--> I’ll save you the time: there is no one answer. Potting soil is as varied as bread. The result depends on who’s making it, and with what ingredients. There are lots - LOTS - of recipes.
But, like bread, the basics are simple, and anyone can make a decent batch. No kneading or rising required.
We’ll talk about each element in turn, and then go to some recipes for how to put them all together.
Water retention:
Water retention is the easiest element to understand. Plants need water, and potting mixes should stay moist for a while so your plants can drink, and you don’t have to water 3x per day!
Air flow:
Roots need air as much as they need water! It’s easy to drown your plants if soils get too soggy. That’s why you always need drainage holes in any potting container. And it’s why potting mixes need structure that allows for air flow.
Nutrition:
Plants need food as well as water, though not very much. Remember they make most of their food through photosynthesis. But they do need some main nutrients: Nitrogen, Potassium, & Phosphorous, plus lots of other trace minerals.
Microbial life:
The symbiotic relationships between plants and microbes - bacteria and fungi primarily - is a new area of study, and not completely understood. But it is clear that a thriving microbiome promotes healthy plant growth just as much, or even more than, strong fertilizers.
Water & Air
Water retention and air flow are generally achieved by balancing ingredients that both hold water and air.
Traditionally, the main ingredient for water and air has been peat moss, but most responsible gardeners are moving away from it.
Peat is disastrous for the environment. The bogs where it’s mined are like miniature old-growth forests. They are not at all a renewable resource! If you’d like to read more about peat and its impacts, especially within the horticultural industry, here is a detailed look, written by Sara Venn, a nursery professional in the UK.
We at Orta are completely peat free.
There are LOTS of alternatives to peat. (Remember – all it does is hold water and air):
A basic all-purpose recipe for potting:
1 part expanded coconut coir
1 part perlite / grit
1 part compost
1 tbsp garden soil per 5 gallons of finished potting soil
Mycorrhizae according to package instructions
Organic fertilizer according to package instructions, err on the side of less.
For hungrier plants, increase the compost proportion.
For succulents / cacti, double the perlite.
For plants that like lots of water, increase the coco coir or decrease the perlite.
Here’s a video of me making my own water-retentive blend with worm castings instead of compost. (It was from before I could easily find mycorrhizae.)
For seed starting, the needs are a bit different. Seeds carry all their own nutrition for the first 2 sets of leaves, which means a seed-starting mix is low nutrition compared to potting mix for actively growing plants.
Also – seeds are often very small, with teeny baby roots. A very fine texture helps the baby roots grow and get anchored. Potting mix can have a texture like rolled oats, or even coleslaw, but seed starting mix should be about as fine as cornmeal (with a few bigger perlite chunks.)
General purpose seed-starting mix:
4 parts coco coir
3 parts perlite
1 part worm castings
1 tbsp garden soil per 5 gallons of finished potting soil
Mycorrhizae according to package instructions
But sometimes you'd like to know if that old packet of seeds you just found is any good (perhaps before you share some with your friends . . .).
Start with a moist paper towel and arrange 100 seeds in a 10 x 10 grid. This is super fiddly. Even if you don't need reading glasses yet . . . you probably need some reading glasses.
Label your paper towel with the seed variety you're testing.
Then, neatly fold up your paper towel, put it in a plastic bag, and leave it somewhere warm for about 10 days.
I did three varieties all at once for this test.
After 10 days, you can check the results!
Look at all the roots growing out through the paper towel!
Open up the paper towel and carefully, carefully check how many of the seeds germinated. With luck, most of them will have germinated, and it will be easier to count the ungerminated seeds.
Again, you're going to want your glasses!
In fact, if you have a microscope, even better!
One of the arugula seeds looked like it hadn't germinated, but when I got it under the microscope, I could see the teeny root just poking out.
Here's another fun thing to look at up close:
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I see her point. Coming in at 386 pages, it's a loooong book! Who has time for that?
If you have to digest 386 pages of information to be successful at starting seeds, why even try? I totally don't blame her for saying "nevermind."
I've written a much shorter seed starting handbook, which you can download here for free. It's only 12 pages (and one of those is the table of contents). But as a parent, running a business, and a household, I know that even 12 pages can be too much!
So, here is the super abbreviated guide to starting your garden from seeds.
Total time: 1.5 to 3 hours planning and planting + 30 minutes to 3.5 hours hands-on tending time over 6 weeks.
The fastest shortcut to figuring out what seeds to start is to follow this diagram:
The list of plants your family likes to eat is probably pretty easy.
"Plants that grow easily from seed in my area"? Less so. Here are my best shortcuts for figuring that out:
This is the trickiest and also most forgiving step.
I know a market gardener in Marrakesh who starts all his seeds every 2 weeks year round because he never knows when he'll have unseasonable cold or heat. He loses lots of plants, but enough survive. If you have a lot of planting space, you can definitely take that approach and ignore timing altogether.
Here is another way:
Seedlings can be tricky, but they don't have to be.
With the right gear, it's pretty straightforward.
After that treat your transplanted veggies just like starts you would otherwise buy at the nursery. And pat yourself on the back for doing it yourself! :)
Of course, because there are literally 386 page books about seed starting, there are, oh, about 384 pages worth of information I've left out. But this is enough to get started and to avoid most of the common pitfalls of beginning seed starting.
Happy Growing!
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By late October, I had about 300 baby plants grown from seed, mostly perennial filler plants to cover the soil and provide habitat and food for pollinators, plus some herbs for humans.
Rain was forecast for early November. I hustled to get most everything planted by then, to have the rain settle the plants in.
Here was the big planting push on Halloween:
Planning ahead for the plants you'll want 3 or 4 months out is *hard*! It's all so very abstract, looking at pictures, reading about what conditions a plant needs, imagining how big it will get and how it will look with other plants. It really does make my head spin!
