The Soil Doctor Writes a Prescription

Since my last post spring has arrived in St. Louis, bringing with it sufficient warmth to open the flowers on our serviceberries and magnolia, shown in the above photo. We have had a wetter and cooler than normal spring season. Last week I measured a total of 4.0 inches (about 10 cm) of rain at our location. I had prepared the bed for the onion and leek seedlings before the rain began but I haven’t planted it as I have been waiting for the saturated soil to drain. While I was waiting, I weeded and mulched the herb bed, just in time for today’s rain. I don’t think we will get nearly as much rain this week as we did last week so I will be able to plant the onions within the next couple of days. Then I must get busy on getting the rest of the cool season crops planted before summer begins and it is time to plant the warm season crops.

A couple of posts ago I discussed Steve Solomon’s new book The Intelligent Gardener: Growing Nutrient-Dense Food. The book describes the re-mineralization process he has outlined for us home gardeners so that we may grow the most nutritious food possible in our gardens. I had a suspicion that our garden soil may not be as well mineralized as it could be and decided I’d like to test his program this year. So I collected 15 plugs of soil using a tubular soil sampler (it could be done with a stainless steel trowel as well but I sprung for the soil sampler because I expect to collect soil samples each spring from now on). Each plug was taken from the approximate middle of one of our vegetable garden beds; there are 15 of them in all, each 100 square feet in area. I mixed the fifteen plugs together as described in the book and labeled that sample Garden. Since I’d been using a version of the Complete Organic Fertilizer (COF) in Solomon’s earlier book, described in this post, on these garden beds for varying periods of time, I was curious as to what effect it may have had. To understand this, I took another 15 plugs of soil from the lawn in between the two largest groups of beds, mixed those plugs together, and labeled that sample Yard. I then packaged and sent both soil samples to Logan Labs, LLC, using their downloadable instructions and form. About a week later the soil report shown below landed in my email box.

From a quick scan of the results I learned some interesting things about our soil. If you look at the pH (level of acidity: 0 to 7 is acidic, 7 to 14 is basic) of both samples, you will see that the soil in the yard is more acidic (lower number) than the soil in the garden and that both values are on the acid end of the pH scale. (Fun but ignorable fact: because the pH scale is logarithmic, the yard soil is actually more than 10 times as acidic as the garden soil.) This makes sense because St. Louis gets about 40 inches of rain a year, enough to leach a significant amount of calcium out of the soil and thus raise its acidity. The garden soil has a less-acid pH than the yard soil because of the garden lime in the original COF formula that I’ve been using. Just about every gardener around here uses garden lime to raise soil pH and calcium to levels conducive to good vegetable growing. The pH value of 6.4 in the garden sample is about what most veggies want.

The organic matter level is nearly the same in the yard and garden samples, running around 4%. Solomon says that north of the Mason-Dixon line, levels of 7% are not difficult to achieve. South of the line, 4% is about as good as you can expect because long, hot summers burn up the organic matter in the soil. St. Louis is close to the line, perhaps just a bit south, so 4 to 5% organic matter is probably about the best I can expect. Considering that I have been adding only the minimum amount of compost according to Jeavons’ book and that last summer was the hottest, longest summer I have experienced here, I’m quite pleased with 4% organic matter. I may look into adding a bit more compost to each bed in the future to see if it might raise the organic matter a little higher, if I have enough extra compost for this.

The total exchange capacity has a lot to say to anyone who takes the time to study chapter 5 of Solomon’s book carefully. To very briefly summarize Solomon’s argument, the various minerals that plants need can be held onto (a chemist would say adsorbed to) either or both of the organic matter or clay fractions of soil. The more of each you have, the more minerals you can potentially store in your soil, available on demand to your plants. Clay has a higher holding capacity than organic matter for many of the minerals plants need in higher quantities but only organic matter can hold onto phosphorus and sulfur.

