings from day to day transitioning to a long, hot summer and then to a short fall with wide temperature swings from day to day, the question of what seeds to sow directly in the garden and what seeds to start inside is more complex. In many cases we can do either and be successful; then it comes down to how much space and time we have to devote to starting plants early. I’ll help you think through this question in the rest of this post.

The easiest question to answer is which vegetable seeds really need to be started early in a controlled environment in St. Louis and other areas with similar climates to ours. Peppers, tomatoes, and eggplants are the plants that most benefit from an early start indoors, for the same reasons that Solomon starts them indoors: the seeds need a very warm start and the plants need to grow for many weeks before producing the parts we harvest. It doesn’t get warm enough here to start these seeds in the garden till May (tomatoes) or June (peppers and eggplants); only if we used the shortest-season varieties available would we be likely to get a harvest before our first fall frost kills the plants. If you can’t or don’t want to start these seeds early, in February or March, and you want to grow anything other than the shortest-season varieties, then obtain them as plants.

At the other end of the scale, everyone starts radishes directly in the garden because they are taprooted and thus difficult to transplant, and because they grow to harvest size very quickly, within a month or two. Almost everyone except for Jeavons direct-sows seeds of turnips, carrots, peas, beans, and corn where they are to grow because these plants grow well from direct-seeding but aren’t well suited to life in a flat, either because they are difficult to transplant due to taproots or because they can only remain in a flat for a few days before they become too large to transplant successfully. Following Jeavons’ advice, I have sown carrots, turnips, and corn in flats and transplanted them to the garden. It worked, but it took more time than sowing directly to the garden, and in the case of the carrots, I broke the taproot during planting and got poorly-shaped roots as a result. I’ve also had some difficulty germinating carrots in a flat, perhaps because the soil dried out during the time the seeds were germinating. I now sow all of these seeds directly to the garden and suggest you do the same unless you really enjoy starting seeds in flats and have room enough to try these.

Our springs tend to be short, with wide temperature swings from day to day as cold and warm fronts battle it out for dominance. Our soil is often frozen into early and sometimes mid-March; yet by June 1 our average high is 81F, our average low is 62F, and the lowest temperatures ever recorded in June are in the mid to upper 40s, with record lows above 50F by the last week or two. By the end of June the average high is 89F and the average low is 70F, not conditions under which crops that like cool weather thrive, or even survive. (All climate info is from the St. Louis National Weather Service office.) Vegetables that like cool growing conditions and need more than two months to grow to harvest size are good candidates to start early in a controlled environment in our area, if you can make a space suitable to their needs and are willing to tend them. Missouri Extension publication G6570, Starting Plants Indoors From Seeds, has a good list of vegetables to start indoors. They include broccoli, cabbage, kale, collards, and head lettuce. If you search seed catalogs for short-season varieties of these and you sow them by the end of March (all but lettuce; sow lettuce seeds in early to mid April), you could sow seeds directly in the garden with good success; I recommend this if you don’t think you have the space to start seedlings inside or you can’t meet their needs. I start all of these, including all lettuces and also bok choy, inside in early February to early March and transplant several-week old plants to the garden. Weather conditions can turn cold in spring, delaying germination and perhaps rotting direct-sown seeds before they germinate. Seedlings grow slowly in cold soil. Lows in the teens in late March or low twenties in early April can kill seedlings. I find it preferable to transplant strong, healthy plants into the garden around mid April, once it seems likely that temperatures won’t go much below freezing and the soil begins to get warm enough to hasten growth. Strong plants dig in and grow better and are more likely to survive the occasional hot spell to produce a good harvest from late May through June and into early July, before the weather gets too hot.

For plants like beets and kohlrabi, which mature within about two months or so from direct-sowing to the garden but can be grown in a flat and transplanted, you have the most options. Garden centers offer seedlings for sale, if you prefer to start with plants someone else grew. You can also sow these directly into the garden in April or start them in flats indoors in March and transplant them into the garden around mid April.

