The Life of A Garden

The Growing Challenge

I signed up for the Growing Challenge today over at Elements in Time.

It's simple and about everything I'm doing anyway so why not?

Here are the criteria:

1. For this challenge, you must grow one additional type of fruit or vegetable than you did last year, and grow it from seed. If you’ve never grown anything, well, grow one thing!  Or if you’ve never grown beans or carrots or lettuce or strawberries, try one of those....  And if you don’t have a garden, you can grow it in a pot or on a window sill - see Gardening 101:  Ordering Seeds for links about how.  The goal is to push ourselves to grow a little more food than we have before.
2. If rule #1 is not enough of a challenge for you, you may make your own rules.  For example, I’m going to grow two fruits and three veggies more than I did last year.
3. You must post about gardening once each week. This could be a post about researching different plants, ordering seeds, buying pots, digging beds, planting the seeds, pruning, adding compost, all the way to preparing a meal that includes the food you grew.  **Please include “Growing Challenge” in the name of the posts - and/or have a Growing Challenge tag in your sidebar - so I can find them!*
4. Every Monday I will go to every participant’s website and check out what you’ve written, and write a summary on this blog. This will be a great way to see what everyone is up to and learn from one another. If you don’t have a blog, you can email me a blurb about your gardening progress.

Stay tuned...
XXKHT

                   

"“The first principle of success is desire - knowing what you want. Desire is the planting of your seed.” ~ Robert Collier

Yesterday, my daughter Ashley and I planted almost all of the remaining seeds that we're hoping will become our summer garden residents.

In addition to the many tomato varieties mentioned in yesterday's post, we've tucked our cracked kale seeds into the dirt, alongside the Johnny Jump Ups and a few varieties of colorful, and companionable marigolds. Some Greek Oregano and Common Sage are incubating next to the alliums that are coming up with a vengeance!

With the cracked seeds, Ashley gingerly removed them from their paper towel incubators and gently placed them into the germinating trays - three to a spot for the Kale seedlings, as well as all the ungerminated tomato seeds.

As with the alliums, you want to use sterilized equipment (bleach/water-1/10), and don't make your germinating mix muddy. It should just hold together when squeezed but not be sticky. You don't want to create too much resistance to the delicate babies, but you don't want any air pockets either.

Fill up the tray and tap it down lightly with the force of gravity. We placed a seed aligned with each of three corners and a popsicle stick name stake in the one that remained - I enjoy the way they resemble tall, thin soldiers standing at attention awaiting orders. As acting high priestess of this future garden, I humbly request that they grow into strong productive plants beginning NOW.

After the seeds were nestled and watered in, on went the mini greenhouse lid. I did not fill the reservoir nor wet the capillary mat that wicks the water while the seedlings are germinating. I read somewhere that seedlings don't want their feet wet, and with lids the humidity level is quite high.

The alliums have shown some signs of a fluffy mold (already!) and I'll pick it off until the lids comes off and then I'm hoping it will take care of itself.

I also recycled some deli/yogurt containers for the Jump Ups because I wanted a lot. They use an extravagant amount of germ mix but I wanted the flowers to have rich resources to draw from. For their lids I stretched ordinary sandwich bags just to keep the humidity up.

The APS systems are expensive and I'm already trying to imagine ways to duplicate them with recyclables in future.

Lastly, the mother daughter planting afternoon turned into a sign up for your garden plot party when Nikki and Katie dropped by and left their payment and paperwork for their very first plot - my first recruits!

Welcome Katie and Nikki - I look forward to living vicariously through your first time joy. What a fabulous day...

XXKHT

Editor's Note:
I apologize for the gigantic "Look at me!" signatures on the photos. The monitor settings have issues and it somehow escaped my notice that the marks were so enormous and blindingly white. It's not that they're such amazing pics, but I've had my intellectual copyrights infringed upon numerous times, and at least I might as well get a little advert out of it when it does occur. I'm happy to share photos with permission and I beg kind readers to indulge me this courtesy.

"Before the seed there comes the thought of bloom." ~E.B. White

At the seed co-op meeting, I whined that Seed Savers wastes a lot of paper and ink with their elaborate photos and giant envelopes just to transport a tiny scoop of seeds.

"Oh, but it's 'vegetable porn!'" Joanna exclaimed.

She told us about how in the dead of winter her father would hole up in his bedroom surrounded by gardening catalogs and his seed packets from years past. She said, that to him (and many of us) this part of the process is just as good as the others; the colorful pictures a superb tonic for cabin fever.

Indeed.

Today, I cleaned up the area where we'll start the seeds - in our south facing living room window. We'll take down the window treatments and I moved the houseplants to the spare bedroom (I wonder if they're ready for the neglect?). I also hauled the folding table up from the basement.

Yesterday, Robert and I did a review of our inventory to determine which we need to start first and what else we needed to begin planting. We're planning a trip down to Gardener's Supply this afternoon or tomorrow at the latest, and luckily it's practically walking distance from our house because the roads are crapola today having endured several ice storms in a row this past weekend.

After I'd done all I could do until Robert comes back from errands, I couldn't help but lay out the artful packets in uniform rows on my windowsill in an arrangement of the future gardens inhabitants; the brilliant colors co-mingled in a most satisfactory way.

Seed co-oping is an economic antidote to the standard packaging of seeds with far more than a community gardener (or any gardener for that matter) would need for several seasons. For instance, most squash/melon seeds come with 25 seeds per packet and considering that they'll need about 6 feet per plant and varieties are better off being planted far away from each other (x-pollination), that'sa lotta melons!

