Bee Diagrams February 24, 2009
I’m popping these two excellent little diagrams into this post so I have them here for future reference. These both came from the magazine, Mary Jane’s Farm , which had a wonderful issue dedicated entirely to honey and bees.
On Seeds & Schedules February 24, 2009
It’s late February. Do you know where your seeds are? Mine have been arriving in spurts as each different supplier gets them shipped to me. My two favorite sources for seeds are Renee’s Garden Seeds and Johnny’s Selected Seeds. I think I should be ashamed to admit to you that I’ve got more than 30 packets of seeds in my storage box and more on the way, but I’m rather addicted to seed starting. If you’ve ever started your own seeds, you’ve probably gotten hooked too.
My ‘Frontier’ onions, and they’ve done a tremendous job popping their long skinny necks up out of the flats. When I start seeds, I fill my packs or flats with a very loose germination mix and soak it thoroughly with a gentle mist from the hose before sowing the seeds. By soaking the soil/media first, the seeds don’t get clumped into groups by water droplets from overhead watering, and they start off with a wealth of moisture to get them happy and growing.
My seeds tend to germinate much more quickly than the seed packet says thanks to a rather homemade system for keeping them in a perfect little pocket of moisture and warmth. I use one of those flimsy flats that hold pots at the commercial greenhouse and invert it over the tray holding my seeds. Then I cover the whole thing in clear plastic, sealing in and protecting the little seeds against drying out or getting hit by any chilly drafts. The need to water them is cut in half, which is hugely helpful considering seeds need fairly constant and even moisture to germinate. If you’re going to give this system a shot, just be sure to use the kind of flats that have big openings in them so that plenty of light can still get through to your seedlings when they start popping up their heads.
I typically leave this little incubator system in place for about a week after the first signs of germination since the seeds have headroom thanks to the inverted flat keeping the plastic off of them. After that first week’s growth though, I take the plastic and inverted flat off the seed tray to let the seedlings have the maximum amount of light possible as they get the photosynthetic wheels turning.
As I mentioned in the post about my garden layout for the coming season, I have a lot of crops I want to grow and the vast majority of them are being started from seed. Seed starting is not a once-and-done deal; each crop requires a different timeline, both in sowing and in transplanting. Adding to the challenge is the fact that I want to do succession plantings in my garden this year, both in the form of multiple sowings of a particular crop (i.e., string beans) and of switching out a spring harvested crop for a summer or fall harvested crop (i.e., sugar snap peas and summer squash).
To accomplish this intricate dance of the seeds, I’ve created several spreadsheets, have a calendar I write notes on, and have organized my seeds in a box by sowing month. Keeping the whole ball of yarn from unraveling is a very basic schedule (pictured here) that says when I’m supposed to sow the seed and when it gets transplanted into the garden. By planning in so much detail and so far in advance, I’m pretty confident that healthy plants will get into the ground where and when they need to and hopefully it’ll be a very productive year as a result!
The Lay of the Land February 24, 2009
Any of you who have a garden surely are familiar with the yin and yang of winter. These months of dormancy in the garden are a blessing in that they provide the busy gardener with time at his or her desk (or kitchen table) to sort through the catalogues and draft up the plans for the coming season’s garden. But winter, as it trudges along to late February, can be downright painful for the gardener psyche, having been penned up inside for so long. I have turned with new zest to house plants this winter, having missed my garden so very much. I have also been soothing the burning desire to get in the garden by meticulously planning on paper every detail of my little patch of green goodness.
Plotting out all the details of the garden has become increasingly important for me, thanks to both my experiences gardening in a small plot with an ambitious crop list and my reading list over this winter. One of the books I read from front to back and then again was Sarah Raven’s The Great Vegetable Plot. Just like her The Cutting Garden, this volume is jammed full of great tips for getting the most out of a small piece of land, focusing in great detail on succession planting, trellising, the most productive varieties of any given vegetable, and how to push the limits of the seasons. With these words of wisdom in mind, I drafted my layout for this year’s vegetable garden.