But the good thing about doing all this from seed is that if it doesn't work out, you've only lost the $5 or so you spend on seeds, plus maybe another $10 or so on potting mix. And if you have 40 plants of a particular variety, you can plant them in different spots to see where they thrive in your particular microclimate.
The main criteria I was searching for while planning were the following:
Here are the plants I've chosen:
If you know me, you'll know that I don't sugar coat things. It's really not fair to say, "Oh this is so super-duper easy! Give it a go!" when it's actually a lot of work. It makes you feel like a failure for not succeeding with something "easy." Anyway, another day for my soap box on misleading internet tutorials . . .
Suffice it to say, planning for the perennials was a challenging job with a lot of lists and Google time. You can definitely do it, if you're prepared that it will take some time and some mental effort.
But then it's all worth it when this starts to happen:
The biggest difference between perennial seedlings compared to veggies is that for the most part, the seeds are eeny-weeny! Like dust-like.
(If you're new to seed starting and want to learn more about the easier process of starting veggies from seed, click here to receive our free complete handbook for starting veggies from seed.)
All seeds are a bit different, and it's important to read the package. For the varieties I sowed, most required light to germinate, and so I scattered them on the surface of already moist seed-starting mix. I was very, very careful to get the itty-bitty seeds evenly distributed over the mix, and then I watered extremely gently with the "mist" setting on my sprayer, just enough to settle the seeds into good contact with the soil.
Because I was using Orta self-watering pots which water from below, that was the only time I watered from above. With really small seeds, top watering can scatter them and hurt their chances of taking root. You don't have to use Orta seed pots, of course, but you should definitely have a plan for bottom-watering or seriously gentle top-watering if you're growing very small seeds.
Here are some Anise hyssop seedlings (foreground) about 2 weeks after sowing:
And here they are a 2 1/2 weeks later:
So, to summarize, here are all the steps I've done so far to start perennials from seed:
On this Earth Day, I am reckoning with one of the core ideas behind Orta.
Orta’s straightforward mission is to help you grow your own plants from seed, successfully and confidently.
But there has always been a deeper mission: to make a positive contribution to humans’ relationship with the natural world.
We support sustainability in two main ways, one of which may be problematic in a surprising way.
The first is to make the green choice wherever possible in our operations. We package and ship products without plastic, for example. And we spent almost a year formulating glazes to work without spraying (to keep particulates out of the air), and with a single, low temperature firing (to use less energy overall). We demonstrate that green choices are possible, and hopefully inspire others to do the same. If your aim is to be green, rather than to simply maximize profits, it can be done.
Our other contribution is less direct.
The idea goes like this: If we help you start seeds successfully, you’ll connect with the magic of sprouting baby plants more often. And like a gateway drug (but a wholesome one), once you’re starting seeds and tending plants, you'll want to keep them healthy. And then you may become interested in pollinators and compost and soil life and all the rest. And if you’re carefully nurturing the earth nearest to you, maybe you’ll join me in taking collective action to preserve biodiversity and fight climate change. And together, slowly, gently, we find ourselves shifting perspectives to live greener lives.
Besides the obvious catch that seed-starting doesn’t necessarily lead to climate activism, there is another flaw in the plan. It’s something I’ve noticed but couldn’t articulate until I read this Gen Dread piece about why eco-activism isn’t necessarily the cure for eco-anxiety.
The more connected you are to nature, the more you feel the pain, grief, and anxiety of environmental harm. So if Orta is helping connect you to nature, we’re also bringing you pain. (Or making you work harder to pretend that your love for seeds is not connected to the wider environment.) And I’m very sorry for not understanding that until now.
I was making the common false assumption that becoming aware of a problem leads to action towards solving the problem. But I was leaving out feelings. Which are important. Becoming aware of a problem, especially if you care deeply about it, leads to anger, grief, despair and depression.
In order to avoid those “bad” feelings, it can be common to go straight into action without processing the feelings, or to deny the problem entirely. Both of these coping strategies leave you perhaps “happier” for now, but less emotionally resilient, and less able to move forward productively in the face of inevitable setbacks and bad news.
Climate-aware psychologist Caroline Hickman talks about “internal activism,” learning to process and live with the grief, anxiety and depression that will continue to follow us through the climate crisis. And that’s how you become more effective at more conventional “external activism,” or just living your daily life, instead of being sidelined by dread and all the rest.
This mental shift has already helped me immensely, and builds on what I learned from Peter Kalmus’ book Being the Change. Among more typical stories about biodiesel and vegetarian eating, he shares how meditation helped him process his debilitating climate grief and move forward productively.
Of course, understanding these emotional dynamics on a personal level is one thing, but I’m not sure how it changes Orta’s not-so-secret mission. I still think it’s a good thing to connect more with seeds, and that the joy and hope of new green life is a balm for anxiety of any kind. But I’m having a deep think on how we can better support gardeners through the scary emotions that seem to develop in lockstep with deeper connection to nature in this era of global heating.
On Earth Days past, I have always focused on actions. But this year, especially as many of us (myself included) struggle with the mental health fall-out from our pandemic / election / social justice year, layered on top of the ever-simmering climate anxiety, I am looking inward.
In a conversation last summer, when police violence protests were everywhere, a white person who cares deeply about the environment but was new to social justice put it bluntly: "How can we expect Black communities to care about recycling when their lives are in danger every day?"
And in a less extreme form, how can anyone consumed by grief and anxiety (whether it comes from climate anxiety, or simply the common stresses of our times) do their best work, and make meaningful contributions to collective climate actions?
Counterintuitively, it seems that the most important climate action of all may be helping people feel safe. (And of course, actually making communities objectively safer.) We need to process, rather than avoid, our anger, grief and anxiety, so that we can take more effective action from a place of calm, rather than fear.
How do you process (or not) your climate anxieties? How do you care for your mental health to allow you to do your best work?
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The biggest project of our move has been building a new casting room. Here are a few pictures of how I've been doing it.
