Bolting over bounty

A couple weeks ago, virtually all of my spinach was bolting. "Bolting" means going to flower. When a leaf crop, such as spinach or lettuce, goes to flower, that's not a good thing, unless your purpose for growing them is to harvest the seeds rather than the leaves (in which case bolting is obviously imperative). Bolted lettuce and spinach leaves are more bitter and generally not marketable.

Heat is a factor that accelerates the flowering process, and my spinach spent most of its life span during the hottest days of May and June, so in a way it's no surprise that it bolted. I just wished they had grown a little bigger before going to flower. They were very slow-growing. I think part of it has to do with flat soil I sowed them in, which wasn't ideal and possibly retarded their growth. Also, I probably could have sowed them much earlier than I did and given them more of a chance to grow during the cooler weeks.

So for a while I had been picking off the flowering heads from all my spinach plants (which I had to do every day). But it was getting to the point where the leaves simply weren't becoming more abundant no matter what I did, so I harvested it all at once.

Much of my Simpson lettuce has also been bolting (though not quite as much), and I can only assume it's doing so for the same reasons my spinach did. I did the same thing for the lettuce as I did for the spinach, but ate the bolting heads because they seemed to be just leaves anyway (and they weren't noticeably bitter yet).

I sowed more spinach and lettuce seeds a few days ago, which I'll plant where my current lettuce resides after it's been harvested. I tried four different types of potting soil mixes - regular 1:1 mix (soil:compost), a 1:3 mix, a 100% compost mix, and a 1:1 mix that happened to have a bit more soil in it than compost. I'm curious to see what's most effective for germination and seedling growth. So far, the 1:1 mix is winning!

Seedling Swap

I haven't been posting much lately because I've been spending most of my time practicing with Meta and Chris for the Cowboy Mimes' second show last night. My amazing friend Kelly from Everdale kindly drove my big-ass keyboard to the gig at no charge, and it was a good chance for
us to swap seedlings. I gave her some of my many sweet pepper seedlings, and in return she gave me a zucchini, two varieties of tomato (beautiful, large mini-plants they are), and an unusual kind of eggplant that's produces orange-coloured fruit (I'll find out the name).

My own tomatoes are doing very poorly. None of my groundcherries have germinated, and only two of my ruffled red tomatoes have sprouted. All my seedlings seem to be growing very slowly, despite the amount of sun they get. Perhaps it's still just too cool at night? Or maybe my potting soil is too dense and the roots don't get enough oxygen? Beats me.

What do people think about transplanting seedlings into 100% compost, just to give them a boost? Maybe I'll experiment.

Damping off damping off

After reading farmer Jon's posting in which he mentioned some of his seedlings were damping off, I realized that this was exactly what was happening to my seedlings. I was wondering why my poppy, valerian, and lavender seedlings weren't becoming expectedly big and strong with the warmer sunny weather of the last few days. Instead, they were getting scrawnier and eventually just collapsing and disintegrating, which sounds like exactly what was happening to some of Jon's seedlings.

I think my potting soil was poor. I'd water it, and it seemed to stay moist for a long time. When it finally did dry out, it was extremely dry, crusty and chunky, not fluffy like it was when I first filled the flats. All in all, it didn't seem like a very habitable place for a baby seedling (as nutrient-rich as it may have been). I may also have been watering too often. They say to let the soil dry out completely before completely saturating the soil with water again. This makes the soil inhospitable to the damping-off fungi that like to attack seedlings.

I realized that I really should have sifted my compost rather than just crumbled it through my fingers. I don't know what I was thinking. I guess I just didn't feel like going to the trouble of making a compost screen. So I went to the trouble this morning, and I made a great little sieve (I only needed to make the screen part shown on that page, not the frame it sits on). I found a ½"-gauge screen by the railroad tracks (I actually went there specifically to look for one, too; I also found a perfectly good cooler). I sifted all my potting soil, and already it felt much softer and less chunky.

But I knew I'd need to do more than sift it, because if I grabbed a fistful, it would still stick together in clumps that wouldn't break apart very easily. It seemed I needed the equivalent of peat moss for my potting soil to make it act more like a sponge. But peat moss is a non-renewable resource and its use promotes the loss of wetland habitats. An alternative to peat moss is coconut coir, but it comes from India, so that's out of the question. The more common alternative is vermiculite, but it's mined and its production is very petroleum-dependent, so it doesn't interest me either.

I went back to HtGMV just to make sure they really did say to use one part compost, one part garden soil for making potting soil. Yup, that's what it says. But then I realized that the compost they're referring to is the hypothetical compost that I would have made last year - from vegetable remains, compost crops and yard waste - whereas the compost I had delivered to my backyard seems to be very much manure-based. It's rich, dense and pretty homogeneous. By contrast, compost made from leaves, twigs, stalks and veggie scraps would be (as I recall our garden compost as I was growing up) much more powdery, fibrous, and heterogeneous. Which is possibly why it eliminates the need for a spongy ingredient like peat moss. This is all very speculative, of course.

If only I'd had some of that "other" compost to use for my potting soil! But as luck would have it, today just happened to be one of the city's "Environment Days" where I knew they gave away free leaf compost, and it just happened to be within a 25-minute walk from my house, too. Clearly, it was meant to be. I grabbed the biggest knapsack I had, lined it with a couple oversized plastic bags, grabbed a shovel, and headed down. I got there, and there was barely enough left between the tufts of grass to scrape an oversize load into my knapsack. I'll leave you to imagine how uncomfortable the walk back home was. At least it wasn't raining.

I added the sifted leaf compost to my potting soil, and it seemed to improve it a lot. It had just the texture I was looking for. So I resowed most of my seeds, plus tomatoes, groundcherry, and spearmint, using the new soil (I think it's still within 7 days of the new moon) and we'll see if it works a little better.

Reconnecting with the earth

I realized today that three of my four paper-towel-sown varieties are happily sprouting - the poppies, the valerian, and the parsley (yes, I sowed parsley, too). Following cousin Elizabeth's advice that poppies don't like to be transplanted, I created these sort of biodegradable seedling cups from a plastic egg carton lined with old tissue paper (thank you, Jen). It would have been even easier with a paper egg carton, but one must make do with what is given.

I made a very simple flat soil, following the recipe outlined in the biointensive gardening bible, How to Grow More Vegetables by John Jeavons: one part sifted compost, one part soil from the garden. I didn't even bother sifting the compost but just broke it up through my fingers, since I needed only a small amount for now. I filled the egg carton with this potting soil – packing it just enough so that it doesn't really move around (the best soil is 50% air) – and delicately pressed what poppy seeds had germinated into the cups of soil. I set them by the window. Pictures soon.

I've started constructing my cold frame (or mini-greenhouse for seed propagation). I got two beautiful, big old windows for free from good old Freecycle (damn, they even delivered them for free!). I'm using my compost pile for the north wall, which will not only protect the cold frame from the wind but also hopefully absorb daylight to be released slowly overnight. I will detail the construction of this cold frame when I have made some real progress and taken some pictures. I guess the poppies will be guinea pigs of this device.