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We started some seedlings for winter a little over a week ago.
I sold my old TV and used the $$ to buy sooo many seeds!
Lettuces, broccoli, carrots, spinach, spaghetti squash, cauliflower, kohl rabi, onions, leeks, celery, cabbage, brussel sprouts, chinese cabbage, bok choy…and so on and so forth! I’ll try to cover some techniques later for you folks that live where there’s a killing frost. Here in West Sacramento we get a light frost in the winter mornings, and that’s it.
True to my first post on growing from seeds, we used the biodegradable pots this time. They’re $2 for 50 at Lowe’s or Home Depot.
We're reusing the miniature greenhouse trays from spring
And, now here are our seedlings!
Green beans in the front are actually a summer veggie...I'm pushing it a bit.
Even though we don’t have a huge yard, I know others have an even smaller space. I was wandering around Instructables.com when I came across this wonderful little tutorial. So, of course, I ran out and grabbed a hanging shoe pouch thingy ($13 at Target). I filled it with potting soil.
I put mine on our fence.
I planted a number of different herbs in it, as well as some mesclun mix and arugala.
Oregano, Tarragon, Catnip, Dill, Basil...and some more I can't remember =)
I made a little hole in the soil in each of the pouches.
About the same size as a little seed starter pot.
And then I poured some seed starting mix into it, and patted it down.
I planted the seeds into the seed-starting mix.
Hopefully this will get them going! I’ve been watering them every day, so I’ll let you know how it works!
TIME INVESTMENT: 1 hour
COST: $13 for shoe rack, $5 for seed starter (I already had some lying around), and $5 for potting soil (already had some of this too). You won’t use all of the potting soil or the seed starter. $23, without seeds. Seeds run $1.50-$2.50 a packet.
My husband just put together a cute little greenhouse. We’re working out some kinks, but I’ll show it to you next time! We’ve also got some quails that we hatched from our quails.
The side yard is a fine and dandy place to grow vegetables. It’s already given us more tomatoes than we can eat. However, we’re aiming to cut our grocery store trips waaay down (and don’t homegrown veggies just taste better?). Since we have plenty of lawn, and live right across from a massive expanse of grass, we decided to put a couple of garden beds on our lawn.
We built ours 4′ wide and 8′ long. 22″ tall to keep the puppy from jumping up and rooting through our veggies. It’s entirely unnecessary to have yours quite so tall, unless you have a small dog that loves to dig!
PARTS (per garden bed):
6 – 8′ long 2×8′s
1 – 8′ long 4×4′s
24 – 3″ long wood screws
TOOLS:
circular saw (or get the wood cut to size at the hardware store)
power drill/screwdriver
We had the hardware store cut some of our wood to size, and we cut some of it at home with a circular saw. Three of the 2×8′s need to be cut in half. The 4×4 needs to be cut into 4 22″ long sections.
Cutting the 4x4s into 22" long sections
Put 2 of the 4×4 sections on the ground, and line up 3 of the 4′ long 2×8′s. Pre-drill two holes on each piece into the post. Make sure the drill bit is slightly thinner than the screws you are using.
If you're doing this alone, it might be best to do on a flat surface
Screw the 4′ long 2×8 pieces into the post. Line up the 22″ long 4×4 post on the other side and do the same. You should end up with a piece that looks like this. Three 4′ long 2×8′s and two 22″ long 4×4′s.
Devin in a most un-ladylike pose!
Repeat for the opposite side. Then stand those up, and start putting on the 8′ long 2×8′s. Two screws for each end of the board.
Put your back into it, kid!
A very short time later…
We had the long ends overlapping the short ends for a neater look
Now we have a raised garden bed! We’ll have to dump dirt in it, and raise up some seedlings, but you get the idea. Since we have it in our lawn, I’ll probably be sealing the outside to protect the wood from our sprinklers (though we turned off the one that was inside the bed. We have a hose from our sprinkler system coming up this side of the yard, so we’re going to put our garden beds on automatic sprinklers as well.
DON’T MAKE MY MISTAKE:
Build it where you plan to have it lay, or close by. It is heavy!
COST:
$43 for the wood + $6 for more screws than we needed = $49
TIME INVESTMENT:
If you include the hardware store trip and the cutting, about 3 hours.
So, we had the wedding and the honeymoon, and we’re finally back! We have a lot of projects planned, so we’re excited to finally be able to stop planning a wedding and get on with things.
When I got home, the garden looked like this:
Too much tomato growing...too little support
What a nightmare! I think I’m going to try pruning the tomato plants a little bit next year. Right now we’re getting lots of tomatoes of a medium size, and the plants just went wild. Fewer tomatoes of a larger size with more manageable plants would be a good thing. I used the last of my bamboo stakes to prop things up so I could walk through here.
Phew! You can *almost* see a pathway through now...
Cucumbers were a great success as well. I built a nice little a-frame for a support. It worked really well (though could stand to be bigger), so I’ll show you how to make one of those. Took about 20 minutes. I’d also like to address flower planting. After much wheedling, I’ve convinced my hubby that planting flowers will help us attract more pollinators to our garden. We have some sunflowers, and with these, I’ve actually seen some honeybees in our yard.
This sunflower is nine feet tall and has a flower as big as your FACE. Yes, YOUR face...
This is our haul of tomatoes so far, with the two of us eating at least two tomatoes a day.
The beans in the middle are for the chili to be made tomorrow with our homegrown tomatoes and homegrown bell peppers =)
So stay tuned! We have a new set of quail eggs in the incubator, raised garden beds to build (to better feed our family), a winter garden to plant, a solar oven to construct, and much more!