Our soil is a silt loam soil derived from wind-blown glacial deposits. Its clay content is rather low. Since summers are long and hot, I can’t hold a lot of organic matter in the soil. Thus my soil starts out with a major disadvantage: the soil mineral pantry will always be on the small side, sort of like the pantry in our 85 year old house is too small to hold everything Mike and I would like to keep in it. That’s what the total exchange capacity of around 7 means. Those of you with more clayey soils have an advantage over me because your soil’s pantry is potentially larger even if we have the same percentage of organic matter in our soils. What this means to me is that re-stocking my garden soil’s pantry by side-dressing with extra fertilizer in midseason could boost my yields to some degree. I will consider that possibility as the garden season progresses. Certainly with that small exchange capacity I need to be attentive to re-mineralizing every year, especially for crops that need high nutrition to grow well.

In order to understand what the rest of the results on the soil report mean and how to develop a soil prescription from them, you’ll need to read chapters 6 and 7 of Solomon’s book. He has developed a worksheet to help with that process. You can find the various versions of it in Appendix C, or you can download a pdf file of the latest version of the worksheets at this site. Since I have an acid soil, I used the acid soil worksheet in the downloadable version.

Please forgive me for not subjecting you to the level of detail Solomon does in the example in his book; I’d really like for you to read the book yourself rather than attempt to summarize it for you. What I’m going to do here is discuss the pattern of mineral deficiencies and excesses for my soil and the COF prescription that I’ve designed to address those patterns.

Above is side 1 of the filled-out worksheet, in which I used the information from the soil report to determine the pattern of deficiencies and excesses for my soil. Note that sulfur and phosphorus are both deficient. The phosphorus deficiency is to be expected since I do not use N-P-K  fertilizer (the P represents phosphorus) on my garden and the organic matter level is not high. Plants need and use a lot of phosphorus so many soils are deficient in it, thus the widespread use of N-P-K fertilizers. My soil also has a considerable sulfur deficiency, as does the example soil in the book. As for the rest of the minerals, magnesium, potassium (the K in N-P-K), iron, and manganese are all present in excess in my soil, while the rest of the minerals are deficient.

Above is side 2 of the acid soil worksheet, in which I work out target amounts of minerals to include in my customized COF prescription for 2013. It was easier to work out the quantities and materials for my COF versus the book’s example soil because I have an excess of potassium and because I need to add sulfur and calcium but not magnesium. Gypsum (calcium sulfate) is the perfect choice for this situation. Two other minerals I need to add, copper and zinc, are added as their sulfate salts (salts with sulfur included in the formula). What I did was determine how much of each of these minerals I needed and how much sulfur they brought with them, then adjusted the amount of gypsum to add to remedy the rest of the sulfur deficit. We are cautioned to avoid adding over a certain level of sulfur each year. Our sulfur deficit is less than that so I don’t have a problem there. I’m really glad to be adding gypsum because our soil has the classic symptom of a soil that needs it: it’s sticky when wet and compacts easily. Solomon had the same problem with his soil and found that adding gypsum greatly improved his soil’s texture. I’m eager to see if it does the same for ours!

The gypsum brings with it about half of the calcium our soil needs. Because our soil already has too much magnesium, I don’t want to use the dolomitic form of garden lime to add the rest; dolomitic lime brings in some magnesium along with the calcium. What I need to use is high-calcium lime, often referred to as high-cal lime. I determined how much of that to include to remedy the rest of the calcium deficit.

To add phosphorus, I chose to use rock phosphate because I have a nearly-full bag of this at home. The analysis on the bag suggests nothing else on the worksheet is coming in with it; I hope that is the case. If calcium comes along it won’t be a major problem. Once I use up the material on hand, I’ll probably switch to bonemeal for the phosphorus requirement since it does not bring in anything that is in excess in our soil.

This leaves two more minerals to balance, sodium and boron. Both of these are needed in only small quantities and toxic at levels not much higher than the needed levels. St. Louis gets enough rain that sodium chloride (table or sea salt) will leach out of the soil, which is probably why our soil has a small sodium deficit. I don’t find any information about sodium in the water quality report of our water supplier (it’s probably low because we draw water from the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers rather than a well field) and we still have a sodium deficit after irrigating heavily most of last summer, so I will add sea salt for the sodium requirement. It brings in some valuable trace minerals as well. For boron, my target to add is below the application limit, and I will use borax as recommended.