Here is a screen shot of the seed order spreadsheet I made to keep track of my part of the co-op order.

(click on the image to enlarge)

Joanna coordinated the Johnny's order and I did Seed Savers (see sidebar for links). All in all we paid out over $100 for seeds for this year, but with leftovers, seed saving and next year's co-op, it should be next to nothing in future. Next season, we'll probably need lettuces and the coles again, and carrots and beets and onions; because we need so much lettuce, and at least at this point, I haven't the slightest idea how to save carrot or beet seeds.

As for the tomatoes, beans, peas, cucumbers, squash and peppers - I'm all about it. I can't wait to see how the different generations turn out (or if they turn out at all).

Stay tuned for the next installment of Germination 101!
XXKHT

“The seeds of knowledge may be planted in solitude, but must be cultivated in public” ~ Samuel Johnson

Day one of Life of a Garden:

Although it's not yet mid-March, it is late to begin our garden journal, in that there have been several events passed this winter, relevant to our theme.

The first, is the wonderful day last month when my partner Robert, and I (Kimberley) gathered with our garden friends Joanna & Daniel and Tim & Hillary to co-op our seeds and seed orders.

We gathered at J & D's house, armed with our seed catalogs as well as our collective dreams of "dirt manicures" and luscious tomatoes still warm from the sun that produced them.

Joanna made gorgeous chocolate treats and a big pot of tea, and we set about trying to organize our desires into schemes with potential.

Joanna, a seasoned gardener, is a veritable expert on tomatoes. Additionally, she had a lot to say on companion plantings, when to start seedlings and what not to bother planting at all. Her seed vendor of choice is Johnnys Selected Seeds from Maine. She also had a good number of seeds saved from previous seasons (one packet was from 1992!).

Last year being my first garden ever, I had what I hope was not just beginners luck in that we had a beautiful, bountiful harvest, from a veritably weed free plot - that is, because I spent literally hours there every morning making sure that no weed saw the light of more than a single day.

Robert was master of watering and tomato maintenance, because not unlike Joanna, the rest of the garden is basically decoration around the tomato plants.

Seed saving hadn't really occurred to me until I started to run out of things to do around late August. As we picked the last of our prized Pink Lady tomatoes, I thought to myself, "Holy crap! I should be saving seeds so we can have these same babies again next season! Then I wondered why the thought hadn't occurred earlier. I figure you can't expect too much your first run - I mean everything last season was a learning experience for me.

The idea of seed saving sent me to the internet looking for the how-tos and ultimately to Seed Saver's Exchange.  SSE is my vendor of choice both for their beautiful presentations, and their righteous mission  - to preserve our seed heritage, and to protect heirloom varieties from extinction through education, on site preservation and dispersed cultivation via their seed sales.

The group traded their saved seeds, ordered from Johnny's and SSE and got back together to parse out the booty a couple of weeks ago.

The next step is planning out what needs to be started indoors and when.

We already have our light system and a sufficient supply of materials to use the APS seed starting system, which is a wick watering device and which I am planning to go into great detail about in later posts after we actually get started.

We still need to research and purchase our seed germinating mixes and potting soils in addition to fertilizers (if any) and we want to invest in a light meter, and possibly soil testing kit.

This year is going to be the most expensive investment year because it's all new. In past, Robert always purchased starts from the nursery, which is fine if you'll be content with the standard varieties a nursery offers.

As a chef for over 20 years, once I got my hands dirty, I immediately began to long for colorful heirloom varieties like Dragon Carrots, and Rainbow Chards, and Bull's Blood Beets - but let's not go there quite yet - there's plenty more where that came from.

The seeds we plan to start immediately are onions because they go in the ground as soon as the soil can be worked, which around here I believe is around late April, but we'll have to wait until the community gardens are actually open for biz in the tilled areas which is sometime in early May (I should know this, since my partner is a coordinator!) After a harder search than I thought should be necessary, I found a wonderful web article at The Kitchen Gardener called The Humble Onion. It's chock full of what you need to know about planting onions, and I'm grateful to the producers for clarifying the process and assuring us that it's not so hard after all.

The Tommy Thompson area offers both deep tilled and no till plots, of which we plan to work one of each. I'm not fully sure of the advantages and disadvantages of each, but that is part of what we intend to learn this season.

I know that with the tilled plots one disadvantage is being on the BACGs schedule meaning that you must have the plot cleaned up by a certain date (generally in mid November). This eliminates the possibility of fall plantings such as garlic, and also of late harvest crops like leeks and cole crops that can survive or even thrive through some frost.

The tilled plots are particularly nice for gardeners who are very active, in that the deep aeration is wonderful for the annual plants to dig down some nice roots without much resistance. Deep tilling pulls up a lot of weed seeds however, and this is a source of debate amongst gardeners as to the advantages v disadvantages etc.

I think they both have merit, and it all depends on your plans and your style and I for one am grateful to have both as an option. I'm looking forward to learning from the experience of each mode as well.

So that's our start for now. I am going to try my best to journal this season as thoroughly as possible with many photos, and tips, and challenges, and prose, and recipes and ideas as I can cram in here so we can all learn from our successes and failures.

As the fairy in my kitchen proclaims, "If you're not killing plants, you're not stretching yourself as a gardener." Let's hope this turns out to be more the exception than the rule.

XXKHT