P.S. Gratuituous photo of a monkey from our honeymoon trip.
Gratuituous Monkey Photo
We moved into our house in July. Most of the yard was already landscaped, and one of the side yards had been turned into a dog run.
The side yard gets a good amount of sun, and we have a little dog – thus no use for a dog run…so we decided that this area would be our garden. We thought, “Oh, we’ll just move this bark here.” In reality, it turned out to be a lot tougher than that.
Note the gate - perfect for keeping puppies out of gardens!
We moved the bark, and there was a black tarp underneath. So we moved the tarp, and there was sand underneath. FINALLY we moved the sand, but there was hard-as-rock clay beneath that.
Over two weekends we bagged up all the bark and put the sand into bins. We didn’t throw it away – we posted it for free on craigslist and a few different people picked it up.
We wet down the clay and used a shovel to loosen it up. We bought a lot of garden soil (we bought most on clearance from Target – this was at the end of summer – for $2/bag). We mixed this with the clay and made raised beds.
Bins, bags, and a hose, oh my!
Those were our winter crop. Of everything we grew, the chinese cabbage and the broccoli proved the most prolific. The taste difference between the store-bought chinese cabbage was pretty large. Home-grown was much more flavorful and very, very tender. Small differential between home-grown and store-bought broccoli.
Here’s what it looks like now.
Two neat little rows...we kept some of the sand.
The black hose going around we just installed yesterday. We’re planning on adding an automatic watering system back here to reduce the daily time investment. We’ve pulled up most of the winter veggies and planted some seedlings out here. The sugar snap peas seem to have come into their own just now.
Pretty flowers and edible = a winner
The strawberry patch is starting to grow some little strawberries now that the weather is warmer.
Can't wait to eat these!
LEARN FROM MY MISTAKE:
If you’ve got clay for soil, do yourself a favor and borrow a rototiller from someone. Breaking up the clay was back-breaking work. That’s what took us the most time. Do raised beds so you can have better control over the content of the soil. Keep in mind how deep the roots will go. Cabbage, broccoli, and cauliflower all have shallow roots. Plants such as tomatoes and carrots have roots that go deeper.
INITIAL TIME INVESTMENT: 2 weekends’ worth of labor, less if you don’t have to move bark and tarp and sand.
DAILY TIME INVESTMENT: 5-10 minutes
Tomorrow – an entry on making your own soymilk.
I think the first thing a lot of people think of when they think of self-sufficiency is…vegetables! Anyone can grow veggies, even people who live in apartments.
I’m trying something new this year – growing vegetables from seed instead of buying the young plants from the nursery. I find you can get more variety this way, and it’s $2.50 tops for a whole packet of seeds as opposed to $2.50 for 1-6 plants.
I planted some seeds back in early February, but I think I transplanted them outside too early (unusually late frost killed a few) and apparently we have a slug problem.
OH, the carnage! Alas!
We’ve started to go out and pick the slugs off at 10:30PM at night, but this takes time and effort, and that is what we here at Suburban Sustainability are seeking to avoid. I’ll address ways to combat slugs and snails in a later post.
Starting seeds indoors is a great way to get a head-start on the growing season. It’s >70 degrees F outside right now here, and judging from the size of the plants at the local hardware store, I could have started my seeds in December or January for a super-early start.
I bought some of these Ferry-Morse mini-greenhouse plant trays ($9.00 for three with plastic covers, drainage trays, and 72 little pots per tray) and some seed-starting mix ($5.00). I will attest that they are brown-thumb-proof, as a chronic brown-thumber myself.
Note the "Quick 'n Easyᵀᴹ" in the upper left corner...YES!
This stuff is super-fluffy, so I like to wet it down a couple times before planting the seeds in it. Just a note: this can be done indoors, but I’m the kind of person that ends up throwing dirt everywhere despite my best intentions. Do it outdoors or in the garage if you’re this type of person. Your spouse/significant other/cat will thank you for it.
My Selection
Cucumber died of frost, corn and zucchini were eaten, and spinach died of reasons unknown. I’m doing a take 2 on that one. Still trying to earn that green thumb…
P.S. Next time I’m going to avoid buying the plastic receptacles. They say that the plant easily “pops out” and that the receptacles are reusable. I found this to be the case only a fraction of the time. I ended up cutting a bunch of them up and tossing them. I’m going to go for the biodegradable receptacles next time ($2.00 for 50).
LEARN FROM MY MISTAKE:
Butternut Squash
All of these Butternut Squash seedlings were planted at the same time. Look at those two new nubs of green! I think that’s about 2 weeks from the time the first ones came out. When I transplanted outdoors, I threw away what looked to be empty receptacles with non-growing seeds. They probably would have sprouted. So be patient, and give it some time. You may be pleasantly surprised.
In several weeks, you’ll have something that looks like this!
Mostly Tomatoes - will be transplanting to cups soon...
Keep them next to the window, and try to rotate the trays 180 degrees once in a while so the seedlings don’t lean permanently in one direction. Watering is minimal with the plastic covers – the soil should feel moist to the touch. I leave the cover on until the seedlings get too tall, then I take it off and water every 1-2 days.
I prefer to keep mine in the guest bedroom with the incubator, since it warms the air a bit…but that’s another post =)
INITIAL TIME INVESTMENT: 15-30 min trip to the hardware store or nursery, 10-20 min to plant the seeds = 25-50 minutes
DAILY TIME INVESTMENT: 2 minutes