You also have options with melons, squashes, zucchini, cucumbers, and okra. Their seeds need a warm start and the plants need warm weather to grow, but they germinate and grow fast enough that they can be sown directly to the garden in May or June. You’ll find seedlings of melons, squashes (and pumpkins, another name for some kinds of squash), zucchini, and cucumbers readily available for purchase, but these are so easy to direct-sow in the garden or to start indoors in small pots and transplant that they make good seeds to start with when you are first learning to grow plants from seeds. I’m not a big fan of okra so I haven’t noticed if you can buy okra plants at garden centers, but I did grow it from seed one year, planting the seeds directly in the garden in early June, and they produced a high yield. Missouri Extension says you can start okra seeds early in small pots in late April, transplanting about a month later, or direct-seed into the garden in May.

For other plants, you use a similar process of evaluating the conditions the seeds need to germinate and grow and the growing conditions and time needed to grow plants to harvest or flowering stages. Most gardening books, including the books I’ve discussed in earlier posts, include this information for commonly grown vegetables, herbs, and flowers. You should be able to find it on the Web as well. Compare these requirements to the climate in your location to decide whether to sow seeds directly to the garden or whether to start them early inside, if you can meet their needs and have enough space. Spring herbs like dill and parsley grow quickly and can be either direct-sown or started inside in the St. Louis area. I generally start them inside, because I have plenty of space and enjoy caring for seedlings; if you don’t, direct-sowing at the proper time works fine. Basil, on the other hand, can’t tolerate frost and needs warm conditions to germinate seeds and a long time to grow to harvest size, so I and most other people who start it from seeds start it early indoors. If you don’t want to start it from seeds, obtain started plants, which should be easy to find.

If you are in the U.S., you can find climate information for your location, including average and record highs and lows, from the nearest office of the National Weather Service. Your state Extension service should have general information on how to grow vegetables and other commonly grown plants in your state, including publications for downloading and printing. If you live in a mountainous area, your climate is altitude-specific; you may need get information from local resources for gardeners in order to know what works best for you. Folks in other parts of the world should consult with the appropriate organizations in their area. The best source of information may be a knowledgeable gardening neighbor!

In the next post, which I intend to get up by March 1, I’ll offer some guidance on how to start and where to grow the seeds you need or want to start in a controlled area, whether in the house, on a porch, or in a cold frame. There’s still time to start these seeds in the St. Louis area, so get the seeds you want to start while I’m writing the next post!

Seeds or Started Plants, That is the Garden Question

This is the time of the year when we receive garden seed catalogs and see seed packages and seed-starting equipment for sale in garden stores. If you haven’t tried starting plants from seed before, you may be wondering if it’s a worthwhile thing to do, and if so, how to do it in a sensible way. In this post I’ll offer my thoughts on when it makes sense to start plants from seeds, and when you may prefer to obtain plants started by someone else for your garden. 

Started plants are easy to care for and to distinguish from unwanted plants. If you’ve never started seeds before, you may not be confident of your ability to meet their requirements. Even if the seeds germinate and the desired plant appears, you may not be able to distinguish it from surrounding unwanted plants (“weeds”). Even if you do figure out which is the plant you want and keep weeds from swamping it out, tiny seedlings can be delicate, possibly succumbing to over-watering, excessive dryness, lack of nutrition, disease, or predation by any number of critters. Caring for seedlings is generally more time-consuming than caring for larger plants nurtured through the seedling stage by someone else. For all of these reasons, beginners may well find it easier to start with a good-sized plant whose identity is known. Such plants are generally stronger and better able to withstand a bit of neglect than a tiny seedling. The first year I grew any vegetables, I bought a few tomato plants and planted them in large pots. I didn’t know at that point that I wanted to have a vegetable garden; starting with a few plants as an experiment made more sense than buying seeds.

Some plants are more difficult to start from seed, enough so that even experienced gardeners prefer to or must obtain them as started plants. If you live in an area with short summers and don’t have a warm place to start pepper or eggplant seeds, you will do better to use started plants in your vegetable garden. Most other vegetables and annual herbs and flowers are reasonably easy to start from seeds. Some perennial herbs and flowers are easy to start from seeds, but others take a long time (several months to multiple years, with conditions varying during that time). If you don’t enjoy the challenge of starting them from seed, you need them now and not several years from now, or you don’t have the right conditions to germinate the seeds or time to take care of slow-growing seedlings, you’ll need to obtain them as plants. Some shrubs and trees can be started from seeds, but they will establish and produce years sooner if you obtain them as plants. Even after close to 20 years of gardening and a good track record of starting seeds that many people consider difficult, I still buy or obtain from other gardeners some plants for my various gardens.