Solomon says that pounds per acre is about the same as grams per 100 square feet, the size of my vegetable beds. There are 454 grams in one pound, which I need to know because my postal scale reads in pounds. Some of the minerals are added in just a few teaspoonfuls for a 100 square foot bed; Solomon has those measurement equivalents on page 191 of his book. I’ll spare you the calculations that I made to convert pounds per acre to the amount used in the prescription for our soil.

Two other components besides those mentioned above will be part of the 2013 prescription. The first is an oilseed meal, cottonseed meal in my case (lots of cotton is grown in southern Missouri) since that is what I have been using in the earlier version of COF. Solomon suggests using about 3 quarts of this per 100 square feet. The meal feeds the soil microlife which in turn makes nitrogen (the N in N-P-K fertilizers) available to the plants as the microlife eat, poop, breed, die, and decay. The second component is kelp meal, used to provide a lot of trace minerals as well as a little nitrogen. Solomon suggests using 1 quart of that.

So here is the Soil Doctor’s prescription for 2013 for our soil, to dig into each 100 square feet of bed space before planting crops.
 - 3 quarts cottonseed meal
 - 1 quart kelp meal
 - 5 pounds rock phosphate
 - 1 pound gypsum
 - 10 ounces hi-cal lime
 - 1.4 ounces sea salt
 - 1.0 ounces (about 2 tablespoons) copper sulfate
 - 0.8 ounces (about 1 1/2 tablespoons) zinc sulfate
 - 0.2 ounces (about 1 teaspoon) borax

To prepare the 2013 prescription, I’ll put the cottonseed meal into a large tin that formerly held popcorn. Then I’ll mix all but the bottom four items into that. Solomon suggests dissolving the borax in a full watering can, then watering the entire surface of the bed with that water, in order to get a reasonably even distribution. I believe I can do that with the salt and copper and zinc sulfates as well. The others won’t dissolve sufficiently in water to play that trick.

After I remove any existing vegetation from one of the beds, I’ll sprinkle the mixed prescription as uniformly as possible over the entire surface of the bed, sprinkle 3 or 4 five-gallon bucketfuls of my compost similarly, and then dig them into the bed using a broadfork. Following this I’ll dissolve the last four items into a 2 gallon watering can and lightly water the bed surface with that solution. Then I’ll plant the bed.

If you play soil doctor and come up with your own prescription, you will need to locate the materials for it. Most decent garden centers carry most of the materials I needed for mine and most you are likely to need for yours. Borax is the same borax that you find in the grocery store and use for various cleaning purposes. What I had a hard time finding were hi-cal lime, sea salt, and copper sulfate. For copper sulfate, I searched the ‘net and found out it is used by aquarium hobbyists and can be obtained in 5 pound quantities. Even for my size of garden this will be many year’s worth. Fedco carries sea salt and hi-cal lime as well as most if not all of the other materials in Solomon's book if you are unable to obtain them locally.

Watch this space for details on the results I get. If any of you want to try this, I’ll be curious to learn of your results as well. I’ll explain more fully why I’m doing this and how I will determine if it’s worthwhile in one of the next posts I make. In the meantime, enjoy life!

Lingering winter

I took this photo of plum trees and spicebush shrubs in our backyard following what the St. Louis National Weather Service has dubbed the Palm Sunday Winter Storm. The official snowfall total at Lambert Field, around 10 miles from our house, was 12.7 inches of snow. I measured 12.0 inches in my backyard, but some melting may have already occurred before I made the measurement. As is typical of late season snowstorms, the snow was quite wet and heavy. Until the breeze picked up later in the morning and the air warmed slightly above freezing, the snow clung to shrubs and trees. The weight of the snow brought down a branch of the blue spruce in the side yard. That branch fell on the nearby blueberry shrub, breaking one of its branches off. Another shrub, a spiraea, suffered stem breakage from the weight of the snow on it. As more of the snow melts, I will check to see if any other woody plants were damaged.

Today I pricked-out seedlings of bok choy, cabbage, broccoli, cosmos, and zinnia from the flat in which each was started into individual cell packs. It was a good activity for a cold, snowy, but sunny afternoon. It felt like winter outside, but on the porch the temperature climbed to 80F.

