fertilizer

One thing that is lucky about the slow start the garden got this year, is that by the time I was doing my later plantings (watermelon, squash) I had learned from some failures/disappointments from the first plantings. One of those was the importance of fertilizing.

Although we intended to fertilize the whole garden with manure and leaves, most of this went to just two beds. I thought since the land hadn't been used for a garden for at least several years (perhaps never), the soil was probably chock full of nutrients and fertilziing wouldn't be a problem. It probably wasn't, but fertilization would have helped.

The thing about fertilization is that it helps plants grow stronger, making them more resistant to bugs and disease. Used in a targeted way, it also helps the plants grow faster than weeds, increasing the likelihood of the vegetables' triumph over the weeds.

I didn't research fertilization options too much, and I didn't get my soil tested (I will next year though). I just found a recipe and scoured the gardening store looking for the ingredients. The primary ingredient is a seed meal of some sort - the only one I found was cottonseed meal. The secondary ingredient is lime. You use about eight times as much cottonseed meal as lime, and mix them together. I just put a small scoop of this (1/4 cup) where I was planting seeds and mixed it in with the hand trowel. The watermelon and the celery seem to love it, but the summer squash that I planted has been lackluster. Actually, come to think of it, I may or may not have given fertilizer to the summer squash.

I also bought a container of seaweed extract. It seemed expensive, but you dilute a tablespoon in a gallon of water, which has been enough for a whole bed of vegetables. I think it will last at least a season or two. The celery has always responded noticeably to fertilization. I hope to do some experimentation next year so that I can compare growth, insect and disease resistance, size of harvest, and ultimately taste for plants depending on the fertilization.

tomatoes - good news and bad news

soon-to-be-ripe cherokee purple tomato

The tomatoes have been ripening quickly. The first cherry tomatoes only took about two days to go from pale green to red!

BUT - I had trouble with blossom end rot and sun scald. It took me awhile to figure out what was going on - I did see a few insects on the plants, and I blamed them at first. But after cutting into every bad tomato that I picked, doing lots of googling, and talking to some farmers, I think it was just that the blossom end rot and sun scald created opportunities for insects. I also put yellow sticky paper up around the tomato bed. I would recommend this because it showed me which flying insects were hanging around my tomatoes. Turns out there wasn't anything damaging in large numbers, just some flies.

small spot of blossom end rot (seriously, in bad cases it basically covered the whole tomato)

what the blossom end rot looks like on the inside. In every case, it went much deeper than it
looked like it would on the outside.

First - blossom end rot. It is caused by calcium deficiency in the soil but also by watering at night. This is the third year I've grown tomatoes and I have always watered them at night and never had this problem. But now I know. I tried eating the parts that didn't look damaged by blossom end rot, but they are not tasty.

two tomatoes with blossom end rot - the one on the left was picked early, before the rot spread
and before insects took advantage. The one on the right was picked late,
after the rot spread and insects binged on it.

Second - sun scald. I think this was caused by the long stretch of very hot weather we got. These were just small spots and if I brought the tomatoes right when they began to ripen, bugs didn't get to them. So I was able to just cut off the sun scald and eat the tomato anyway.

tomato with two spots of sunscald

Two things for next year: I am going to plant repelling flowers like marigolds and borage around the tomatoes. I may not have insect trouble with tomatoes this year, but as I've said before, I'm going to be much more proactive next year. Second, I thought with 20 tomato plants designated for canning, I would have an easier time getting large amounts of fruit ripened at once. So far I am getting a handful of tomatoes every day. In addition, I began examining the canning books to see how many tomatoes you need for a pint of tomato sauce. It is a lot! I think it was 10 pounds per pint. So, I will actually at least double my tomato plants next year, or plan my garden for summer eating and buy a ton of tomatoes direct from a farmer.

I must say I was very relieved when I determined that the tomato problems were not caused by insects. I am upset about losing the squash, but I would be DEVASTATED if I didn't get the tomato crop I wanted. For the last couple of weeks I have been able to bring in lots of perfect tomatoes so I'm feeling hopeful!

birds as insect management

I know that experts on integrated pest managment will probably think this is way too obvious - but I had an epiphany the other day when touring a neighbor's garden. I pointed out hundreds of squash bug eggs and babies on her squash plants, and she wasn't concerned. She said that they always have them but they don't cause any problems. I wondered how this could be, and she said "the birds eat them!" At that moment I paused to listen to my environment and I heard the chattering of several birds, dozens probably, in her gorgeous tree-shaded yard. I noticed the bird bath and the bird houses scattered around. Returning to my garden, I heard.......nothing. For some reasons I don't have any birds in my yard!

Now I want to get birds into my garden, pronto! We do have one tree nearby but we will have to add a few nice homes (different types to attract different birds), places for the birds to rest in the actual garden, and a place or two that will provide them water. We are going to work on that this weekend, and I want to pick up a few bat houses while we're at it.