Some plants aren’t available as seeds. French tarragon, for instance, doesn’t flower and thus must be obtained as a plant. Some named plants cannot be grown from seed because the seeds are not released to the general public, although nurseries can purchase seeds and raise the plants for sale. Hybrid plants like apples and most culinary mints don’t come true from seed (seeds are produced only through cross-pollination and thus are genetically different from the parent plant); if you want a particular variety, you’ll have to obtain it as a plant. In other cases it may be so difficult to start the plant from seed, or the seeds have such a short lifetime, that it isn’t profitable to produce and sell the seeds, but reproducing from an already-started plant is rather easy. Some of our native plants fall into this category.

In many cases, however, it’s either preferable or necessary to start your plants from seeds, for the following reasons.

A packet of seeds is nearly always cheaper to purchase than a started plant, especially since most seed packets contain enough seeds for anywhere from tens to many thousands of plants and most seeds remain viable (capable of germination and growth) for at least a few years when stored properly. While a person tending a very small garden (say 50 square feet or less) may not find the cost of seeds enough cheaper than buying started plants to justify the extra equipment and time required to start seeds, if you have a garden much larger than this you’ll generally find it less costly to start plants from seeds yourself, even accounting for any cost incurred in whatever seed-starting equipment you choose. In a later post I’ll discuss Living Low methods of raising lots of seeds cheaply and using no or very little fossil-fuel energy.

In the case of vegetables and some herbs and flowers you’ll find a much wider choice of varieties available as seeds than as started plants. The plants commonly available at garden centers are popular varieties that tend to grow acceptably over most of the U.S. (or whatever country you live in). They may not be the best-tasting variety, however, or the variety you remember your parents or grandparents using in certain special foods, or varieties that are especially well suited for your climate or growing conditions. Many different seed companies produce an almost unimaginably large number of varieties of different vegetables. If you want to grow something spectacular-looking or with an unusual or exquisite flavor, an heirloom variety (some popular heirloom varieties like ‘Brandywine’ tomato can be found in garden centers as plants but most are still only available as seeds), a variety especially suited to a particular cuisine, or a variety that does well in your unusual growing conditions, best to look in the offerings of seed catalogs or the seed racks at a good local garden center. If you want to save your own seed to have even more control over your food supply, you’ll of course need to learn to grow the resulting seeds.

Some vegetables are usually or always grown from seed directly sown in the garden, generally because they are taprooted or have delicate roots so they don’t transplant well or at all, or because they can only be transplanted when very young and thus are not suited to mass production, shipment, and holding for sale. Examples are radishes, carrots, turnips, peas, beans, and corn. Some herbs like cilantro also fall into this category. If you want to grow these, you’ll have to buy seeds and learn how to meet their needs.

The last reason to grow plants from seeds is because you want to! Many gardeners enjoy the whole process of growing plants from seeds all the way to the mature plant. Starting seeds and watching the seedlings appear and grow can make the waning days of winter that much more tolerable. Participating in the entire life process of a plant really brings home the beauty and fragility of all life.

To summarize, it makes sense for a gardener to use plants started by someone else under the following conditions:
    you have a small garden so the cost difference between seeds and plants is small;
    you can’t supply the seeds you’d like to grow with the conditions they need;
    you have more money than you have time to start and care for seedlings;
    the varieties you want to grow are only available as started plants.

Starting seeds yourself is especially important for those of you who want to grow a large garden, don’t have much money to spend on your garden so you need to make it go as far as possible, want to grow plants only available as seeds, want to be as self-sufficient as possible in your gardening practice, or enjoy the process of growing plants from seeds.