Slip casting, the process we use to make all our pots, works much better when everything stays warm. (I learned this the hard way when, for the first couple years of Orta production, we had excellent results in the summer, but starting in November, all sorts of weird problems cropped up - cracking clay, sticky molds, torn casts.)
In our current space we built a casting room from 2x4's, plywood and fiberglass insulation. And it has worked well, but was quite expensive to build, is hard to clean, and is almost impossible to modify.
This time, we're building our warm room with cooler panels, the kind used to make large walk-in refrigerators. But instead of a refrigeration unit, we'll use a heater. Because brand new panels are quite expensive, and also use virgin materials, I've been searching for used panels, and it's been quite an adventure! I finally found what I needed in a used-restaurant surplus yard in rural Sacramento.
At the end of this rural road, I finally found the used cooler panels of my dreams. (Well, at the the right combination of function, location, and price!)
Located on the site of a former bean processing plant, this surplus yard was huge! And kind of mind-blowing in its scale and variety.
Loading panels into my trusty little Uhaul.
I've never seen loading done like this before: two forklifts going at the same time! Like a ballet.
That's what a 10' x 20' walk-in fridge looks like on a truck. You can see that this place is really out there in fields!
Driving the lift to help get the heavy roof panels onto the box.
As of yesterday, the box is up, and I've started making molds to be ready to resume production ASAP.
The movers come on Friday. We're madly jamming to get the rest of the space ready! More updates *after* the move. :)
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Most gardeners in mild climates have some herbs growing somewhere! And most people who cook and eat appreciate the extra flavor of homegrown herbs.
Side note for Californians: If you don't have a Bay Laurel tree yourself, chances are a close neighbor does. You know those bay leaves you buy at the store? There are probably branches of them on your block for free. The tree in our yard is vigorous to the point of being a pest and needs to be pruned back all the time. Your bay owning neighbors will gladly part with a generous amount!
Lots of herbs, including rosemary and mint, will root in a jar of water on the counter. You could either start now to see if you can get them rooted before you give the gift, or clip some sprigs at the last minute and put them in a pretty jar. (This is a reused jar from St Benoit yogurt -- it's worth buying the admittedly quite expensive yogurt sometimes just to get the pretty jar!)
Citrus is a traditional Christmas gift, and if you live in a citrus-growing region, chances are you have some trees with fruit on them at this time of year. Throughout the winter, I like to send Meyer lemons to friends in cold places. You can also make marmalade to make the harvest last longer and travel better. Here's a nice marmalade recipe that includes safe canning instructions.
If you're like me, you probably have a bunch of extra seedlings all the time. Granted, the ones above are for the summer season, but if you've been nurturing along some flowers to plant in the spring perhaps, or you've got some rooted cuttings, they can make a lovely gift for your gardening friends.
Perhaps you saved seeds this year? Or you have a collection of half-used seed packs, with more seeds than you need? Package them up nicely with a note for the gardeners on your list. This has the great advantage of fitting into the envelope with a Christmas card, making it an inexpensive way to send a thoughtful gift to gardeners who are far away.
Do you have any other favorite ways to give gardening gifts? Please share them in the comments below!
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Last weekend I went to my friends' house for an Orta products photo shoot. They're serious gardeners, growing lots of their own food, composting their food scraps, and using the garden as a classroom for their daughter's Covid pod.
They are also renters, saving up to buy a house. Which means they're not investing a ton in long-term projects or garden infrastructure, but they are devising some really cool DIY growing methods that both save money and reuse materials on hand.
This seedling planter is a great example. Made from one old fence board cut into 5 pieces (4 sides + a bottom), it has cardboard dividers that make seedlings easy to separate at transplant time.
SAFETY WARNING: Before I go on, I want to be very clear about material choices! DO NOT USE PRESSURE TREATED WOOD. Pressure treated wood is extremely toxic, and should not be used for plants, especially edibles. Painted fence boards can have toxic ingredients also. Your safest bet is plain, un-stained, un-treated wood. Around here in Northern California, fences tend to be made from untreated cedar or redwood, both of which are fine. There is likely to be a similar choice in your area. When in doubt, do your homework!
As for the cardboard dividers, plain, uncoated, un-printed corrugated cardboard is generally considered quite safe and biodegradable. Because corrugated frequently contains recycled material, however, there is some debate as to whether petroleum-based inks from the paper's previous life survive recycling and end up in the cardboard. For my part, I'm comfortable with the cardboard, but you may prefer something else.
Its genius is in its simplicity. With a saw, hammer, nails, and some thoughtfulness about dimensions, anyone can make one of these in about an hour, or set up an assembly line and make 4 planters in about an hour and a half.
What I especially love is that having six baby plants separated by cardboard, but sharing the same container, you have the water-holding capacity of a bigger container. That means you can go longer between watering, and keep those adolescent plants at the right moisture level.
And of course who doesn't love a garden project that salvages materials, and doesn't use any plastic at all? Brilliant!
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Normally this time of year I'd be planning a seed and plant swap as a way to get gardeners together, meeting one another, learning about plants, and going home with free seeds and plants! But this year, alas, is 2020.
While we can't easily swap plants at a distance, we can still swap seeds! I'm mashing together two favorite gifting and trading traditions to create the Secret Solstice-Santa Seed Swap! We can celebrate seeds, gardens, the holidays, and the inherent generosity of gardens and gardeners, all through the mail.
Here's how it works:
A free package of 3-10 varieties of seeds plus a letter from a lovely gardening stranger, who may even become a friend!
1. Sign up here
2. Choose at least 3 (and up to 10) varieties of seeds you especially like.
3. Write a letter that describes the varieties, why you like them, and any growing tips.
4. Please mail your seeds and letter by December 10th so that they arrive in plenty of time to be a solstice gift. (We'll remind you!)
And by that I mean I'm not voting to elect them, but voting for their interests. Their future is being decided next month, but they can't vote.
I'm sure that everyone reading this has different ideas about the big issues, and I'm not going to go there. Instead I'm interested in what we have in common, and how we collectively act for our common, common-sense, gardener values.