Of course, then I might have a problem with birds eating my garden, but I guess like everything else I will worry about that later.

pests

We're getting ready to go out of town for several days, so we've been focusing on getting the garden in tip top shape. We have caretakers lined up, but we don't want to ask too much of them. I've spent hours ruthlessly going after weeds this week, which has given me some time to reflect on this gardening season.

I know I've said it before, but I cannot emphasize enough how much time I have spent working on protecting my plants from bugs. Not bugs in general, but specific pests that are especially damaging and with high populations. These include japanese beetles, squash bugs, squash vine borers, and now cucumber beetles (though I've really only seen a few of the latter). I don't completely mind this work, but I would really like to avoid it in the future.

I have spent far more time working on the squash bug eggs and japanese beetles than I have on weeding. I don't mean this to discourage people from gardening - the opposite, actually. I believe a proactive stance towards certain insects is best. Usually that means spraying harmful chemicals, but when you're not willing to do that, prevention is much better than treatment. Especially as these problems are rampant in the area I live - one family told us that they lose their squash every year and they never knew why. After hearing us talk about vine borers, they realize that is what's going on. They were blaming themselves. Since you are almost guaranteed to have these unwelcome visitors try to take up residence, stopping them before they do damage makes the most sense.

I will say I have given up on the squash bug eggs. It just took too much time and after the vine borers, it seems highly unlikely that we will ever get anything to eat from these plants. I do still go out and capture the squash bugs - they still come out of hiding when the plant is sprayed, and they have started to live under the boards we laid out. They are pretty easy to get rid of once you see them. There have been dozens under one of the board every time I pick it up. I don't think the bugs grow fast enough to be ones that hatched from eggs on the plant, they must be coming from somewhere else. According to my research, it takes about a week for eggs to hatch, and then about a month for bugs to grow to be adults. Unless a bunch hatched before I ever noticed the eggs.

We have made the decision to pull up the last galeux d'eyesines plant. It was continuing to grow new vines and form new blossoms, but the plant overall looked really ill. If we were going to be here it might have been a more difficult decision, but we also have to worry about our watermelon plants. I pulled it and have left it on the squash bed as a trap for a couple of days - I'm hoping it continues to attract all of the bugs so I can kill them.

The zucchini is looking okay, but not great. I don't know if we will get any more zucchinis from it before it dies.

We're going to dust the watermelons with diatamaceous earth and wrap the stems in aluminum foil before we leave. I also gave the squash trellis to the watermelon - hopefully being off the ground will help, somehow.

(8/9)

squash update and new trellis

Although I said I was giving up on the squash, you knew I wouldn't be able to totally do it. I'm not inspecting the leaves the way I was, but I did decide that if the plants were trellised, it would be easier to find and remove bug eggs. My spouse and I together designed this tent-style trellis that will be easy to store and easy to put up next year. The squash plant seems to love it - though I did have to uproot some of the areas where it attached, it has grown quite a bit since we put the trellis up.

This is the trellis, modeled by two watermelon plants.

I'm considering trying to grow squash again - just once more. If I do, I will be extremely proactive about insects and I won't add any new vegetables, so I can focus my attention and energy on successfully growing squash. I know now the importance of checking your garden every day - I would train the squash (so it didn't grow through the neighbor's fence), inspect it, put out insect traps, etc.

However, the squash plant that had the large fruit set on it is officially dead. It was looking pretty bad near the root, but one of the vines still looked strong, so I put extra dirt around its root and gave it some water in hopes that it would become the new root. Each day it looked worse and today, the large fruit had fallen off. It's been 10 days since we performed squash surgery, so I don't know if the plant died because of the surgery or because we didn't find all of the borers. The other plant that we found about a dozen small borers in looks really good - for now - though it doesn't have any fruit set.

The zucchini is still growing strong and we've harvested several. A summer squash that I planted later is growing slowly - maybe it is working on its roots or maybe it doesn't like the heat wave we've had.

(7/28)

canning potatoes

We canned potatoes tonight. I gave about a half pound to one neighbor and set aside another two pounds to give to other neighbors, and we were worried we wouldn't be able to fill the 10 jars that our canner can hold. But we had more than enough! I will make a rough guess that each pint jar can hold about a half pound of potatoes, because I estimate we made it through 2/3 of the potatoes before we ran out of jars. The entire canning process takes a couple of hours, and we didn't want to do another round tonight. It takes longer than you might think, because we had to wait for water to boil at a few different points.

I soaked the potatoes in water for a minute or two before scrubbing them, to help loosen the dirt.

