Sustainable Potting Soil Mix Alternative

The latest issue of Mother Earth News has  an article on container gardening that has advice for making your own potting soil mix out of thoroughly rotted/composted sawdust and/or chipped bark:

http://www.motherearthnews.com/organic-gardening/container-gardening-zm0z12amzhun.aspx


"If rotted until black, either material makes a wonderful growing medium with excellent structure. Two parts rotted sawdust or chipped bark to 1 part compost usually makes a good container mix. If you're committed to growing container veggies, set aside a spot for these materials to decay so you can start making your own potting soil in the future."


There's a sawmill near us that's offering free sawdust and they'll even skip load it into our trailer.

I'm going to give this a try, as I am growing more and more in large containers, for a variety of reasons:
--The south side of my yard is narrow and gravel-lined. Peppers, tomatoes and other heat lovers really like growing in self-watering or other large containers there.
-- I can reduce the amount of solanaceae that I have to rotate through my beds if I grow my peppers only in containers (that leaves me tomatoes and potatoes to juggle in my raised bed rotations) and they do great in them.
-- I can tuck those extra artichokes or potatoes into the random sunnier patches of the yard when I am out of bed space.

I like that the sawdust is renewable and not particularly carcinogenic (vermiculite may have asbestos in it). I'm picking up extra containers as I find them at thrift stores, going for the Rubbermaids only, as the less pliable plastics become brittle and break in a year or so's time.


 
One easy way to grow in containers, at least the smaller leaf and root crops, is in milk crates lined with weed barrier (I"m using old bedsheets, for lack of a better material).
http://www.urbivoreonline.com/2010/07/22/diy-milk-crate-container-garden/


I try to grow in containers that are at least 5 gallons, both for root space and to minimize the chances of them drying out in less than a day.

And if you want to put more work into it, there's always these great self-watering containers to make:


http://www.seattleoil.com/Flyers/Earthbox.pdf

Happy growing!

Carrot Seed Tape

This is a winter gardening project I've wanted to do for the past three years and I've finally gotten around to it. I found it in a self-published binder/book called Gardening in the Mountain West by retired Cooperative Extension agent Barbara Hyde. As soon as I read it, I realized it would be a great solution to carrot seeding. I hate thinning plants generally and I find thinning carrots particularly challenging because I always end up seeding them too thickly -- darned tiny seeds.  I never seemed to be able to pinch them off properly either, and I would end up yanking some out and messing with the survivors' roots, which can lead to forked roots. I'm determined to grow lovely, straight carrots this year.

The process, in a nutshell:

Unroll a long sheet of single-ply toilet paper.

Make a flour and water paste (mine was about the consistency of heavy cream.)

Pour carrot seeds into a bowl.

Use a toothpick dipped into the paste to pick up a carrot seed and deposit it onto the paper.

Repeat, spacing the carrots out the recommended distance (one inch, for my variety, at least.)

Allow to dry thoroughly, roll up, label and store (I'm going to put them in a paper lunch sack for another month or so.)

When it comes time to plant, make a trench, lay in the toilet paper and cover to the recommended depth. Paper and paste disintegrates and you have a nice neat row of properly spaced carrots.



In reality, it's not possible to pick up one carrot seed and you have to be careful not to let the paste drip into the bowl of seeds. I figured out a system eventually, picking up a small clump of seeds and wiping them on my index finger to separate them out, then using the paste-dipped toothpick to lift each separate seed and wipe it gently onto the toilet paper.

I can't wait to see how these plant out. I'll report back with pictures.

Oh, and definitely do not attempt this project if you have a cat and she is awake.

Edited to add: I ended up making 50 linear feet of tape (couldn't bring myself to waste the seed that I poured too liberally then splattered with flour paste) -- once the dog figured out that my crouching over the toilet paper was not a play bow, and once the cat went back to sleep. I'm thinking this  will make succession seeding of carrots crazy easy -- just tear off four or five feet every week or two and plant!

AWOL blogger

(Edited to add that this was written back in May, I just never got around to looking up the wicking bed links and posting. Actual new posts to come soon!)

That's what happens when family comes to town for an extended stay and then one's adrenal system decides that it is had quite enough, thank you, and did I really think that I was supposed to be keeping up with the 20-somethings at jujitsu? Sigh.

I've likely been in some degree of adrenal burnout since the fall of '09 when I caught whatever pernicious virus was going around then. But I had a lovely crescendo at the start of the month when I decided to go all out at the jujitsu class Willow and I are taking, the day after my folks left for home. Hit a wall so hard that I could barely think straight for the exhaustion, couldn't walk five steps without being breathless, couldn't sleep for the mental agitation and just wanted to curl up and die.

The symptoms were so extreme that I was (crazily) worried that that virus might have damaged my heart somehow, but was relieved that my allopathic doctor found no signs of cardiomyopathy and kindly patted me on the head, saying reassurance was 85 percent of his job. He told me I was just out of shape and needed to build aerobic conditioning more slowly. Hah. After trying his exercise plan for a week and hitting yet another shocking wall when I fast-walked a little too fast for 20 minutes,  I went to my naturopath, who said it was classic adrenal fatigue. I'm actually relieved to have a diagnosis that makes sense, fits my episodic symptoms to a T, and as an added bonus, inspired the Rolling Stones to write a song about it (Nineteenth Nervous Breakdown, anyone? Apparently, that's what we used to call adrenal fatigue, though allopathic medicine does not recognize anything short of adrenal gland failure. Because organs just up and fail, all at once, with no precursor state or warning, right?)