Here's a fantastic story about the intersection of a gardener's vision for a better world, and the nitty gritty municipal politics of Los Angeles. Ron Finley planted vegetables on his front parkway in the food desert of South Central LA. But it was illegal, and his refusal to remove the garden led to a warrant for his arrest. When the LA times got hold of the story, the city council finally moved to change the rules. Now it's legal to grow edibles on all the parkways in LA. Here's his wildly popular TED talk (which includes some swearing, in case you're watching with kids).
Another example is greywater, and how the regulations have been changing. Greywater is lightly used water from laundry and showers, as distinct from blackwater, which comes from the toilet. Until the 1990's, greywater reuse was illegal in the United States. Together with blackwater, it was required to be sent to a sewer. For most of us living west of the Mississippi, however, water scarcity is a real problem, and reusing our laundry water to irrigate landscapes makes all the sense in the world. Even gardeners in England (England! Where it rains all the time!) are beginning to collect and reuse rainwater and greywater.
Over the last 25 years, dedicated local gardeners have been advocating to make greywater legal, to bring municipal codes into alignment with common sense, and to help residents reuse water safely. Now many states allow greywater reuse, albeit to varying degrees.
And then, of course, there's the elephant in the room: climate change. Leaving aside your feelings about coal and jobs, about a green new deal or unnecessary regulations, gardeners all over the world have noticed the changes.
Frost dates are shifting, heat waves are increasing, pests are moving into new territory while pollinator populations plummet, and it's getting harder to predict planting dates. And also, I'm probably not the only one who's been gardening in a respirator when the smoke gets really bad. We gardeners, attuned to the micro-shifts in our micro-climates, are canaries, and it's our duty to talk about what we're noticing.
I'm not trying to persuade you to vote one way or another on the big issues (most of us have already decided anyway), but I am urging you to vote, period. Voting is our collective voice, and more gardeners acting together is our best bet to make the world more like a healthy garden.
Maybe even investigate your local issues, if you have the time and mental stamina. Does one city council candidate favor encouraging front yard gardens for food security? Is the mayor for or against neonicotinoid pesticides in municipal parks? Is a state representative up for reelection, and perhaps more likely than usual to listen to constituents about water policy?
Now is our chance to vote gardeners' values!
]]>Last week, my daughter and I were sorting calendula seeds from seed heads we'd picked and dried last month, and we had a question. The seed heads had lots of layers of seed-like parts, but we weren't sure which ones were the actual seeds. Some looked for sure like seeds -- the smallest, hardest, innermost parts. Others looked kind of like seeds, but also kind of like seed casings.
Which of these layers are the seeds? The outer shells? The little curls tucked inside? All of the above?
We decided to do a germination test to see which ones would sprout. Here's how to do it.
The mystery, "maybe" seeds are on the left, and the for sure seeds are on the right. Which ones will sprout?
Get your paper towels moist, but not soggy, like a wrung out sponge, and leave them in an open bag. The idea is to keep them lightly moist, but allow them to breathe a bit too. Check on them every day to make sure they're not drying out.
After 4 days, we got our answer: the "maybe" seeds are, in fact, seeds! (Do you see that little root poking out the bottom of the curl? So exciting!) We're going to leave them for another week or so to see how many more germinate, but our curiosity has been satisfied. All layers of the calendula seed head are seeds, even though they look really different.
At the same time, we did another germination test with mizuna seeds I saved in the early summer. Because they sprout so much faster than calendula, we've got our full test results after just 4 days:
24 out of 27 seeds sprouted, giving a germination rate of 89%. (24 divided by 27 = 89%. Anyone have a kid working on percentages at school these days? This project is a good real-life application!) I'm going to leave these for a few more days to see if the last three sprout as well. But 89% is a good enough rate to feel confident planting this batch of seeds.
]]>To harvest zucchini seeds for next year's planting, you let the fruit ripen waaaaay past edible, collect the seeds, and then ferment and dry them.
Ideally you will have hand-pollinated a zucchini to ensure the seeds haven't accidentally cross-bred, and then left it alone for about an extra month.
This is what it looked like right after I pollinated and netted the flower:
And this is what it looked like after I harvested it 5 weeks later (with a coffee mug for scale):
And with a 5-year-old for scale:
You'll know it's ready for harvest when it stops getting bigger and the skin is hard like a pumpkin.
Just like with a pumpkin, you'll need a heavy-duty knife. Be careful! It will be hard, tough, and awkward.
Parents: This is a great sensory play activity for kids. The innards of the zucchini are slippery and gritty, and soft enough that kids can scrape them out themselves with a spoon.
Fermenting will clean gunk off the seeds and improve germination. (Fermenting is part of saving tomato seeds too!) Add just enough water that the mix is like a slurry, and then leave it somewhere warm for a day or 2.
The seeds are done fermenting when they smell a bit sour, and the seeds themselves feel less slippery and gunky.
This is what mine looked like after fermenting. They smelled a little yogurt-y.
Add a bit more water to the fermented slurry. The good seeds are heavy, and will sink. Everything else will float, including the empty shells of bad seeds. Gently pour off the extra material, being careful not to discard the seeds.
Give the seeds one more rinse, and then lay them out to dry on a screen or paper towels, rotating frequently to make sure you don't get damp spots. When the seeds are completely dry, store them in paper, in a cool, dry place.
]]>Raising caterpillars to butterflies is a great activity for families, especially now as we parents try to figure out remote learning, inventing educational projects for our kids.
We've raised about 6 caterpillars this summer, all of them cabbage whites until now, and it's become a fun activity that my daughter and I do together. Here's our routine. (Feel free, of course, to adapt to your family's rhythms!)
We started our caterpillar / butterfly journey with the cabbage whites that lay their eggs on (and can destroy) brassicas. We watched as the butterflies laid eggs that hatched on our broccoli and kale seedlings. Then, instead of either killing the caterpillars or leaving them to eat the seedlings to the ground, we brought them indoors and fed them from our more mature kale plants until they turned into butterflies.