The methods are well-established and simple to follow, as long as you can handle precision. We have the directions that came with the canner and two books, and the instructions were basically the same. I definitely recommend reading the instructions thoroughly before you begin so that you are prepared for the next steps - for example, there are several points where you need to have boiling water ready. Next time I think I will make a step by step outline for ourselves that indicates when we need to put water on to boil, and how much. It's easier than going to the book every two minutes to double check and to look ahead to the next steps to make sure you're ready.

The only other thing I would do differently is get more heavy-duty potholders. When we poured boiling water on top of the canning jars in the canner, we both burned ourselves a little.


I've never eaten canned potatoes before, other than sweet potatoes, so I'm not sure how we will use all ten jars (plus we will probably can as many jars of the german butterballs). I'm getting excited for the winter!

re-doing the bean trellis

The bean trellis failed on us - after it broke in the wind storm, my spouse propped it up with extra support, but a few weeks later the bamboo poles were completely falling over with the weight of the beans.

He went and bought relatively inexpensive wood and built a taller, stronger trellis. He built the frame without using his saw, he just screwed the wood together and braced it using string to the fence and to the ground using stakes. Then he tied string between the old top and the new top. At this point, it really seems impossible to undo the strings, so hopefully the bean vines will figure out that they have new room to grow up.


I really like the way it looks, and it's easier to walk around when I'm doing japanese beetle duty. I don't have to duck under six strings, there is only one that is in my way now. We only spent about 30 bucks on the wood and twine, and we should be able to unscrew the wood to store it over the winter. The photo above was taken a few weeks after the new trellising was built - as you can see, the beans quickly vined to the top of the new trellis. I think it's about eight feet tall - I can't reach the top leaves for picking japanese beetles.

It is important to me to garden inexpensively, and this seems like a good option for beans. Ideally we would have had a plan for this last fall and we could've been on the lookout for something free, something re-used...but it is what it is. We also should have switched the new, taller trellis more quickly - the vines wrapped around each other into huge clusters that are really hard to pick beans out of.

squash surgery

We tried the surgery to salvage the squash last night. I don't really care about the zucchini plant but I will be sad to lose the galeux d'eyesines squash. I'm excited to try them, and I was really hoping to be able to give a few to friends and family. They travel better than tomatoes or spinach. So we're going to do what we can.

leaves wilting like this is one of the signs of squash vine borer larvae in your plant.

Galeux d'eyesines squash with evidence of squash vine borer larvae damage near the root - see the orange sawdust-like substance? That shouldn't be there.

zucchini with same stuff

We went outside with a small knife, the bucket of water, toothpicks, and gloves. My spouse used the knife to cut vertically above the holes where we could see the orange strawdust-like substance that squash borers produce.

The plant felt pretty strong - it was actually difficult to cut into, which is good news (less damage so far). But, we couldn't find any caterpillars (squash borers at larvae stage). We moved on to the zucchini - same thing.


When he cut into the last plant, the second winter squash, we found about a dozen teeny-tiny caterpillars. I really couldn't even see them from where I was standing - they were about the size of a short grain of rice. We also found one large one, about an inch long. He would scrape them out, then drop them in the bucket of soapy water. The toothpicks came in handy here, since they were so small it was hard to get them with the knife. After he had scraped everything rotten out of the plant, we declared the surgery over and I put a shovelful of rich dirt on top of the wound. This makes the plant more likely to live through the harrowing experience.

photo of an out-of-focus small borer larvae on a toothpick.

Now that we'd seen them, we went back to the other two and tried again. We still couldn't find any on the zucchini but we found a few on the other winter squash plant. They made it through the night without collapsing, but I expect it will take a few days to know if they really lived through the surgery. And of course we have no idea if we got all of the borers or not. I was noticing a few other places I thought we should check, so we might be performing surgery again tonight...

Update: the plants all lived through the surgery, but we didn't get all the borers. I think the problem was that the plants were so big by the time we did the surgery, and the roots were so stocky and thick that we just missed them with our cut. It's also possible that new eggs hatched. Twelve days later the second plant died, which was the one with the big fruit on it. I do not expect the third plant to live because it had serious damage and I had to remove the main root. The photos below show the borers and the shredded roots a little better. But, it's still there two days after these photos were taken and the plant is still alive, so maybe there is reason to hope.




If I plant squash again, I will use an aggressive strategy to prevent the borers. They seem like a more serious problem to me because they completely killed two of our plants before we got any produce from them. At least with the squash bugs there's a better chance that you will get to collect a little on all of your hard work. I will use trellising, wrap the base of the plant in foil, put out yellow pans filled with water, sprinkle diatamaceous earth, and spray neem oil. At this point I am not sold on row covers - they seem like more trouble than they're worth because they also keep out pollinators. I haven't heard good things about them from the forums I've read.

