Hulless happiness, germination damnation

A while ago I ordered some different grain seeds from Salt Spring Seeds, a heritage and heirloom seed supplier on Salt Spring Island, BC. I was looking for hulless grains in particular – grains that have naturally loose hulls that can be separated by rubbing or shaking. Most grains these days need to be hulled, which is generally done mechanically, though I'm sure there are many non-mechanical ways of accomplishing it, too (this is why I must spend some time visiting some traditional cultures). Since I'm interested in self-sufficiency, I'd like to grow grains that require a minimal energy investment. A rudimentary search for hulless barley and hulless oats (the only hulless grains I've yet discovered) led me to the catalog for Salt Spring Seeds, so I ordered from there.

I got the seeds a couple days ago, along with golden flax and Indian Blue corn I'd also ordered. It wasn't a new moon recently – rather, quite the opposite – but it's getting late in the season, so I thought I'd forgo the cosmic calendar this once and sow seeds anyway. Meta also thought it would be nice for some morning glories to swallow the backyard's ramshackle fencing. So I sowed.

It seems I haven't been doing a very good job getting my tomatoes and sweet peppers to germinate. In case you were wondering, none have germinated yet, and it's been several weeks for some of them. I don't know why I thought it would be okay for my ungerminated tomatoes and peppers to spend their nights at or below 10ºC. I guess I forgot to read the instructions. I read some guidelines today, which clearly state that peppers germinate best between 24ºC and 29ºC (at least above 18ºC) and that tomatoes germinate best between 21ºC and 27ºC (and never below 10ºC). Maybe that's why most greenhouses have heaters, hey? Yet the concept still seems kind of wrong to me. :) I suppose I should really just stop trying to grow tropical vegetables in Toronto.

So I sowed the last of my pepper seeds and a bunch more tomato and groundcherry seeds, and this time I've brought them inside to germinate. One of the articles I read suggests putting the trays on top of the fridge. I think I'll try that and see how it goes.

Of seeds and sprouts

I'm happy to report the birth of some cheerful companions: radishes in the double-dug bed and chard in the cold frame.

This morning I was also delivered an old, rusty wheelbarrow with a flat tire - thank you again, Freecycle! (Freecycle rules, people.) I'll be looking for a new inner tube for the tire, or better, heavy-duty patching tape for the old tube. It should be pretty handy for transporting compost and soil around when I get serious about double-digging.

My mini-greenhouse indoors is now equipped with a fan and - I caved - a lamp. We have zero windows that receive direct sunlight, and I really don't want to risk fungal buildup, so I'm going all out. I'm not really happy about it, but those seeds were expensive, and I want a garden before fall rolls around. If it doesn't work, then it'll probably be cold frame the whole way.

I sprouted lots of spearmint over the last couple weeks - probably way too much. I never thought the seeds were going to do anything, but I guess it can take a couple weeks or more for certain seeds to sprout. So I got overly eager and sowed spearmint in different ways at different times. Hopefully I'll end up with far more than I can handle.

watercolour, summer, 2000

And lo and behold, dear cousin Elizabeth has donated to the Garden project a packet of lettuce poppies from Tasha Tudor's garden in Vermont. Lettuce poppies (aka. opium poppies) are apparently the oldest poppies in cultivation. The seeds are highly appreciated, cousin!

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.

Life of a double-digger

I prepared my first raised bed yesterday by double-digging an existing 18-square-foot bed in the front yard. Double-digging is one of the essential features of the biointensive method. It originates in French intensive gardening, which was developed for people with narrow backyards in France to enable higher yields for a given area. The idea is to loosen the soil two feet deep without completely disturbing the natural soil profile, so that roots can easily delve deep rather than spread out.