You can use a combination of plants you grow from seeds and plants you obtain from someone else in your garden. This often makes sense for gardeners who can supply the right conditions for some seeds but not for others. Peppers and eggplants require a lot of heat to germinate their seeds; few of us who are living low have that kind of heat available in February or March unless we have a wood stove or buy and use a heat mat or something else to create a small space that is warm enough. Even if you start the rest of your vegetables from seeds, you may prefer to use plants someone else started for your pepper and eggplant crops.

I’ve been careful to state that you only have to obtain the plants from someone else, not that you need to purchase them from a garden center. The Living Low in the Lou Way includes creativity in finding sources of the things you need or want outside of the monetary economy. If you have a gardener friend who grows plants from seeds, it’s quite likely that he or she will have a few extra seedlings available after planting his/her garden. Most gardeners would rather see those plants go to a friend than get composted. Check with gardener friends at planting time. Perhaps a gardener friend is willing to raise a few extra plants for you, for free or in return for something else; this is the time of year to ask since those of us who raise seeds in the St. Louis area are either starting them now or will be over the next few weeks. Trash-picking or dumpster-diving could be a source of free plants, especially for those of you who live in the city of St. Louis or someplace else where dumpsters are readily accessible. Gardener friends might divide a perennial plant or reproduce it from cuttings or layering if you ask them.

In the next post, I’ll consider when it makes sense to start seeds early inside a controlled environment versus starting them in the spot where they are to grow. I hope I get to that next week since it’s time to start seeds early for those of you in the St. Louis metro area and in other places with similar climates.

Independence Days 2-10-12

We had a lot of rain, a little snow, some cold weather (for this winter) and not much sun this past week. Tomorrow is likely to be the coldest day yet this winter. Unlike last week, I didn't do any yard work. But I got a lot of other needed work done.

Plant something: I planted seeds of cabbage, bok choy, kale, collards, broccoli, mustard greens, calendula, dill, parsley, cutting celery, thyme, and sweet marjoram in a flat and put the flat on the enclosed front porch. Enclosing that porch was an excellent idea. Granted, it hasn't been that cold this winter, but it's been like April (mid-spring here) all winter long on the porch. The rosemary plants and a calendula, grown from a seedling I potted up last fall, are in bloom! See them below.

Harvest something: well, no. Maybe next week I'll harvest the lone kumquat from the plant on the front porch.

Preserve something: I brought the last four winter squashes into the kitchen so we remember to cook and eat them.

Waste not: the usual composting and saving eggshells separately (I may grind them to sprinkle on the garden in place of some of the limestone we'd otherwise purchase). A friend gave us some of the foam wrappers that surround commercial packages of ice cream cones. We're thinking of ways to use them - maybe to stuff into our old, flat pillows to improve them.

Want not: nothing particular this week.

Eat the food: cooked and ate some of the homegrown sugar beets. Included stored winter radishes and sunchokes in the stir-fry. My DH is making black bean soup from our homegrown beans to take to a potluck tomorrow.

Build community food systems: answered a friend's question about when to direct-seed onions into the garden (answer: second half of March, as soon as the soil thaws. That is, if it freezes again. Which it will probably do this weekend. But how long it stays frozen, I don't know.)

Skill up: learned how to make caramel fudge this week due to a friend's request, and it actually turned out well! It's the first time I've made a candylike material from scratch.

I'm planning a post or so on seed-starting next.

Celebrating Independence Days in 2012

Sharon Astyk, one of my favorite writers, has just announced the beginning of her Independence Days challenge for 2012. I’ll be playing along and reporting here. Now I did say that my next post would discuss how I actually garden ... and it will ... but since Independence Days focuses on food, and we like to grow as much of our food at home as we can, it’s closely related to gardening. At least it is to me, and it’s my blog, after all.

