Up-potting, and my new mini Greenhouse

Well my little tiny sprouts got big, too big for their pots (it seems to happen faster every year!) Time to pot up, or up-pot.

These little nubs on the bottom of the tomato trunks are rootlets, I always make sure to put these under the dirt, so they can form into roots, making my plants sturdy and strong.

Since space in my apartment is limited, and I have a south facing balcony, and I hope to grow many, many plants this year, I thought it was time to build myself a mini greenhouse. 

This was actually my first frame building experience, and it is really not straight, but anchored on the corners with big pots and covered with clear plastic, it actually works.

The hope is that the thermal mass of the big pots and all the soil will keep the little plants warm at night. I can easily begin hardening them off starting in a week, by lifting the roof off for a few hours at a time.

I'm excited, I think this is the beginning of a long relationship between greenhouses and myself.

Thinning!

Maybe I'm a bleeding heart, but I always find myself resisting to do any thinning. It just seems counter intuitive, after working so hard to provide seedlings with proper soil, light and water, to then kill almost half of what responded to your care and sprouted. But I have learned over the seasons that the plants given enough growing room will be the healthiest and most productive. Over crowding often results in diseases, pests, stunted twisted growth and no fruiting at all, not to mention that they become very dependent on heavy water and fertilizer treatments. And so...

I've sowed three to four seeds per pot, usually two come up per pot, so I choose the weaker ones, the ones with the bent stems, small leaves etc. and then I simply pinch them off with my nails.

They look so much happier already

I sowed the peppers in bigger pots so that I may not have to pot them up at all before they get put into their summer home, thinning is really important for allowing me to do this.

Its tough, I love all babies, but I try to keep in mind that this is all part of the path to loads of home grown vegetables!

The Wonder of Sprouts!

I love seeds. It is amazing that something so small has the potential to create a plant with fruit that contains so many more seeds. I sprouted some of my saved tomato seeds last month, now I am enjoying watching this tender early growth.

Sprouts are weak, small and needy. The seed (and this is an important consideration with especially small seeds like tomato) only has enough energy stored within it to germinate, burst from the casing of the seed, form roots and send leaflets towards the light.

I say leaflets because these first few leaves do not photosynthesize, so they don't feed the plant, they seem instead to serve as a light sensor, directing the seedling towards the light...

...then, when the true leaves begin emerging they are facing the right way. Isn't it cute that tomato seedlings are fuzzy just like their larger plants?

Once the true leaves emerge, the roots start feeding, the stalk gets thicker and the seedling works its way to becoming a large fruit producing plant. This is the case with tomatoes and peppers at least.

These Pea seedlings on my balcony have emerged with true leaves and begin photosynthesizing immediately, and grasses like corn are also way different, but that'll be another post.

It's Time!

The Daffodils are finally blooming! They've come up a month later this year than last, but now that they are here everything is ready to burst with growth.

And so are my sprouts, I started my pepper sprouts (I'm trying 8 different varieties of pepper this year) March 5th, and it took them awhile to sprout, Ancho took 17 days, but now they are making true leaves! 

I always started my tomatoes on the Spring Equinox, Basil too, and they have just sprouted as well.

I like to keep my sprouts under lights to keep them from getting leggy, which means long, sprawling and weak. I use 4ft shop lights that I bought at Home Depot for $17, I am using plant bulbs, but I've successfully grown tomatoes using normal fluorescent bulbs before too.

And look what came in the mail yesterday! Seed Potatoes. Last year I planted my potatoes on April 5th, I'm aiming for the same timing this year, I'm just waiting for a dry spell so that the soil isn't so wet when they go in. 

Yay! I love the Spring.

The 2011 Seed Trials

Remember, way back in the fall, when I put so much effort into saving and storing some seeds, well now I put them to the test, and see if I did it right, if they are still alive and will they grow?

To do this trial I used a recycled plastic asian pear container, that was too nice to just toss. It has eight compartments and a lid that snapped shut. I lined every compartment with moist tissue, and then labeled each compartment with the variety of seed that they are to hold, and added the seeds, 10 to a compartment for the smaller seeds, 5 to a compartment for the large ones. I sprayed them with more water and worked to keep them moist for the next two weeks.

After two weeks I check on them and count the number of sprouted seed to the number of unsprouted seeds to obtain my germination percentage.

Giant Sunflowers, that I saved from a flower in the park across the street from my house

4/5, or 80%

Quinoa, from what I could salvage from the crop in my backyard

10/10 or 100% (but I wouldn't bet on it in the field)

Chiapas Wild tomatoes, the first attempt to save tomato seeds

0/10 or 0% boo!

Basil, from my own pot in the backyard

0/10 or 0%, but Basil takes longer that two weeks to sprout, or Im hopeful still

Ardwyna Paste, that lovely paste tomato that lived through the terrible tomato year

8/10 or 80%, trying this one again

Zebra Green tomato, from a tomato I bought at a Farmers Market

0/10 or 0%, so much for free seed while enjoying a salad, may try it again

Black beans, from my garden

1/5 or 20%

Flax, from my garden, 

10/10 or 100% I loved how simple it was to grow, its gonna make a comeback this year too.