I might wait a few years before trying squash again in hopes of discouraging the borers from hanging around my garden - but then again, there was no garden in this spot for several years so I'm not sure this will help. The only reason I'm still considering this is that I'm certain the yard was sprayed using artificial chemicals, probably excessive amounts in last two years. I think it's possible that in the process of transitioning this space of land from conventional to organic, I've been hit hard with insects that were being suppressed unnaturally and unsustainably prior to us. I don't actually know if this is how it works but it seems plausible.

potato harvest, part I

We harvested the rest of the cranberry red potatoes, leaving one plant to see if the potatoes get bigger in a week.

We pushed the flat fork that we use for compost down several inches away from the base of the plant, then lifted up. We erred on the side of too far away while we figured out just what the potatoes would like when harvested, which I recommend. The soil was really easy to work with, probably because we worked it so much before we planted potatoes.

Like many vegetables, the roots extended about as far as the leaves did.

we found 2 or 3 rotten potatoes, but there weren't any widespread problems

I weighed our harvest using our bathroom scale, and it said we got 10 lbs, but it's probably a little less because the bathroom scale is not that precise.I'm basically happy with that yield. There were several tiny potatoes (about the size of a dime) that weren't even worth collecting, which is why I left one plant to grow for another week. I wonder if we didn't jump the gun on the harvest or if there will always be small potatoes.

We planted one lb of seed potatoes, and according to the seeds company you can expect about 10 lbs of harvest for each lb. At 5.50/lb (plus shipping) for seed potatoes, these come out to about 50 cents/lb for edible potatoes. I think most vegetables are much more money-saving - we paid about $2 for a packet of spinach seed, used less than half, and got about 4 lbs worth. 25 cents for a pound of organic spinach is absolutely incredible!

cranberry red potato harvest 7/19

The main benefit that I can see now of growing your own potatoes is the variety you can get. Most of the farmers at our local market sell pretty standard potatoes. Growing your own, you get to choose your favoriate varieties and even try new ones. And it does save money if you only think about the seed - I think market potatoes usually cost 3 or 4 dollars per pound. But when you factor in the cost of materials, not to mention the labor, I doubt it saves money. Still, it's fun!

Now, since I made a critical error and bought early potatoes which do not store well, we have to decide what we will do with our bounty. I want to share them with our neighbors, who have been so extraordinarily kind, generous, and welcoming to us. My spouse wants to can them. We will probably do some of each.

watermelon germination

Well...only two of the three types of watermelon I planted germinated. Unfortunately, I'm not sure which one I planted where, but I'm almost certain that livingston seed's petite yellow is the one that failed. I'm disappointed and very concerned that even the two that germinated won't set fruit before the weather gets cold. Plus, I'm going to have to be very vigilant about pests, after the trouble I've had with the squash - more on that later.

Next year, I will almost certainly start watermelon seeds indoors. Maybe in the south people can direct seed watermelon and it will ripen in their long growing season, but here in zone 6 it doesn't seem like it will be a success - especially since we had such a late start to summer.

They took a surprisingly long time to germinate - at least two weeks for the first one that poked through (pictured below) and even longer for the second.

potato harvest - surprise!

After the last post when I was so worried about my potatoes getting leafroll virus, I took a leaf sample to the farmer's market so I could ask my farmers as well as the master gardener's. The MGs are a great resource and incredibly eager to help, but they usually have to do some research before giving me an answer. They thought it was an insect because they focused on the holes in the leaves, and we looked through their pest book and found a picture of damage done by potato leaf hoppers that looked exactly like the leaf I had brought in. This was actually good news to me - much easier to deal with than a disease.

But then I took the leaf to my farmer, who said there was nothing wrong with it - it was just ready for harvest! I hoped he was right but I was skeptical because the photo I saw looked uncanny, and my resources all indicated that it was too early for potato harvest. But I also know that the farmer is most likely to be right, because it is his full-time job rather than a hobby (even if the MGs are experts, my understanding is that most are volunteers so they just haven't had as much experience as a full-time farmer).

I came home hopeful and decided to yank up one of each variety of potatoes I planted. It was so exciting to find a bunch of real potatoes under each vine! It makes it totally worth the wait:-) But they were pretty small, so I looked up each variety from the seeds of change catalog and found that indeed, these were both early varieties that take an estimated 100 days until maturity. It hasn't quite been 100 days (I was able to use the time stamp on my camera to verify this) so I will wait a little longer, but I am so relieved.

Here is a photo of the harvest from two plants:


Here is a photo of the cranberry red, which was a gorgeous fuschia color!


We will be using them in our food tonight...I'll let you know how the taste compares in a later post!

Freezing spinach

For spinach, you have the option of canning or freezing. You could probably dry it as well, but for us there was no question - freezing was likely to have the best texture and flavor. But you can't just rinse the leaves and shove them into the freezer - I'm not sure what would happen if you did that, but at the very least it would taste bad.