What are Independence Days? Astyk borrowed the expression from Carla Emery, author of The Encyclopedia of Country Living. One of Emery’s goals was to feed her family as much as possible from her own labor. To do this, she tried to plant something every day from late winter to mid-summer, so they would have a wide choice of foods to eat over an extended period of time. By mid-summer some of the crops were ready to be harvested and put up, so from then through late fall she tried to do a little of that every day, to ensure her family had some home-grown food in winter and spring. During the winter and for as long into the following spring as possible, she and her family made it their goal to eat some of the stored food each day. For Emery, Independence Days were the days, or perhaps just meals, that she could feed her family from just what they grew. Independence Days represented a struggle, but one that was worthwhile for her and her family. Astyk, in adopting the term for her family and her book Independence Days, reminds us that in the midst of the economic, energetic, and environmental difficulties of our time, one of the best ways we can respond is to make the growing, preserving, storing, cooking, and eating of locally-grown foods a central part of our lives. But she also knows that many of us don’t have the skills we need to preserve, store, and cook unprocessed foods in low-cost, low-energy ways. Hence her book, and it’s a good overview of a big subject, enough to get you started if you haven’t done much or any of these before. Later on I’ll suggest some other books that go more in depth into some of the topics, for those of you who want that info.

Astyk runs the Independence Day challenge not for competitive purposes, but so we can see and note the positive steps we take each day toward our own Independence Days. Perhaps you think you haven’t done enough if you haven’t spent all day digging up your garden or canning quart after quart of produce. It’s not that concentrated efforts like these don’t make a big difference - they do - but doing a little bit every day is easier for most of us and will end up being a big accomplishment when seen over a whole year. Looking back over your week and noting all the little things you did helps to keep you focused and looking forward.

The categories Astyk set up and the reasons for them can be found here (see the Feb. 1, 2012 entry). I may as well get started with what I did this week, since it’s Friday and she suggested reporting on Fridays. For those of you who live in the St. Louis metro area or other areas with similar climates who want to know what gardening activities are good to do at various times, you’ll be especially interested in the first two categories.

Plant something: I started onion and leek plants in flats and put the flats on the glassed-in porch. It’s still too cold to put anything in the cold frame, but the porch is warm enough to start seeds.

Harvest something: nothing this week, since I don’t have any hoop houses or other enclosures over the outdoor garden. It is winter, after all.

Preserve something: nothing this week, see above.

Waste not: I started drying the egg shells rather than just reflexively tossing them into the compost pile (not that composting them is a waste, but I have ideas for other uses for them). I checked the various stored veggies to ensure they are OK when I removed some to eat.

Want not: nothing particular this week.

Eat the food: homegrown butternut squash, storage radishes, beets, turnips, sunchokes, and kimchi; sun-dried locally grown peaches, Mike’s homemade wine from home-grown elderberries.

Build community food systems: this blog post would be it.

Skill up: I’m sowing seeds according to the biodynamic calendar this year for the first time.

Gardening When It Counts: Steve Solomon's approach

A few years ago, while perusing a favorite seed catalog, I noticed a book with the title Gardening When It Counts: Growing Food in Hard Times, by a man named Steve Solomon. I’d read a little by him in other places and liked his work, and the short write-up in the catalog intrigued me. I was a little frustrated by what I perceived as too-slow progress in improving my gardening skills and wondered if a different gardening method might be worth a try. Plus my garden was growing larger and it seemed I was spending too much time digging, doing precise plant spacing, and weeding among closely-spaced plants. So I bought the book.

Solomon is the founder of Territorial Seed Company, based in Oregon; he sold the company to its current owners several years later and continued to garden and write about self-sufficiency in Oregon, then in Canada, and now in Australia. He’s writing to both beginning and experienced gardeners. He means to challenge what he sees as the intensive-gardening dogma being pushed on gardeners.

Solomon’s argument against intensively-planted beds is that they are, in his view, wasteful of water and fertilizer and do not allow plants to develop to their full potential, cheating us out of some of their nutritional value. When he began Territorial in 1979, he gardened using John Jeavons’ biointensive method (this was around the time Jeavons published the first edition of his book). Solomon even wrote three gardening books advocating intensive methods. But for his seed business, he needed to do variety trials at wider spacings in order to better evaluate the plants. (Although he doesn’t say this, I suspect that his trial gardens were large enough that he needed to plant in more time-efficient ways than the meticulous spacing required by intensive methods, and this by itself was enough to push him into using a traditional row style of gardening in his test plots.) He says that he actually irrigated the test plots less than his intensively planted beds; the plants in the test plots got larger and the resulting vegetables tasted better; and, he says, they yielded more for the space they took up, compared to plantings in intensive beds. After he sold the business in 1986 and since he had several acres to garden on, he began to research “the nearly lost art of vegetable gardening without irrigating at all” (p. 2). That research has led to several books, including this one, in which he outlines his method for growing with little to no irrigation. He points out that our future is likely to be one in which more people will want to, or have to, raise some of their own food and that they may well have to do it with little to no added water, manure, or fertilizers. He thinks this can best be done using a more traditional row-based gardening method and tells you how to do it in this book.