At the same time, in a much longer term project, I started native California narrowleaf milkweed from seed last year. The plants are finally big enough to attract Monarchs to lay their eggs. I found the first caterpillar a couple months ago, and showed my daughter. Ever since then, she checks the milkweed plants regularly, as part of her routine in the garden. Now she always finds the Monarch caterpillars first! It's a fun, low-stress activity that gets us looking closely at details in the garden, watching for caterpillars, and tracking them as they grow.
I should mention here that Monarchs in particular are endangered and should mostly be left alone, and mostly we do. The Xerces society, one of the most trusted insect conservation organizations, recommends against captive breeding and raising of Monarchs. But they say it's ok to raise one or two, especially as part of teaching children about Monarchs and conservation. So we decided to bring the one pictured below into our kitchen, and raise it like the cabbage whites.
The Joyful butterfly has a nice, detailed description of everything you need to keep your caterpillars happy indoors. The things to remember are:
After a week or so of eating, your caterpillar will look for a spot to pupate. It will attach itself to a branch or the underside of a horizontal surface, create a chrysalis, and spend about another week transforming.
While the caterpillar attaches and builds the chrysalis, it's quite vulnerable. Take care not to shake or move the habitat for the first few days of pupating. Once the chrysalis has fully formed, you can gently move it to a bigger habitat if it will need more space when it hatches.
The butterfly emerges slowly and then spends a couple hours drying its wings before it's ready to fly. Make sure that whatever habitat you've chosen has enough space for the butterfly to stretch its wings before you release it, and a big enough opening that it won't damage its wings as it flies away.
"Just wanted to send some love for your newsletters! I read them all, which is a lot more than I can say for all of my other subscriptions. You do such a great job! Thanks for giving us an entertaining peek into your world." ~ Krista, April 2022
And once you have the technical aspects down (see parts 1, 2, and 3, here) it's more of an art form than an exact science.
Each growing season, watch your plants carefully and notice how each plant of the same variety grows a little differently. Of course this could be due to environmental factors -- one spot gets more or less water or sun, perhaps there's an extra good pocket of soil that you can't see, who knows? But all things being equal, there's still another factor: Even seeds from the same variety have ever-so-slightly different genetics and characteristics.
Depending on your preferences, you may select for the best tasting, the most prolific, the most drought tolerant, or whatever is important to you. Over several generations (plant generations, that is) the subtle changes will accumulate, and your plants will become more and more locally adapted.
One of the reasons we work with small, independent seed growers like Redwood Seed, San Diego Seed, Living Seed, and Hudson Valley Seed is that they are all highly skilled plantspeople who select seed every year that adapts to the widest variety of conditions possible, given their locations. All of them (including all the seed we sell), along with most of the hundreds of small, local seed companies around the country, provide excellent seed to use as the starting point for your home seed-saving adventures.
First is this tomato volunteer that's growing, thriving actually, completely un-irrigated in the packed clay of a path. That's one tough tomato! Because it's quite a bit behind its irrigated cousins in the veggie beds, I haven't tasted the tomatoes yet. But if they pass the taste test, this one will be a keeper.
Another example are these two arugula plants just beginning to flower. They're the last two of the ten I planted in the spring. All ten were from the same seed packet, and yet these two bolted about a month after the other 8. The seeds and seedlings of that batch were all treated the same way, and they were grown together in the same spot. As far as I know all 10 plants had more or less the same growing conditions.
But two of them lasted a lot longer before flowering! That's a sign that their genetics tend more towards slow bolting. And so those are the two I'll use for seed saving.
One final note before the end of this series. If you plan to save seed long term to sell or trade, you must also consider population sizes. If you only ever grow and save seed from one zucchini plant a year (and honestly, one healthy zucchini plant is enough for most families!), over time the plants will become inbred and loose their genetic diversity and vigor.
You've probably heard about zoos and endangered animal conservation programs concerned with breeding population numbers. The same goes for plants. You can refer to this chart for the population numbers required to maintain a variety indefinitely. Those numbers are for commercial growers. Home gardeners can get away with a lot less. But still, it's a good idea to keep in mind, especially if you're interested in long-term food security.
"Just wanted to send some love for your newsletters! I read them all, which is a lot more than I can say for all of my other subscriptions. You do such a great job! Thanks for giving us an entertaining peek into your world." ~ Krista, April 2022
If you remember from Seed Saving Nerd Out (SSNO) Part 2, two categories of plants require isolation for your saved seed to breed true: Insect- and wind-pollinated open-pollinated crops. (It's a mouthful, I know. This chart helps organize the concepts.)
If you want to save pure seed from a wind- or insect-pollinated variety, you have two choices: Separate plants that could cross-breed by their specified isolation distances (almost impossible in urban and suburban areas) or pollinate it yourself, and then keep other pollen out.
If you don't yet know how to identify flowers about to open, spend a few days checking on your zucchini in the evening and then again in the morning to see how the flowers look in their various stages.
Identify female flowers by the mini-zucchinis at the base. Male flowers are on a plain stem.
This is a male flower, taped shut, at night. You can see the plain stem below the blossom.
This female flower has a mini-zucchini at the base. You don't have to go out and tape them shut in the dark (evening is fine), but it was pretty exciting rummaging around in the plants with all the night insects buzzing around my headlamp!
When you see the flowers in the morning, it's easy to tell why you taped them shut. They're bursting to open! They open early in the morning and pollinators will get in there before you. (I hand-pollinated and took these pictures at about 7am, and the pollinators were already busy on the open flowers.)
This makes a little pollen paintbrush for you!
Get that pollen all over the structures at the base of the female flower.
Now that you've pollinated your zucchini flower with pure zucchini pollen, you don't want any bees coming along with other squash pollen to contaminate your seeds. So either tape the flower shut again, or net the flower. I'm using one of those reusable net produce bags because the drawstring at the top makes it easy to close. But really anything that keeps the bugs out will work.