A year ago, spring came very early and I did not respond in time, losing some unknown portion of the yield I could have gotten from my spring garden. This year I am late getting the ground prepared, not only because we were out of town for several days a few weeks back but also because of the lingering winter weather. Until the snow melts, I won't be able to begin preparation for the peas and onions that should have already been planted, much less the next set of seeds that I should have been preparing for now. Once the snow melts I'll have to check the soil temperature to find out if it is high enough to support seed germination now that we have had a week of very much below average temperatures. A week ago I measured the soil temperature at around 48-50F, which would have been warm enough for many of the spring crops I wanted to plant. I hope it hasn't dropped much. All of this is a good reminder that despite whatever I'd like to think, I'm not in control and nature has no obligation to grant me or anyone else the sort of world we think we should have. The best I can do is try to respond in a timely and appropriate way to whatever is actually happening - and in this case it is winter lingering on.

Soil re-mineralization for the rest of us

Now that spring is supposed to be here, I should be outside working on garden beds for the earliest spring crops. But we are having a late spring this year, at least compared to recent years. The temperature at the official St. Louis NWS site is 33F as I write. One year ago, it was 81F. The average high for today is 58F.

To really appreciate the difference between last year and this year, compare the picture of two redbuds in my backyard above (the small trees in the foreground), taken yesterday, with the picture below of the same two redbuds taken one year ago.

Last year the redbuds were in full bloom. This year, they haven’t changed much from midwinter. Granted, this year is closer to climatic normal than last ... but even the magnolias and most of the daffodils aren’t blooming yet.

With winter hanging on for at least a few more days, I have had time to read most of the way through Steve Solomon’s new book, The Intelligent Gardener: Growing Nutrient-Dense Food. Unlike his previous book, which I discussed here, this book looks in depth at one topic: why and how to re-mineralize garden soils. I’m really glad Solomon wrote the book because a couple of years ago, I had a subscription to Acres U.S.A. and read about soil re-mineralization and how important it is in that publication. However, Acres U.S.A. is written for farmers rather than gardeners. The articles discussing re-mineralization referred to many books written by and for farmers and their advisers. I could tell that different people used different systems, but I wasn’t up to reading the various books in order to piece together what might make sense for me to use on a garden scale. Fortunately for all of us, Solomon became interested enough in the topic and, as he puts it, honestly passed high school chemistry, so he could read much of the re-mineralization literature and interpret it for gardeners.

The first few chapters of the book explain why soils need re-mineralization and why composting and manuring are not sufficient to restore a full mineral balance to most soils, although they do benefit soils by feeding the soil microfauna. For those of us, myself included, who grow by the organic method as explicated by Organic Gardening magazine, we have much to learn. Solomon isn’t knocking organic gardening methods; rather, he wants to extend them to take into account what has been learned by soil chemists and successful holistic farmers about the need for and practice of re-mineralizing farm soils. Soils need re-mineralization because they are leached by rainfall and because typical agricultural, horticultural, and landscaping practices (even organic practices) remove some of the soil’s mineral reserves without replacing them and may create excesses in some minerals that are harmful to crops. Crops grown on such soils will not be as nutritious as they could and should be to sustain their own health against disease and insect attack. Since they lack nutrition, they cannot create the proper level of health in those of us who eat them.

The good news is that we can gradually replace the missing minerals in our soils and reduce excessive levels where those occur; Solomon’s book tells us how to do both. For those of us who don’t have the inclination to have our soil tested, Solomon offers an updated version of his complete organic fertilizer recipe. It’s not quite as simple to prepare as his earlier recipe because his research has led him to tweak the mixture depending on where you live, but it should also work a little better than the version in his earlier book. For those of us who want to develop a mix better attuned to our particular soil, Solomon tells us how to collect a soil sample, where to send it to for analysis, and how to interpret the results and use them to develop a mix tailored to remedy the particular pattern of deficiencies and excesses our own soil exhibits. I’ll be doing this and will report on what I learn, the mix I develop, and its effect on my garden throughout the season. I encourage other gardeners to read the book and try the updated recipe (or, if you want a personalized mix, have your soil tested and develop your own mix and try that). Let me know how it works for you. I’ll be interested in comparing results with those of you who have the more clayey soil typical of most of the St. Louis region rather than the silt-loam loess soil that I have.

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.