I'm a little sad that there were so many failures, but this is a skill that I think will take a few years to get right, I'm looking forward to seeing my results next year.

Winter Planning

I've been enjoying planning the garden for the summer, working with what is already planted, what I already have to plant, and what I absolutely need to try planting (peppers, this year.)

I buy predominantly from two different seed companies, WestCoast Seeds and SaltSpring Seeds and love reading a wide variety of gardening and agricultural books. Then I brainstorm and write down all my ideas into my garden journal, which helps me plan my planting schedule and also helps me determine what should go where. 

Storing Seed until the Sping

The Harvest is now, mostly over. The seeds that I've intended to save have been taken in and dried for a week or two, and are now hard enough to chance surviving through to spring. How I store them will increase the chance of the seeds remaining alive through the winter.

They must be kept dry, because water activates them to come alive, and grow, not something that you want them to do this time of year. I collect packs of silica to keep them dry. Silica comes in boxes of almost anything manufactured in the tropics, so feel free to politely harass retail stores to keep some for you, I get mine from my partners Bike Shop, but electronic stores are also a good bet, or I've noticed they come with packs of Nori. Silica is also reusable, empty it out of the paper packages unto a baking sheet and dry it in the oven at a super low heat.

Most Seed you buy comes in paper envelopes, and you could make your own envelopes really inexpensively, but I prefer using clean small glass jars, like the type that used to house jam, or artichoke hearts. These keep my seed really protected and look so pretty.

Besides protecting your seeds from water you also want to consider protecting them from extreme heat, extreme cold and light. Some of the experts recommend keeping your seed in the fridge, but with three grocery shoppers in my house this is not possible. Instead, they will be stored in a box on a self in a cool indoor storage closet.

Pickled Jalapenos!

There is almost nothing that seems more gourmet than eating your own, home grown pickled jalapenos. They are a plant that is more associated with warmer climes, but I have had extraordinary luck growing them for the last 2 years. I treat them just like tomatoes...

I start them inside, at the end of March under either grow lights or fluorescent lights. This gives them a long enough growing season to produce fruits.

I start hardening them off, at the end of April. Hardening off means you are gradually getting them used to being outside, I like to follow the sunny days and start with a few hours a day for a week, graduate to 6 hrs a day for a week, then all day for a week. Eventually you forget to take them in one night because you are out enjoying the good weather, and the process is complete.

Eventually, after much growth vegetatively, small blossoms begin forming

And then they come, descending from the blossoms, just like tomatoes. They start green and ripen to red as the season waxes on, however our season is so short I've only seen a few turn red.

Then I harvest them all, this is the bounty from 2 plants, I got just over 1lb. Now to process the harvest. This was my first canning experience, it took me and 3 friends all day to get 10 jars of anything, so I will not give any advice on this except to say go to this site: Home Canning ...

Sterilize EVERYTHING...

And have lots of helping hands.

These are the five jars of jalapenos beside the pickling mixture, which was:

3 cups apple cider vinegar

3 cups water

3tbsp pepper corn

9 cloves garlic chunked

1tbs seasalt

9 bay leaves

 Here are the cans in the water bath, what fun. I will try canning again, I think it can be quick once you get to know it. And the results are so beautiful, and easy x-mas gifts.

 On a spicy scale of 1 to 10, I think these are at an 8, but lots of people think I'm a wimp when it comes to spice too!

Enjoy

The Potato Seed Debate

This Spring I was talking to a friend of mine who is also an avid gardener, we were debating whether it was worth spending the money on seed potato when there are rumours of being able to grow potatoes from peelings of grocery store varieties. The thing is, seed potato is expensive, I bought 5 of them for $6, thats over $1 per potato, and, well, there are so many potatoes already sprouting in your cupboard anyhow....
So I decided to try it, I planted one row of Red Potatoes that I bought at the Winter Farmers Market, and I planted one row of Yellow Seed Potato,  from a company based in the Netherlands that I'd never heard of before. The race was on.

First I had to "chit" them, which meant simply to sprout them, then I cut them into one ounce pieces, around the nicest sprouted eyes. Here they are sprouting with some ginger, a different experiment.

Then, on April 5th, I planted them. As I was planning on hilling them up during the growing season, I dug and planted them in trenches, with a mound of soil on either side.

And then they started to grow, really quickly. Every week they grew another 5 cm, so every week I was hilling dirt up around them.

And then they got HUGE, and started blooming, which signals the beginning of tuber formation.

You can dig up potatoes at anytime now, but the longer you wait, the bigger they will be.

On Sept 29th we finished out potato harvest, digging up all of the Yellow and half of the Reds. The results: 

Yellow Seed Potato- 8.8kg

Red Market Potato-4.375kg

The seed potato apparently does better because it has fewer diseases as it is grown in an area of the world where no aphids exist (like the far north, or isolated islands) so the vines already have less to challenge them. I will grow from seed again, but will change the company I get it from, to avoid buying seeds with Potato Scab again,