As my garden has grown larger, I’ve come to appreciate the extent to which the method of gardening that works best is dependent on the size of the space being gardened. If you try to do row gardening on the postage stamp of a yard that is available on a 1/8 acre lot or in a raised bed in a community garden, you’ll get very little food for your trouble and probably quit in frustration after the first season. Rows are too narrow, only a couple of feet wide at the most, and the space between the rows, another couple of feet, is wasted space. Half the garden or more is not producing anything but “weeds.” Go to an intensive planting method and you now have a 3 to 5 foot wide space in which to raise crops. If you keep the space between beds to 1 foot, you’ve gained even more space for the crops you want and less is left to the “weeds.” Now you can actually harvest enough food out of a small space to feel that the time and money you put into it was worthwhile.

As you add more intensively planted beds, the time needed to prepare, plant, and maintain the beds rises accordingly. If you run out of space before you run out of time for an intensive garden, fine - but what if you still have more space and want to use it? This is the situation I found myself in a few years ago. It’s when gardeners start looking at ways to make the more time-consuming tasks go fast enough to allow for further expansion. It may be true, as Jeavons suggests, that you only need 15 minutes a day to maintain a 100 square foot garden, but a garden that size doesn’t produce many vegetables, in my experience. If you are growing the number of beds you need to raise a substantial amount of food for two or more people, my experience suggests you’ll want closer to 10 beds, 1,000 square feet, of garden space, if not more. That 15 minutes a day has now grown to 2 1/2 hours or longer. Grow your garden into the few thousand square feet category and the row method’s potential for reducing the time needed for tasks like seeding and weeding is likely to look even better.

There is a lot to like in Solomon’s book. I haven’t seen a better description of how to file a shovel and how to use it for digging a bed anywhere. Even if you’re using Jeavons’ biointensive method, I suggest digging Solomon’s way, with a shovel rather than a spade. I found it took half the time to dig a bed Solomon’s way versus Jeavons’. For those of you who intend to use a tiller, Solomon tells you how to use it, and when (to convert a grassy area into a garden, and only then). He gives a recipe for what he calls a complete organic fertilizer, with several different choices of ingredients so you can match it to what is available in your area. He tells you how much of that plus how much compost and, if you can get it, manure to add to your garden - and what to do if you can’t get the fertilizer ingredients or manure. (He assumes you’re going to be making compost and tells you how to make it.) He suggests about how much space you’ll need to raise a substantial proportion of the veggies you want to eat if you’re gardening his way. He tells you the spacing to use for each crop for several different scenarios including differing amounts of available irrigation; those of you who garden in drier areas will find this information very valuable. He has some really interesting things to say about the quality of plants available in garden centers and the quality of seeds available from mail-order companies, and he makes recommendations on seed companies to use that make sense to me (not all are still in business, but that’s not surprising since the book was published in 2005). He understands that many gardeners don’t have the equipment or desire to start a lot of their own transplants, so he tells you how to get seeds to grow right in the garden and to buy only the few plants that need to be started early in temperate climates: tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants, perhaps squashes and melons. I had good luck starting rows of various kinds of seeds in my garden using Solomon’s directions on pages 121 to 123.

For anyone who has a lot of ground for gardening (say about 1,000 square feet or more), needs or wants to raise large amounts of food, and doesn’t have a lot of time, money, or water for irrigation, Solomon’s method is probably the best method to use. Solomon’s opinionated writing style makes the book fun to read even if you don’t have that much land. Most gardeners will find something useful enough to be worth the time to read the book, even if they choose to garden by a different method.