We rinsed the spinach leaves by dunking them in water, shaking them around, and then putting them in a colander. My spouse rinsed them before tearing off the parts he didn't want to preserve, while I removed the parts I didn't want before rinsing. I think either method is fine but my method meant having to change the water fewer times. Sometimes a clump of dirt or a little big would come off, which is a normal part of growing food. We just picked the parts we would want to eat if we were making a salad - we probably could've included more leaves, but I wanted this frozen spinach to be extra good! In the photo below you can see the bowl of spinach ready to be blanched.


Then, you blanch. This stops the growing process. We decided to use the steam blanching method rather than the immersion blanching method. For immersion blanching, you put the spinach in lightly boiling water for two minutes (precision is important when preserving food). For steam blanching, according to my resources, you just increase the time by 50% - so three minutes. We used a steamer pot and put a very thin layer of leaves in.


Then, you ice bath them. This stops the cooking process. This was kind of difficult - we didn't have enough ice on hand. But we did the best we could and I would just spoon the steamed spinach into the ice bath, swirl them around with my hand until they felt cooler than room temperature. Then we put them in a colander to drain.


Then, you remove the excess water. The more water you remove, the longer the spinach will keep in the freezer. My source recommended using a salad spinner, but we didn't have one so we did the best we could using a spoon to squeeze as much water out as possible. The following photo shows my spouse trying to squeeze as much excess water out as he could - even though we thought the spinach was well-drained, once it was in the bag we could see that there was a lot of water still hanging around.


Then, you put them in bags. We used quart-sized freezer bags and labelled the date, the vegetable, and any other information. For example, I wasn't sure if we were supposed to remove the stems or not so we did one with stems, one without. We're almost certain that you don't have to remove the stems, which is nice because doing so is time consuming. But, perhaps it will taste better.

We harvested enough for two quart-sized bags. In the future I will try to do more to get more water out, because I can tell there are a lot of ice crystals in the bags already. I don't think this will hurt the flavor as long as we use it relatively quickly - I'm guessing three months? I will say that we sampled some of the spinach and the quality - both taste and texture - was phenomenal when judged against the standard of supermarket frozen spinach. I'm excited to see how it holds up!

Lesson learned:)

Some things I've learned about beans, particularly pole beans:

Thin them before they begin to vine!!!!!!! Sure, we probably should've known better - but we're busy and it didn't seem like a big deal until I'd spent four hours of a Saturday gently (read: s-l-o-w-l-y) and methodically unravelling bean vines. Since we hadn't installed the trellising system yet, they had nothing to wrap themselves around except each other. It was painstaking work - but the good news is, since it's been several weeks since this happened, we know it didn't damage any of them. I was worried because some of them broke, and some of them looked very wilted after the whole ordeal. But they bounced back. It was like unraveling a huge ball of delicate chain necklaces that all look exactly the same. I wish I had a picture of how inter-twined the vines were, but I was too focused on the task at hand.

The other thing - stay on top of the weeds. Once we installed the bird netting, we weren't able to weed...and once we took the bird netting off, we prioritized thinning the beans over weeding, for better or worse. Then the beans got too tall to reach in and weed, particularly with the trellising in the way. This is one of the biggest changes I would make next year - I think I would have spent less time weeding overall if I had made more of an effort early on to hoe the small weeds. I would also use bark or grass clippings or some sort of mulch, to suppress the weeds. On the beds we prepared and planted later, we've done this, and it's made a PHENOMENAL difference.

By the way, all of the beans that we thought were bush beans have turned out to be bush beans. This is a relief, since I was worried about trellising in an earlier post. And although I'm irritated that the cannellini beans are bush instead of pole, it hasn't caused any practical problems.

celery update

The celery is growing well in its new outdoor home! It is not ready to be blanched yet, but it is definitely getting there. I'm happy to report that all of the celery plants survived the transplanting process - there were one or two of them I had concerns about. We did have some big storms that knocked some of the dirt from the hills into the trenches, but I do not believe that they is a big problem - just an inconvenience.


Ignore the grasses and weeds in these photos - I weeded those that were at the bottom, possibly competing with the celery root structure, but when I began pulling the grasses growing on the tops and sides of the trenches quite a bit of dirt fell in. I am trying to minimize that until the celery is ready to be blanched.


I will find out if the extra dirt is a problem when I harvest. I think it will just be a matter of breaking the stalks off and washing them well. My guess is that it would only be a problem if you were going to store the whole plant or sell it at a market. But I could be wrong - perhaps having the dirt in between the stalks will make the celery disease-prone or will make it rot. We'll see!

trellising

We decided to try something new with trellising systems. Mainly because we wanted to do it cheap - tomato cages seem to regularly cost 10+ each, a price we could not afford for 22 plants. We bought bamboo poles, put them in the ground, and zig zagged twine across to support tomatoes. We did a similar thing for the pole beans. The bamboo poles were quite cheap - maybe 10 or 20 dollars total for all we needed for both crops.