HtGMV describes several different bed preparation procedures you can choose from, depending on whether you're double-digging it for the first time, preparing last year's biointensive bed, starting a bed in poor soil, and so on. I followed the "Initial Double-Dig" procedure, since even though I was preparing it from an existing garden bed, the bed hadn't previously been worked biointensively. Here's the simplified version:

1. Loosen the top 12 inches of soil with a spading fork (I highly recommend the beautiful, stainless-steel Lee Valley tools) and remove any weeds, roots, or stones you came across.
2. Spread a 1-inch layer of compost over the entire area.
3. Using a flat-edge spade, remove the soil from the upper part of the first trench (a couple feet wide) and place it in a soil storage area for use in making compost and flat soil.
4. Loosen the soil in the first trench an additional 12 inches using the spading fork.
5. Dig out the upper part of the second trench and move it into the first trench. The first trench is complete.
6. Loosen the lower part of the second trench.
7. Lather, rinse, repeat, until you've reached the end of the bed.
8. Shape the bed into a mound by raking it.
   

Result:

Ain't that somethin'?

Next, I planted carrots, radishes, sunflowers and edible flowers. Carrots and radishes both like to be planted next to lettuce. They are companion plants, which is another essential feature of biointensive gardening. Companion planting is a not-totally-understood phenomenon that some species of plants thrive better when grown next to certain other "companion" species. There are also some plant species that will inhibit the growth of certain other species ("antagonist" plants). The de-facto book on the subject is Carrots Love Tomatoes by Louise Riotte.

So back to the carrots, radishes and lettuce. Carrots and radishes like lettuce, so since I'll be expecting lettuce seedlings in a couple weeks, I left some room for lettuce to be planted nearby when the time comes. Carrots and radishes also make good companions themselves if they are interplanted amongst each other, as carrots take longer to mature than radishes, as this diagram illustrates:

I came up with a pretty ridiculous pattern for interplanting my radishes and carrots, based on the fact that carrots should be spaced about 3" apart and radishes 1" apart:

Please do not let this frighten you. Interplanting is completely optional. I just think it's super fun. (Remember, I was a math major.)

So then I poked holes where the seeds should go, popped the seeds in, covered the holes up, and gave the bed a healthy spray with the hose. I hope something grows out of it.

Planting by the moon

The biointensive method of gardening derives its name from the two methods it has its roots in: biodynamic agriculture and French intensive gardening. Biodynamic farming is a holistic system of growing food involving many spiritual concepts, including the idea that the moon and planets are cosmic forces that influence plant fertility. Biointensive gardening shares this view, particularly with regards to the lunar cycle, which is clearly described in the biointensive bible, How to Grow More Vegetables (henceforth referred to as HtGMV). I scanned a couple helpful illustrations from the book that explain how it works:

This morning was the new moon. Following the above guide, I sowed most of my short-germinating seeds in flats this afternoon, including lettuce, spinach, chard, onions, peppers, cilantro, and even carrots (and I realize it's not recommended to sow carrots in flats, as transplanting risks harming their roots, but apparently if you do it biointensively, it's okay). I have three types of flats I'm trying out at the moment:

• 9-cell seedling trays that you commonly get seedlings in at garden centres (Jen found seven of them on the side of the road, like just about everything else we own)
• plastic egg cartons (the awful ones you have no choice but to accumulate as a consumer of organic eggs)
• the bottoms of old cardboard boxes, cut to be about 3 inches deep

I have a feeling that the egg carton seedlings aren't going to fare so well due to the egg cups' short stature. HtGMV says:

The depth [of 3 inches] is critical since an overly shallow flat allows the seedling roots to touch the bottom too soon. When this occurs, the plants believe they have reached their growth limit, and they enter a state of "premature senility." In this state the plants begin to flower and fruit even though they are only transplanting size. We have experienced this with broccoli and dwarf marigolds; the broccoli heads were the size of the nail on a little finger.

But I read this after I'd already poked holes through the egg cartons for drainage, rendering them undesirable as egg cartons. I had to make good use of them, you understand.

The cardboard box idea I derived from the flat design described in HtGMV, but they make theirs out of wood (and I'm sure I'll figure out why they didn't suggest using cardboard in no time). They're a lot heavier than regular seedling trays that you buy, and they're not nearly as convenient for transplanting (it takes time to separate the roots), but I'm sure the plants will thank me for it (and then I'll reply, "No, thank you!").

I put some of the cooler-germinating flats in the cold frame, and the other flats needing warmer temperatures on the window sill. I can't wait to see how they fare with the sunshine and warmth expected in the next couple days.

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.