Perhaps you’ve noticed that one entire row of my vegetable garden isn’t even for vegetables. I made a tough decision to dedicate a quarter of my veggie space to cut flowers. As I see it, I only have a family of two (three if you’re talking about melons, in which case my cat has a near frantic obsession with eating them), and we don’t need great quantities of any one thing, besides some of the crops that will store for long periods (carrots, beets, rutabagas, etc). So instead of growing 19(!) tomato plants like I did last year, I’m only going to put in three this year. Following this pattern, I now have a free row for all the varieties of cut flowers I’ve been so desperate to trial. I can’t wait for that profusion of blooms in Row 1.
Another push I’ll be making in this year’s vegetable garden that’s reflected in the plan is the addition of some vertical elements to make the garden more visually appealing. Since this vegetable plot sits directly behind my ornamental plot, I’d like it to be a continuation of the overall design scheme of an English cottage garden. I’m going to try my hand at building two “tunnels” (pergolas really) of bamboo for the peas, squash and cucumbers to climb. These tunnels will make it interesting to walk down the center path, slipping in and out their shade. Also there will be at least three “teepees” of bamboo and twine to get the sweet potato, winter squash, and melon vines off the ground. Picking the vines up off the ground does more than just increase the aesthetics of the garden; it also makes harvesting easier and allows me to grow more vine crops than I could otherwise if I left the vines run wild.
Even with the flowers taking up one row, I’m still going to strive to grow over 30 vegetable crops in this space. That level of ambition demands an equally high level of organization. Besides this plan to serve as a visual cue and help me place my crops, being sure there’s enough room for each and that they’ve been rotated out of the bed they were in last year (to avoid some pesky disease and pest issues), I am plotting out a detailed sowing and transplanting schedule that I’ll also be posting shortly.
I don’t consider myself an expert by any means, but I feel like I’ve learned an awful lot in this little garden of mine that’s going to be extremely transferable wherever I’m turning over the earth. And I most definitely feel much more prepared for the 2009 season than I did last spring.
First Seeds of 09: Onions February 12, 2009
We’re having an unusually mild week for mid-February here in Zone 6. Yesterday it was 69 F and I was wearing capris and a t-shirt! It’s very hard with such a warm breeze blowing and bright sunshine not to get out and start planting something – anything! – in my garden. But obviously that would be ill-advised since it’ll turn wintery cold once more soon enough.
Lucky for me, it was time to sow the first seeds for the 2009 growing season in the greenhouse so I got to scratch my itchy green thumb a little bit. Sown were five trays of 1006 packs with yellow ‘Frontier’ onion. With my onion seeds, I decided to use a tray cover on one flate to help retain moisture and warmth. I put clear plastic over two others for the same reason and I left two bare. Out of curiosity, I’m doing an unofficial experiment to see if any of these systems works better than the other for speeding germination.
*Update 2/16: All the trays are germinating very quickly and there seems to be no difference between the covered and uncovered trays as to germination. However, the covered trays are putting on growth much faster than the uncovered trays. Baby onions are adorable!
Before this seeding could begin, my classmates and I descended upon the greenhouse and the attached potting shed to clean them from top to bottom, including weeding, scrubbing benches with disinfectant, organizing our potting materials, taking out loads of old dirty plastic trays and pots for recycling, and generally clearing out the dirt from last year’s season. It’s so nice to have such a bright clean workspace. We are working as a group to fill the greenhouse with crops for our gardens and for a plant sale that will happen sometime in May. This mass growing project is part of our Greenhouse Management coursework. As such, I’ll be posting here on the blog a lot of mini reports on the plants growing on my bench in the greenhouse. I’m happy to get to work in the greenhouse since watching seeds start is my favorite of all garden activities!
Quick Pics February 9, 2009
Here are a few additions to the general collection of Longwood pictures on the blog. We had a lovely snow last week that powdered the topiaries like doughnuts.
The giant orchid mobile has been installed over the Patio of Oranges. It was designed by local artist Henry Loustau and is created of stainless steel. With the addition of plants it weighs nearly 1500 pounds. Seven crescent shaped vessels on the mobile hold 70 white Phalaenopsis. I found it absolutely mesmerizing, which I am sure was the intent.