It just isn't working, for either crop. We could instantly tell that it wouldn't work for the tomatoes, as the poles weren't strong enough for the plants even before they set fruit. Below you can see a photo of the poles as we were beginning to tie the string around.


The bean poles were better supported, my spouse used anchors and counterweights but it still dragged the strings way down. i thought they would be six feet high but they are less than four feet when we first installed the trellising. The situation has gone from questionable to bad, as some of the bean poles snapped in a storm. My spouse fixed them, but a couple of weeks later the beans have gotten so heavy that the poles are bending way down. I think it is too late to try something new so we will continue to prop up the current trellising systems. The photo below is from the day we first installed the bean trellising.


The poles came in a package so we couldn't really tell how strong they were until we got home and began trying to put them in the ground. I think we both knew it probably wasn't going to be a successful experiment but we tried anyway. I will definitely do something different next year - either I will look for some free or cheap rebar or I will have my spouse build me a large sturdy wooden frame for stringing the twine for the beans. I do not have any ideas for the tomatoes yet - even if we got free tomato cages, I would rather not use them because in my experience they are not strong enough and they are awkward to store. If you've got ideas, hit me.

Planting asparagus crowns

Around the time I planted the squash I planted the asparagus crowns we bought from a nursery in town. The plan was to compare the growth and ultimate production with that of our asparagus seeds, since my most reliable resource contradicted all of the other resources by advising me to grow asparagus from seed instead of from crowns.

The asparagus crowns looked like hay that had been knotted together at one end. They were dry, brittle, and very light (in weight). All ten combined were the size of what I thought one asparagus crown would be. So far, I think my trusted source will turn out to be right! I'm certain they must have been treated with something to be sold in a package that way, with instructions to plant them in a couple of months. I expected them to be packaged in dirt.

To plant them, the directions on the package said to dig a trench, spread out the roots and plant at the bottom of the trench (sorry no photos, they were accidentally deleted in a computer crash). It was confusing and I felt like I was hurting the asparagus crowns, which were very brittle. But it seemed to work okay. Then you cover them, but you only fill the trench about halfway - once the crowns start to poke through, you cover them up again.

Anyway, it's been a few weeks (perhaps even a month) since I planted them, and I have not seen them come through. Neither the package nor any of my resources have had much to say about planting asparagus crowns, so I don't know if this means they are not going to live or if this is normal. The next planting (the sixth and final planting) is when the asparagus seeds are set to go in, so it will be interesting to see how this turns out!

Hardening off seedlings

If you have started seedlings indoors, like I did, it is relatively easy to control conditions. The baby plants grow up with consistent temperatures and water, sunlight gently filtered by windows, and never have to deal with rough conditions like wind or insects.

This is good for seedlings, particularly plants like tomatoes and peppers that seem to be a little weaker when they are young. But when it is time for them to go out to their permanent spots, putting them out without gradually introducing them to the challenges of the outdoors could shock them (slowing their growth) or, without having had a chance to build-up defenses to these challenges, they might perish.

So, we must gradually introduce them to outdoor conditions. This process is called hardening off. The basic idea is ease the transition. Precisely how this is carried out depends on how much time and energy you are willing to put into it and the outside conditions when you are ready to begin the process.

Some of my resources suggested a simple process of merely putting the seedlings in a cold frame for a few days before planting them. This did not seem like a good solution for me, because by the time my plants were ready to go out, it was already pretty hot. The cold frame protects them from wind, rainstorms, and critters. And, they can stabilize temperatures so that plants don't have to deal with as much shocks in terms of temerature lows. In my situation the heat seemed to be the most difficult element, so putting them in a cold frame would have been detrimental.

The alternative is more time consuming. You gradually introduce them to the elements by putting them outside for short increments. How quickly you increase their challenges depends on how much time you are willing to spend moving flats of seedlings around all day. Pay special attention to water during the hardening off process. Here was my process:

day 1: put plants on covered front porch facing west for an hour in the late morning.
-they had to deal with outside temperature shifts and wind, but the wind was lessened by the walls of the porch. they did not have to deal with sunlight.
day 2: put plants on covered front porch facing west for a few hours in the late morning
-conditions same as day 1, but they have to deal with them longer
day 3: put plants on covered front porch facing west for several hours in the morning, then moving to the uncovered back porch facing east through the evening
-conditions same as day 1, but they have to deal with them longer (moving them to the east porch keeps them from being exposed to direct, unfiltered sunlight)
day 4: put plants on back porch facing east for one hour in the early morning, then move them to the front porch for the rest of the day (including the evening)
-they are getting the first taste of unfiltered sunlight and unfiltered wind. the early morning sun is gentler than the midday sun.
day 5: put plants on back porch facing east for a couple of hours in the early morning, then move them to the front porch for the rest of the day
-same as day 4, but increasing the time
day 6: put plants on back porch facing east for several hours during the day, closely watching them for wilt and sun scald.
-same as previous day, but adding the harsh midday sun.
day 7: put plants on back porch facing east all day and all night.
-adding the challenge of nighttime lows

