It's Been Quiet 'Round Here

It's May, which means New York has no idea what season it is. This seems to have been a trend this year, we had eternal winter (I feared Ragnarok was upon us) and then skipped right to summer. Spring? Bah who needs spring?! This does mean that my seedlings got kind of a weird start this year.

I experimented with using a lamp and a lizard light (vitamin A bulb from the reptile section of the petstore) and while it gave proof of concept the light was too far away from the seeds and they ended up leggy and dead. So I had to restart about 2 weeks ago out doors. Yeah, yeah I'm late I get it. But I couldn't get into Fwigf until it was tilled which wasn't until after the spring brunch on May 3 so I'm really not that far behind. Last year I didn't start until June. So I think all will be well.

I've had to scrap the large garden at home, as well as the decent sized one in the front yard. This is just due to time and my physical limitations. Gardening is my thing, it's not fair to ask Husband to do all the back breaking labor of tilling up our yard for me to plant stuff.

BUT! He is out front right now building me a mini-raised bed to grow greens in. This gives me the happiest of wiggles. My greens bed is:

3 ft x 3ft x 6inches tall. Or 1m x 1m x ~12cm for our metric friends. I'm filling it with 2 cu ft of top soil, 1 cu ft of composted cow manure, 1 cu ft of peat hummus and one 5 gallon bucket of composted horse manure (thank you local horse farm for letting me dig in your shit pile!).

In that I intend to plant 1 brussels sprout seedling right in the middle and scatter Amish Deer Tongue lettuce around it and hope it takes. The goal is to have a small, rich, plot that I can just succession plant greens in to have a constant supply for salads and Husband's sandwiches. We'll see how this goes! I may plant some spinach or hardier greens in there next to be able to actually blanch and freeze them. No repeat of the lettuce sourkrout experiment of last year.

Well, time to go fill my mini-bed with dirt and plant it up!

Sprouts!

Brussels spouts, peas (both cow and sugar snap), cabbage, broccoli, pretty much everything is sprouting!

Except my ox hearts. They aren't sprouting yet. I'm hoping they start sprouting soon since I'm really excited about those tomatoes. Everything else is tiny so they aren't too far behind. Here's hoping they catch up soon.

The snow has started to melt. The weather has started warming up. It's getting sunnier and warmer. Soon it will be spring! And soon my little spoutlings will be outside and growing me food.

Fwigf begins in 2015!

Today is the day my loves! Today I have started some seed (in a covered tray, with the cover taped on, so my asscat won't treat my seedlings like her own personal salad bar.)

No picture today, since they're just wet plugs of peat with some seed on top, and that's not exciting to anyone but me. Consulting the Old Farmer's Almanac (you did save that link last post didn't you dears?) I saw that this week is the week to start broccoli, cauliflower, brussels sprouts, cabbage, peas, peppers, eggplant, and tomatoes.

Going back to my garden plan I counted how many of each I need, realized I only have 75 small plugs and 12 big ones, and promptly started hoping I'd have space for these to go in time to start the next batch  of stuff.

It's starting! I couldn't be more excited about this guys, I mean it! I'm going to have food that I grew again! That aren't PICKLES!

UPDATE:

Here's what actually in the trays (numbers and all)

Large plugs (16)

8 Oxheart tomato seeds (I need 5, if all 8 sprout well I will offer the other three around to see if anyone else wants to give them a shot)
4 Brussels Sprouts
4 Snap peas

Small plugs (72)

5 Cowpeas
7 anaheim hot peppers
10 peacock broccoli
5 eggplant
7 marconi sweet peppers
16 snow peas
8 Copenhagan market cabbage
8 Calabrese broccoli
6 waltham broccoli

I do have a second type of cabbage (dutch flat leaf) but that's a late season so I'm going to sow that when the market cabbage is gone. And I do have a bunch of other things that are either getting direct sown (corn, beans, squash, turnips, carrots) or I'm not sure how and when to plant yet (kholrabi). The cherry tomatoes should get started but those can wait until the second round of plugs since they're just going into the front yard.

The timing of seeds

Welcome back my darlings!

It is kinda-sorta-almost spring if you squint here in the lovely Northeastern US. It will be spring some day drat it. I have eternal hope. Even if it is March and snowing. Anyhow, moving along. Today we're going to look at starting seed indoors.