I have some disagreements with Solomon. To start with, the organization of his book is idiosyncratic, to say the least. Everything you need is there somewhere, but you’re going to have to hunt for it. Why, for instance, is the drawing of the different ways to arrange plants on rows or in beds on page 58, but the chart of plant spacings is much later in the book? It would have helped a lot to have them next to each other, so I could visualize how each kind of crop was to be planted. Why is growing seedlings in the garden center chapter, not the seeds chapter? Frustrations of this sort keep cropping up. The book can be annoying to use until you get a sense of where to find what you want to know.

I don’t agree with his choice of hoe and hoeing method. If you’re going to use Solomon’s method and you expect to remove “weeds,” you’ll need a hoe. He suggests using the classic garden hoe that is available in just about every hardware store that stocks garden tools. Maybe it works OK for him. I find that I can’t stand upright using this hoe, and I’m only five feet seven. After a couple of attempts with it, I quit using it. I suggest the 3 3/4” fixed blade collinear hoe available from Johnny’s instead. You’ll find weeding a good deal faster and easier on your body if you stand upright while doing it, and this hoe blade is small enough to use between rows as long as rows are at least 8 inches apart.

For all that Solomon criticizes the biointensive method, his method isn’t as different as he makes it out to be. For one thing, Solomon recommends hand-digging a raised bed, or at least a wide raised row, for almost every crop; so does Jeavons. He’s using about the same amount of compost (roughly 4 five gallon buckets per 100 square feet) that Jeavons uses. Both methods suggest organic fertilizers if any are needed and use similar amounts to the best of my ability to tell. The major differences are the planting patterns (hexagonal spacing versus rows aligned along either the short or long dimension of the bed) and whether you start most plants in flats for later transplanting (Jeavons) or directly in the raised bed or row (Solomon). Solomon doesn’t get Jeavons’ spacings correct in his chart on pages 148 and 149: the way he reports them is as if Jeavons’ spacing is square (i.e. 6” by 6”) rather than hexagonal, and the spacing for some of the vegetables has been revised in later editions of Jeavons’ work. If you aren’t strongly drawn to one or the other method, try each and see which you prefer.

Solomon claims that he gets nearly the same yields with less water and fertilizer as the biointensive method. I’m not sold on that claim. He doesn’t give any actual yield numbers or the units in which he measures them, so there is no way to compare his yields to what Jeavons suggests can be achieved. Yield can be a tricky concept. Jeavons measures it on a weight per unit area basis. The few times Solomon discusses yields, he seems to be talking about weight per plant. These aren’t directly comparable unless the area taken up by the plant is known.

I’ve been keeping detailed records of weight per unit area for all of my crops for over a decade. For crops that I have raised by both methods, so far the weight per unit area has been considerably higher using Jeavons’ method, as much as twice as high. It’s easy to see why: the spacing between plants is much higher using Solomon’s method than Jeavons’ so less of the square footage of the bed contains the desired plants. Solomon would have you keep that space weeded so the “weeds” don’t suck up the water and nutrients meant for your crops. Some of the most interesting research I’ve seen, however, as reported in Edible Forest Gardens by Dave Jacke and Eric Toensmeier, indicates that having plants cover the soil at all times is crucial to keeping minerals like calcium cycling between soil and crops in areas with enough rain to grow forests. If there are no plant roots available to take up calcium and store it in plant bodies, the calcium ions tend to dissolve as water enters the soil, eventually winding up in groundwater below the reach of plant roots. Here in St. Louis, on the edge of the eastern broadleaf forest and where we usually get enough (if not too much) rain most of the growing season, we may have a more sustainable garden if we pack it closely with the plants we want so as to keep the calcium cycling between soil and plant. Having a lot of bare soil might mean too much calcium lost, even though other nutrients might be more available because there are fewer plants competing for them. However, if we were to get into a drought during the growing season and irrigation water were not available, I’d do what Solomon suggests and remove plants to increase the spacing, hoping to get at least some yield.

I’m finding that it takes a lot of time to write these posts. Starting now I’m going to attempt to keep to an every other week posting schedule - no promises, but that’s the goal. In two weeks, then, I’ll tell you how I’m gardening, and why. Unless something else seems more important at the time.