Anytime the plants wilted or showed signs of sun scald, I immediately transferred them to gentler conditions and gave them extra water [and pulled back a little the next day - either repeating the step or even going back to the previous step. If anything, I wish I had been more careful. My tomatoes almost all survived the hardening off process, and my peppers handled it like champs. But three of my celery plants died, and two of them look like they will not last much longer. My actual process was usually much longer, because of days when the weather was too harsh or we were out of town.


Above, you can see my first hardened-off seedlings. Note the sun scald, particularly on the plant in the middle. I am happy to report that this damage did not deter the growth of this seedlings at all! These tomatoes (the romas) have been out for a couple of weeks and I can't even tell which ones had sun scald damage anymore - the new growth has completely overshadowed those leaves and all of the plants look equally healthy.

Ideally, you would not let the plants wilt or get sun scald. But it can be difficult to know how they will do. Had I started earlier in the season, this process on this exact timeline would probably be fine. By the time I started, even the first hour outside on the shaded porch made some of the plants wilt so it ended up much slower forme. It's easy to grow impatient (especially with the relatively time-consuming process of moving the trays of seedlings around) and difficult to guess what the plants are ready for. But although the peppers and celery only just recently went outside, I am proud to report that the tomatoes have really taken off since they were planted out!

And just as a note, it was fun to watch the plants get stronger - I could really tell that they were growing sturdier as the days went along!

Overall I was happy with the hardening off process. I will do the same thing next year, except I will be ready to start earlier and I will take it a little bit slower.

Up-potting my seedlings

I did not grow up in a household where we gardened. Although members of my family actually live on a farm even today, I consider myself an absolute beginner. My family's knowledge of gardening to not get passed down to me through blood, nor did I pick it up as I was growing up. I have no sense of when things should be planted, how much water they need, how much space they need, or even how to choose the best seedling when thinning plants out. So as I go along this experiment, I base everything on lots of research (and advice from people). Sometimes there is a lot of information and everything works great. Sometimes there isn't. Although overall, I was satisifed with my little seedlings, there came a point where they weren't growing. I wondered and wondered when it was time to up-pot, and how exaclty to up-pot them (move them to a larger pot) but when it got to that point, all my resources were vague or silent.


Above, you can see the celery, including a plant with its first true leaf. Several weeks later all of the celery had one true leaf, but they all remained the size of that little seedling picture above. By the way, thinning out the celery was really fun because when you nibble on the leaves that you've decided to yank, they have the flavor of celery!

Finally, my spouse, who did seem to pick up a little bit of gardening sense as he grew up, hinted that it was really time. So we bought these peat pots (in photos below). If you were doing a large-scale operation, these would be too expensive; but since I knew I would only need about 60, it worked for us. The benefit is that when the plants are ready to go outside, you can just put the pot straight in the ground with the plant in it. Less stress on the plant, and easier for the gardener!


Above, the newly-up-potted celery. See how it is pretty much the same size? Very VERY soon after being up-potted, they took off, steadily growing bigger and adding more leaves!


Above, the tomatoes, sorted by variety and marked since they looked the same at this point. I up-potted the best-looking ones (strongest, tallest, most leaves, greenest), keeping a few more than I intended to plant. I'm really glad I did that. In addition, I saved some of the ones in their cells in case a few of the up-potted ones didn't make it. I was also happy with that decision, though the seedlings in egg cells were harder to water in the new set-up.




Above, the peppers. These are the Yolo Wonders, the rainbow bell peppers were still germinating! These also took off after up-potting - as you can see, they did not have their true leaves yet.

To up-pot them, I bought a new kind of seed starting mix that was closer to soil (the staff at our gardening center recommended that I continue to use seed starting mix since the seedlings were still so small). For some of the plants, I used a fork to dig out the soil pod from the egg carton. I worked the fork around the edge, loosening the soil pod, then lifted up. The problem was I had waited too long, and the roots were growing through the egg carton. I could hear the roots tearing as I lifted. Nearly all of the plants survived in spite of this abuse, but it was a lesson learned - if you are going to start seeds in egg cartons, be ready to up-pot pretty much as soon as they germinate! Or at least as soon as their embryonic leaves appear. After I couldn't handle the sound of the tearing roots anymore, I peeled the egg carton in layers (since it was so wet, this was relatively easy). The roots often didn't grow straight through the egg carton, but would grow through a layer and then snake around in between the egg carton before poking out.