First off, why on earth would anyone want to start seeds indoors, then transplant the baby plants? Why not just stick the seeds in the ground and have done with it? I'm so glad I imagined you asking.

The benefits here are two fold:

1. A longer growing season. You're planting seedlings outdoors, which means they've already got a head start. When you have a shortened growing season (I mentioned I live in the Northeastern US right?) you need all the time you can wring out.

2. Your seedlings are less vulnerable. Those tiny tender shoots that happen when the seed first breaks the earth are easily shaded out or eaten. Planting something a bit larger and established makes it less likely to die off because a dandelion decided to take up residence right next to it.

Seed starting is easy. First thing you need is to know when it's safe to get your seeds into substrate. May I suggest the Old Farmer's Almanac? They have this awesome free planting guide, you put in your location (city an state) and they automatically generate a listing of planting indoors, outdoors, and harvest times for a whole range of plants. Here's what mine looked like:

http://www.almanac.com/gardening/planting-dates/NY/Schenectady

(copy and paste that, I couldn't get the picture to work).

Timing is important. If you're anything like me your natural inclination is to toss everything in at once, do a little garden dance of glee, then wonder how come your peas aren't doing so hot (hint, it's because it's too hot). If you plant too early then your seedlings can (and more than likely will) end up root bound. This makes it far more difficult to get the nutrients they need from the soil and it'll stunt their growth. If you start too late you end up not getting the benefits of starting indoors, only now you've got the added challenge of transplanting wimpy seedlings. So follow that link, input your own location, and check your starting dates.

Next thing you need is something for your seeds to grow in, and the seeds themselves. Personally I just buy the jiffy seed trays that come with the compressed peat moss pellets. They are stupid simple, add water to the tray until the pellets inflate, add seed to the moist peat moss, put the lid on it, set it in a place with ample light, and ignore until the seedlings start pushing on the lid. These do have limits (they're small, you can end up with root bound seedlings if you let them get too big in there, ect) but they're good basic starters.

Another option is to visit a hydroponic store (hydroponics - not just for growing weed anymore!) an pic up some of their starter plugs. They'll function roughly the same, you still need a tray to keep them safe in, and a light source, but they're a heck of a lot cheaper than peat moss pellets, and the person at the hydroponics store will more than likely be perfectly happy to talk your ear off about the various benefits to using them. I'll be using them next year, I'd already bought the peat moss pellets this year. Next year though... next year I am all over a whole tray full of plugs for the cost of one frickin' pellet.

Speaking of hydroponics, actually, no. Hydroponics will be its own post, keep an eye out for it.

Nothing Survives first contact

So back in July I made a post about my garden plan for this year. That lasted until my awesome friends decided to do a seed exchange in January. And I decided to expand my back yard garden, and add a front yard garden. And Husband decided to grow grain for beer, which means we have a second garden plot (Fwigg - Field where I grow grains) for growin' barley.

What does all this mean? It means I needed to reconfigure my garden plan. So here's the new plan:

Fwigf:

Yellow corn (6 stalks)
Ashworth sweet corn (6 stalks)
Butternut squash (6)
Acorn squash (6)
Northeast pole beans (24)
Cow Peas (12)
Purple stringless beans (12)
Snap peas (5)
Oxheart tomatoes (5)
Eggplant (10)
Kholrabi (10)
Peacock broccoli (6)
Peppers - mix of sweet and hot (13)
Turnips (20)
Golden midget Watermelon (7)
Bush cucumbers (13)

Again, all that is going into 400 sq ft. A 15x30 plot with  1 foot walkways between each row. Now all of these are things that I don't have to harvest the second they're ripe. I have a day or two wiggle room in each direction. Which is good because I'll be starting a new job next month which means my time to go out will be limited to 2-3 times a week tops. So I need things I can pick the day before they're ready or 1-2 days after without worrying that they're going to taste funny.