I've also got a pink bow that will stay on the zucchini all the way until harvest so I know which one is for seed saving. (I'll probably have to loosen and move the bow as it grows!)
Now we just wait and watch it grow until the skin is hard.
- Or -
"Just wanted to send some love for your newsletters! I read them all, which is a lot more than I can say for all of my other subscriptions. You do such a great job! Thanks for giving us an entertaining peek into your world." ~ Krista, April 2022
I'm all for experimenting. I love to root an avocado pit, or collect seeds from unknown varieties just to see what happens, BUT . . .
(Please feel free to use and share this graphic, but please credit Orta and provide a link back here to its original home. Thank you!)
Any plant whose flowers generally pollinate themselves before opening. Common examples in the veggie garden:
Any plant that requires wind to pollinate. Edible examples are:
These plants either require insects flying between flowers to set seed/fruit or are a combination of self-pollinating and insect-pollinated. For seed-saving purposes, you should assume that insects will cross-fertilize (creating impure seed) unless isolated. Some examples that are likely in your garden:
The next three categories refer to how the parent plant came to be. (Lots more detail in last week's post.)
These are plants that breed true from seed, meaning that seed saved from an open pollinated variety will reliably produce offspring extremely similar to their parents. If you save seed from an open-pollinated tomato, next year's crop will be the same as this year's.
This category includes all heirlooms grown from seed (though not grafted heirloom fruit trees -- see below). All seed packets will say if a variety is open pollinated or not, and a quick internet search for the variety name will also tell you.
Because we feel it's extremely important to be able to save seed, we only sell open-pollinated varieties.
Hybrids are like mules: A cross between 2 different parents (a donkey and a horse, in the case of the mule) creates desirable offspring that either can't reproduce, or reproduces poorly. "Hybrid vigor" is a real phenomenon, and one of the reasons that so many popular veggies are hybrids. But saving seed from hybrids is always disappointing because next year's crop will be nothing like this year's.
Seed packets will always be labeled to let you know if seed is hybrid or not, and if you know the variety name, it's easy to look up.
There is nothing dangerous or controversial about hybrids, except that you have to buy new seed every year, and are dependent on the seed company.
All fruit trees are clones, where any named variety is genetically identical to all other trees with the same name. While most require insects to pollinate them and produce fruit, the seeds that result will give you quite different fruit from the parents. It's best not to save seed from grafted trees.
The cannabis industry also relies heavily on named clones. Most dispensaries have a plant section, where all the plants were grown as clones from cuttings from a mother plant rather than seed. And because cannabis plants are either male or female, and only the females produce the crop of flowers, all the cloned seedlings are female too, and won't produce seed unless grown alongside a male plant. (I'm not a cannabis grower, btw, but I find the botany fascinating.)
Many popular herbs are also generally grown as clones from cuttings, lavender and peppermint being the most common. Both will produce seed, and the offspring can be quite lovely, but they will be different from their parents. I have lots of self-seeded lavender in my garden, and I quite like how each one is different, but that might not be what you're after. Again, a quick internet search will tell you if your variety is a clone, or grown from seed. If in doubt, you can always regenerate your herbs from cuttings.
"Just wanted to send some love for your newsletters! I read them all, which is a lot more than I can say for all of my other subscriptions. You do such a great job! Thanks for giving us an entertaining peek into your world." ~ Krista, April 2022
This is part 1 of a series (click here for the whole series) that goes deeper than usual into the botany behind seeds to help you become a better seed saver.
Mechanically speaking, it’s not at all hard to save seeds. In most cases, you simply pick them, dry them and store them. BUT (and this is a big but) in order to get plants with the characteristics you expect from your saved seeds, you have to do some research and planning before you get to the stage of picking, drying and storing.
The first step is to understand plant reproduction. While animals can really only reproduce one way (genetic material from one male and one female of the species combine to form an embryo), plants have 2 main methods, plus several variations within each method.
One of the coolest things about plants is that you can grow new, identical plants from pieces of a parent plant. It’s as if you could clone yourself by cutting off your finger and letting it grow into a new you. Weird, right?
Most fruit is grown vegetatively. All Granny Smith apple trees are genetically identical to each other, and to the original tree that Maria Ann Smith discovered and propagated in Australia in 1868. Twigs are cut from mature trees, grafted (fused) onto roots from a different variety chosen for the health of the roots, and grown into mature trees which then, in turn, have twigs cut from them to be turned into new trees. The only way to get a Granny Smith apple tree is to use a twig from the line that continues unbroken from the original.
If you save and plant seeds from a Granny Smith apple (or any other named fruit variety from apples to pears to avocados to lemons) you will get a tree, but the fruit will not be the same as the parent. It might be good, but it probably won’t be. Fruit tree breeders grow hundreds of new crosses to find just one that meets their standards.
It’s a fun project to root an avocado pit or start seeds from a supermarket apple, but if you want good fruit in your garden, you shouldn't start seeds. Buy a tree instead. (See here for my post on ordering bare root trees.)
Just like with animals, for plants to create a new generation that is genetically similar, but not identical to parents, they reproduce sexually. (Sex in plants just means the combination of male + female genetic material.) Pollen (the male genetic material) combines with an ovule (the female genetic material) to produce an embryo that is encased in a seed.
Every seed is like you: sharing traits from, but not exactly the same as, your parents.
But plants can do way more with sexual reproduction than animals. They can create seeds with other members of their own species (like animals); they can self-pollinate, where pollen fertilizes the ovule of the same flower, often before it opens; and they are far more likely than animals to cross with other related species.
All this flexibility in reproduction creates lots of genetic diversity, which is great for plants adapting to new environments, or for those growing alone without another member of the species nearby, but can be vexing for the gardener saving seeds.
Don't save seed from unstable F1 hybrids!