So, the prescription is lower stress (mental stress, mostly for me, no more reading about peak oil and economic crises, however much they might be looming, daily meditation again), lots of rest, keep the diet scrupulously clean and balanced and wait patiently.

In the meantime, I ran across this cool concept, which I'd like to try out at some point:
Wicking Beds: They're essentially a raised bed or row-cropping variation of the self-watering container. Since we live in the arid high plains (14 inches of rain a year and 25 percent more  solar radiation to dry us out, thanks to the altitude/thinner atmosphere) , minimizing water usage is critical. The beds are either raised or dug into the earth 18 inches, with a non-porous liner, a perforated pipe running down the middle  at the bottom level to distribute water through the length of the bed, and filled with bark chips or other absorbent mulch at the lower depths and soil on top.

I doubt I'll have the time or energy to build these this spring, but perhaps next year. One variation I may try is growing peppers in large plastic bins set up as mini-wicking beds -- i.e. don't drill drainage holes in the bottom of the bin, just a drainage hole 4-6 inches up from the bottom on the side. Fill that 4-6 inches with bark chips, wedge a fill-pipe (with the bottom cut at an angle, not flat across, to let water flow better) in the center of the bin and fill with potting soil. Use the fill-pipe to soak/immerse the bark chips and see how that does for bottom-watering through the summer.)

Gardening by the seat of my pants

I've read all the books. I know how I'm supposed to garden for maximum return. And yet, I don't have good soil, I don't have the patience to wait til after the last frost date and sometimes I let those seedlings get too big before I get around to potting them up or transplanting them. So, gardening for me, seems to be one long series of experiments in how far can I push the boundaries of this or that vegetable.

This bed is a case in point. It is early March, last freeze is still 2 1/2 months away. This started out as a sheet-composted bed over heavy clay soil that grew potatoes last year for its first crop. They seemed to have leached all that organic material out of the soil and it's back to heavy clay. So last fall, being the sort of irregular gardener that I am, and noticing that the bark mulch in the pathway next to the bed had decomposed significantly and the chickens were finding lots of protein snacks in it, decided to top mulch the bed with fall leaves held down by the decomposing bark mulch, which I just shoveled off the pathway and onto the bed. I covered the beds with weed cloth and carpet remnants, mostly to keep the free-ranging chickens out. I really wasn't sure how this might work.
But about mid-February, as deep winter broke and the days started to warm into the 50s more often than not, I put some PVC pipes over some 2' rebar stakes and stretched some 6 mil plastic over the bed to warm things up. In early February's first quarter moon, I'd planted some carrot seeds in a flat, as I'd read somewhere that you could transplant very young carrot seedlings (typically, root crops can't be transplanted. But when I get antsy in late winter, I'm willing to try anything to get a jump on gardening.) And while an earlier planting of carrot seeds in January hadn't germinated, this batch emerged into a glorious green carpet of carrot seedlings in less than 2 weeks.
So about a week ago, I transplanted them into the bed. Knowing they didn't want their roots disturbed, I carefully lifted chunks of potting medium and seedlings out with a butter knife and immersed them in a bowl of warm water (warm mostly to keep my hands from freezing, but maybe the carrots liked it too) and tickled and teased the roots apart. Then I pulled open holes in the mulch/soil (on this end of the bed it was slightly more soil-y) and tamped them in. I'm surprised and thrilled to say that it looks like 95+ percent have made it so far.
Edited to add: I have since read that transplanting carrots causes their roots to fork, and that's exactly what happened with these. While plenty of carrot root was produced, each plant looked like a strange sea creature with many tentacles and many were so hard to clean the dirt out of they weren't worth the effort. I won't try transplanting them again.

Intrepid carrot seedling

I open the bed up on sunny days, and keep it covered on snowy days and at night, when it's still dropping into the 20s and teens.
Once I realized that the carrots had survived, I decided to test out some bok choi and spinach. The left half of the bed, where the potatoes were grown, has less-decomposed leaf-litter and bark mulch, which may be problematic. When you have active composting going on in a bed, the nitrogen in the compost is temporarily occupied in reaction with the carbon in the compost and isn't available to any plants. But I thought I'd give it a shot. These seedlings had grown a bit too long in their first flat and had some pretty tangled root systems. With more warm water bathing and teasing apart of roots (which makes the planting process rather time consuming and is not something the average farmer is going to do), I planted the spinach and bok choi, taking care to pull open holes in the soil/mulch deep enough for the roots to stretch down straight. After patting everything in, I watered with warm faucet water (too cold to have the outside hoses running yet) in hopes this would warm up the deeper regions of the bed a bit, and finished with a watering can or two of decomposed fish soup (warm water with a few tablespoons of fish emulsion in it). My hope was that the nitrogen in the fish emulsion would offset any loss of nitrogen in the still decomposing mulch.)
Uncovering the beds this morning, it looks like almost all the spinach and bok choi made it through the night.

Spinach

bok choi

The really smooth looking patch in the middle of the bed is where I dumped most of a bag of composted steer manure and bark mulch from Home Depot. I'm planning on testing the ability of arugula and carrot seeds to start in that medium when the weather warms back up this weekend. Standard advice is that you should work that manure mulch into the soil, but seeing as how I don't have soil under there, just more of the leaf litter mulch (in which I figured seeds would just get lost), I'm experimenting here as well.

So, I'll report back how these various seed starting experiments go in a week or two. For now though, I'm amazed at the resilience and willingness to grow that these little veggies are showing!