Home:

Back yard:

Snow Peas
Brussel Sprouts
Watermelon
Broccoli
Market Cabbage
Loose Cabbage
Roasting peppers
Dwarf corn
Cheese pumpkins
Noodle beans
Carrots

Front yard:

Morning Glories
Borage (it's a flower)
Marigolds
Turnip greens
Carrots

By the sidewalk:
Red cherry tomatoes
Yellow pear cherry tomatoes

The amounts for home haven't been determined yet (depends on space), but I also have two window boxes that I'm using for lettuce. Since it'll be easy to snag greens for work lunch if I have them at home. Which also means they'll get eaten, instead of turn into a really bad science experiment. I'm also planting things at home (see Noodle beans) that need to be picked and eaten (or preserved) before they go starchy and gross. So that's the new plan, we'll see how it works out once it isn't -20 with 3 feet of snow.

I'm only exaggerating by a couple of inches and a few degrees in both directions. It's miserable here right now. I'm counting down 'till spring.

Fwigf 2014: An Overview/ Starting Seedlings

This year we started our community garden a bit late. I'd called in early June to see about signing on for next year and got told there were still plots left in our preferred garden, and if we wanted one we could have it. We decided to go for it. I made a hasty garden plan and began starting seeds. A week and $30 later Fwigf was ours. A barren, flat, untilled piece of land, growing only sparse grass and Jerusalem Artichokes. I'd begun to think I was in over my head. I probably still am. Thankfully the gentleman next to us was a retired farmer and was able to explain how to build up mounds and lay out our garden most effectively.

There it is, the day we got our mounds made and our seedlings in. It didn't look like much there yet.

What we planted (from back to front):

Long Island cheese pumpkins, Adirondack Blue potatoes, Chinese Red Noodle Beans, Sugar Snap Peas and spinach, Bird's eye pepper and horseradish and spinach, carrots, cucumbers, cucumbers, tomatoes, lettuce. Along either side is a row of Jade Blue Dwarf Corn.

Our seeds came from the Hudson Valley Seed Library (http://www.seedlibrary.org/), which is an organization dedicated to the preservation of heritage variety plants. What does that mean? It means our plants are open pollinated, which is the vegetable version of open source. We aren't growing GMOs, nothing is patented, and we can engage in seed saving and have our seed be viable. Nothing has been bred to be sterile and unable to propagate itself. Which means if we do this right we won't have to buy seed every year, and we're growing veggies that are a bit more unusual.

I mentioned up top that I started the seeds. What that means is I essentially planted the seeds themselves in a tiny greenhouse at home so I could plant the seedlings where they were a bit bigger and stronger and less likely to get eaten by Jerkface the groundhog. I used one of these: http://www.plantationproducts.com/pages/cfJiffy.cfm which is essentially a plastic tray with a lid and some pellets of peat moss that you put the seeds in. I liked this because all you needed to do was add enough water to hydrate the pellets, put the lid on, set it in a sunny spot and forget about it for about two weeks. Evaporating water condensed on the lid then 'rained' on the peat pellets. Which meant I didn't have to worry about over or under watering. When the shoots appeared I had to prop the lid open and start hardening off the seedlings so they'd be able to live outside. All that means is exposing them to out side conditions gradually.

I also started seeds by planting them in a container filled with potting soil and covering it with plastic wrap. Did the same thing and I was later able to use the extra potting soil to mound my potatoes. I think next year I'll skip the jiffy tray and just start in pots with plastic wrap. The steps are the same, I just think the pots method leads to more reusability and lower long term costs, but it is a more expensive initial outlay.

Direct sow is easier and cheaper, but has a higher risk of failure. Direct sow means you skip the starting bit entirely and just plant your seeds directly where you want the plant to grow. I don't care for direct sowing because I live in the Northeastern US where our growing season isn't what it could be and I want my plants to have as long a growing season as possible. If you direct sow too early your seeds won't germinate because the ground is too cold. If you direct sow too late you won't get food off your plants because they didn't have enough time to mature. Therefore I cheat and start my seeds indoors.

When the seedlings were big enough and hardened off they were ready to go in the ground. If you're using the peat pellets just pop that sucker in the ground, water it, and go about your business. If you're using the pot method you need to carefully remove your seedling (making sure to take ALL the roots), then put it in the ground, water it and go about your business.

If you're doing direct sow then pop your seed in the ground, water it, and keep coming back every day to make sure it's got enough water and hasn't been eaten by Jerkface and friends.