F1 hybrids are commercially available seeds created by intentionally crossing two different varieties to create offspring with desirable characteristics, particularly for commercial growers. Lots of familiar varieties are F1 hybrids: Sun Gold, Early Girl, Sweet 100, to name just a few common F1 tomatoes.
Growing F1’s at home can give great results because the varieties are predictable and vigorous. Though because they're most often bred for commercial viability, they're primarily selected for traits that home gardeners don't need -- things like ripening well in a truck on the way to the supermarket, or having all the fruit ripen at once for bulk harvesting.
The biggest problem for home gardeners, however, comes with seed saving. In F1 hybrids, the combined genetic material from the parent plants goes haywire in the second generation. That’s why we call F1 hybrids unstable, because after the first generation, the offspring are really unpredictable.
The solution to this problem is to know what your varieties are. Do not save seed from hybrids.
Open-pollinated varieties are the alternative to F1’s. They have been stabilized by plant breeders over many generations so that the seed you save from them will produce offspring that are very similar to their parents. That’s what plant people mean when they say that a variety “breeds true.”
If you know the name of a variety you’d like to save seed from, it’s easy to look up whether or not it’s open-pollinated. If you don’t know the name, it’s probably best not to save seed because it could be a hybrid.
(I should mention that hybrids are completely different than GMO’s. Hybrids are created with traditional breeding methods and are not at all controversial, except perhaps because they can be expensive to buy year after year. GMO’s are created in a lab with genetic engineering and are the source of lots of controversy. Hybrids can be grown organically. GMO’s cannot.)
If a species is self-pollinating, accidental cross-breeding is rare, and not something home growers need to worry about.
Some common self-pollinating veggies:
For everything else, read on . . .
If a flower doesn't pollinate itself, it relies on wind or insects to carry pollen from the male part of the flower to the female part, or in some cases from male flowers to female flowers. As the insects fly and the wind blows around, pollen can get mixed up and spread around a pretty large area.
If two varieties of the same species, like zucchini and crookneck squash, are planted near one another, insects will carry pollen between the two, and this results in cross-breeding, a.k.a. a hybrid. The problem, however, is that each seed you save from a zucchini that’s been pollinated from a crookneck will have a random collection of genes from each, like a bunch of siblings from the same parents. You might get crookneck-shaped zucchini, or half-yellow, half-green squashes, etc. And because plant genomes are way bigger than animal ones, cross-bred plants can give you lots of really weird combos, some of them great, but most of them not so tasty.
The first solution to this problem is to plant different varieties of the same species at their specified isolation distances (once you know what to look for, there are lots of charts online – it’s different for every species). For those of us in urban or suburban areas, this isn’t practical because you really never know what your neighbors are growing just over the fence.
The second solution is to pollinate the flowers by hand, and then block insects from entering them until fruit starts to form. I'll go into lots more detail about that in the next post!
Click here to see part 2 for a handy graphic to help you decide which plants to save seed from!
"Just wanted to send some love for your newsletters! I read them all, which is a lot more than I can say for all of my other subscriptions. You do such a great job! Thanks for giving us an entertaining peek into your world." ~ Krista, April 2022
This is the story of what I did wrong, and what I'm doing to fix it. Hopefully my failures can help you grow better tomatoes!
I've been reading for years that tomatoes need really strong supports. But until this season, my tomatoes have never gotten big and vigorous enough to need anything more than the cone-shaped tomato cages you get from the hardware store.
This failure of support is actually related to two things I got right this year for the first time: Really healthy transplants, and well amended soil with good drainage.
After I started Orta it was easy to get my tomatoes germinated from seed in our self-watering pots, but once they outgrew their seed pots, I didn't get their care quite right. Because they're such fast growers, tomatoes need to be potted up to bigger containers fairly quickly. If they get root-bound in their Orta pots, even if they're getting enough water and liquid feeds (from above, not in the reservoir!) they'll slow their growth, and won't ever be as vigorous as they would have been. This year I was very careful to pot the seedlings up early, and into a rich potting soil. The difference in the health of my transplants was remarkable.
The other thing we did right was to dig deep beds, put in drainage channels, and backfill them with native soil mixed with amendments, about 2 feet deep. You can see our whole veggie bed building adventure here, and here.
Given that I'd never gotten those elements right before, I had no idea what abundant growth these healthy plants would give me! I thought a steel rose arch would be plenty of support. For the amount of plant material out there now, I think a set of monkey bars might be more appropriate if I were to start over.
But working with what I have, I used a big rope to secure the rose arch to a nearby tree to keep it from toppling over, and then untangled and secured the individual vines to the newly sturdy(ish) arch.
This is related to the lack of support described above. Tomatoes are sensitive to excess moisture and cold. Because we've had such a cool, foggy summer, the plants were getting really damp, and weren't able to dry out during the day because of the dense growth.
After I untangled and supported the vines, I went through the plants and pruned off the densest undergrowth to allow air to circulate. In the process I discovered lots of yellowing and dead leaves buried deep in the masses of vines. I'm hoping that the extra air circulation will help curb whatever fungus or disease was causing the yellowing.
After propping up the tomato vines, their leaves wilted at the tips. I thought it was maybe because the plants had to work harder to raise water now that the plants were a few feet higher than they had been. So I gave them a good soak. Which was clearly not the best thing, because some of the fruit have started to crack. This happens when they get too much water suddenly, after a long period without. Though the wilting vines did perk up, so maybe it wasn't all bad . . .
I learned this one on Gardener's World last week: A comfrey mulch for tomatoes. Comfrey is a classic garden helper plant because it draws nutrients from deep in the soil and concentrates them in its leaves. It's often soaked in water to make a fertilizer. But a much easier solution is to chop up comfrey leaves and mulch around the base of tomatoes, leaving earthworms and other soil life to work the nutrients into the soil.