I filled the new pots halfway with the seed starting mix (again, prepared with about equal parts warm water), then set the soil pod in the middle, then spooned more seed starting mixture around the edge. As you can see in the photos, I left space between the soil line and the top of the cup. With the celery, this was a good thing. With the tomatoes and peppers, this was a bad thing. Later on I learned it is best to bury the embryonic leaves when you up-pot or transplant tomatoes and peppers - you end up with a stronger plant because roots will begin to grow from where the embryonic leaves are. My tomatoes and peppers seem to be doing fine, but perhaps they would be stronger or further along if I had used that technique.

Lessons learned:
I don't regret starting the seeds in egg cartons - they were free, decent sized, and when I had seeds that weren't germinating very well I didn't have to feel like I wasted any resources. I wish that I had up-potted each individual cell as soon as the first true leaf appeared. I think some of my seeds were stunted by staying in the small cells too long.

In the future I would also like to get grow lights for my tomatoes. The peppers and celery seemed to do fine, but my tomatoes seem leggy, thin, weak, and lacking color compared to my expectations. We will see how they end up producing, but I suspect if I'm going to commit to starting seeds indoors, grow lights would give me much better results and would be well worth the investment. Based on what I paid for materials to start my seeds this year compared to what it would have cost to purchase transplants, grow lights would pay for themselves in one year.

Finally, I wish I'd known about burying the embryonic leaves. I did plant the tomatoes out last week (more on that to come!) and considered doing it then, but at that point the plant seemed too well developed. I don't know. I wish I had planted one that deeply for comparison, but it really seemed like a bad idea at that point.

All in all, I'm glad I started seeds indoors and though I made a couple of mistakes, I would consider this part a success!

film review

We went to see Living Downstream at the local theatre, a newly released documentary about chemicals in the environment. We were lucky to have the filmmaker Chanda Chevannes and the main scientist in the film, Sandra Steingraber, available for questions after the film.

The basic point of the film is that at least some of the chemicals in our food, soil, water, and air - for whose presence humans are responsible - can cause cancer. I think this film has the potential to reach a much wider audience because of the cancer element which so many people can relate to.

The film was very good and I do think it's one everyone should see. Even more than the Future of Food or Food Inc, it shows the importance of large-scale changes. The film explains how chemicals get into our food, soil, water, and air supply - so even if you are eating organic, you are still swimming in harmful, cancer-causing chemicals with every breath you take. That was why it was surprising to me when after the film, the first question on the 'what should we do?' theme was unanimously answered "eat organic." After the leaving the theatre I wondered whether they were trying to avoid being political in an effort to avoid polarizing or alienating viewers.

The film receives high marks from me in terms of its educational quality, though even if I were using this in a college classroom I'm sure the students would need help making connections in certain places. For the most part, Dr. Steingraber does a great job of conveying scientific facts and reasoning to a lay audience.

One of the most interesting points she made was that when she was going through the initial doctors visits for cancer treatment, she would try to engage her health providers in a conversation about environmental factors and cancer incidence, to no avail. In the medical literature, the link has been clearly shown time and time again. This to me pointed out something that I am personally disturbed by, which is the gap between scientific knowledge and practical knowledge. I think one of the reasons for publicly funded higher education is for professors to be researching in the public interest, but the way the career of professor is structured, credit is given only for publishing in specialized academic journals, read by other academics. In my field of Sociology, this is a huge problem, but it just seems even more urgent in the medical field.

Anyway, I recommend it! Go find a way to watch this film and get other people to see it too!

know your farmer!

While at the market Saturday chatting with our farmer, who knows of our plan to have a large garden and preserve lots of vegetables for the winter, he had a great offer: he said that if I wanted to come out to the farm for a day or two in the spring and help with tomatoes, he would give me some seedlings. I am planning on at least half of my tomato plants being heirlooms and I don't know what he will be planting, but I figure this is a good opportunity either way.

I've looked into farm apprenticeship programs, which many of the local of farms offer. You apply and most of them offer housing as part of the payment, plus a small stipend, and it lasts through the growing season for one year. It would be a great opportunity for learning from an expert - it seems that farming is the type of thing that is much better passed on by working hands-on with someone experienced rather than learning out of a book, as I am doing. But in the end, the drawbacks outweigh the pros for me. I don't want to live away from my spouse and my dog. And I don't want to have to pause my dissertation work for a whole six months (or however long it would end up being). Of course I suppose I could try it out, do it for awhile until it gets too hard and then quit - but I think the experience would be best if you make it through the whole season. I also think if you make a commitment to something, you should see it through. Anyway, I will probably take any short-term offer like this I get, just for the learning experience.

For those with some time to spare who are looking to save a little money, this is a great way to get good quality seedlings and learning experience.