If you don't have comfrey, and you'd like to feed your tomatoes, look for an organic fertilizer high in potash (potassium, or K in the NPK of fertilizer ratios) like a standard tomato feed. Liquid seaweed is also great. A fertilizer too high in nitrogen at this time of year will encourage lots of leafy green growth, but not much fruit.
How are your tomatoes this year?
]]>Deadheading is the single most important garden job to keep flowers blooming for as long as possible. And it's really quite easy. Snip off all of a plant's spent flower stalks just above the next set of leaves. Monty Don recommends you do it every day, but for most of us, a couple times a week should be plenty.
To understand why deadheading works, you have to think like a plant. From the plant's perspective, the point of flowering is to attract insects that will pollinate the flowers to create seeds and reproduce. When a plant makes flowers, it's intending to make seeds. Once the flower is pollinated and begins to fade, the plant will put all its energy into those developing seeds, and stop producing new flowers.
If you cut off the faded flowers, the plant continues to put its energy into flower production, hoping to get pollinated and create seeds. The less time a plant spends with pollinated flowers, (i.e. the more frequently you deadhead) the more flowers you'll get.
This same principle applies to harvesting vegetables too. For many of our homegrown crops (zucchini, tomatoes, green beans), we eat the fruit and seeds. Because fruit follows flowers, we definitely don't want to deadhead the flowers!
(Anecdotal asides: I met someone who picked all the flowers off her tomato plants because she thought they were getting in the way of growing tomatoes. You can imagine she was puzzled by the lack of tomatoes. Another time, I helped a colleague of mine plant tomatoes in his yard. One day, he told me he noticed that the tomatoes seemed to form right where the flowers had been, and wasn't that fascinating? I was A, surprised that he could get to 55 years old without knowing that and B, impressed that he figured it out, just by keeping an eye on his first ever tomato plants. Goes to show that, as I often say, much of gardening is in observation.)
Anyway, we eat those fruits and seeds at an immature stage. The plant might like to continue putting energy into developing seeds, but because we pick and eat them, the plant produces more. So for all the summer fruiting veggies, stay on top of harvesting them to keep the plant producing over a longer season.
]]>Scroll down for 3 gardening ideas for you to reduce your own plastic footprint.
First, the archives:
Our original packaging for fulfilling rewards from our Kickstarter: Padded paper, kraft paper tape, pretty stickers, and strict quality control enforced by Catson. | The first Orta packaging station and warehouse, in my living room, with Mom wrapping pots. |
Packaging gets more serious as we near the end of Kickstarter fulfillment, operating out of Orta's first commercial space. Note the paper tape, and tons of cardboard all around. (The labor is still friends and family though! This is my sister and three good friends. Can you spot my friends' baby in the corner?) |
This is the retail packaging for our 12-Pack: A cardboard tray, padded with corrugated paper, and wrapped in translucent vellum paper, all compostable and recyclable. | And this is how we ship it, nestled into a box lined with honeycomb, and padded with kraft crinkle paper, sealed with kraft paper tape. |
We're always trying to figure out how to do a better job with packaging, to use less material, and ship without plastic. Our most recent innovations are sourcing potting soils and ingredients made from compressed coconut coir. Because it's dry, it's easy to ship in a plain kraft paper bag.
And we're excited about the sunscreen we found that comes in a cardboard tube. As gardeners, we go through a lot of sunscreen, and all those plastic tubes were really piling up.
Lettuce and salad greens are one of the easiest and most compact vegetables you can grow, and they can tolerate less than full sun. I've got about 10 square feet dedicated to salad greens, and it's been more than plenty. We give lettuce away regularly because we can't keep up with it!
Because lettuce tends to come in a plastic bag or clamshell from the store, growing your own cuts out all that plastic. And homegrown also tastes WAY better than the pre-bagged stuff.
If you depend on the nursery for all your starts, you end up with a plastic pot for every plant you buy. And depending on the recycling services where you live, those pots often go straight to landfill.
We won a grant from StopWaste because our pots make it much easier to successfully start seeds and reduce the waste from nursery pots. But you don't need to buy anything to start seeds, if you're diligent about watering. We have a detailed how-to guide here.
I made a video showing how to make your own potting soil using coconut coir bricks. (You can get the bricks from us, or at most garden centers.).
You can also usually get bulk potting soil from a landscape supply company, the sorts of places that sell truckloads of mulch and gravel. You can bring your own bags and shovels and load materials yourself, or get materials delivered by the yard to your driveway, if you can use a whole yard of potting soil!
I know that for me personally, using less plastic makes me feel good. But as Mary Annaise Heglar wrote so well in this essay, it's important not to get caught up in shame for your environmental "sins."
It shouldn't be each individual's responsibility to scour the internet to find the one brand of sunscreen in a compostable package. You should be able get your usual groceries and supplies without having to choose between tons of plastic packaging or tons of mental energy (and often extra expense) to find the plastic-free alternative.
We need to pressure the companies responsible for the plastic pollution to stop it before it starts. And for those of us in positions to change how business operates, it's our responsibility to make clean options easy and normal.
When we started down this path in 2012, we were outliers in our insistence on zero-waste. But it gives me great hope that awareness of plastic pollution is going mainstream, and that though the waste continues to grow, the emergence of alternatives is growing even faster.
]]>This post will help you figure out for yourself what to sow now for your fall garden: veggies, herbs and perennial flowers. It does not have, I’m afraid, another one of those lists of “what to plant this month.” A simple search will give you many such lists that say more or less the same thing, and they're a good place to start. I can’t add much to the genre, but being a first principles sort of gal, I can help you understand some of the reasons behind planting and timing so you can choose what works best for you.
The main limitation of the “what to plant now” lists is that everyone’s local climate is different, and our planet’s overall climate is changing. What works in New York doesn’t work in California, and what worked in 1995 might not work now. The first step is to pay attention to your climate, and to how it's changing.
Even without climate change, every year is different, and it can be a good idea to make multiple sowings a few weeks apart, bracketing your “ideal” planting date, because you never know when you’ll get an unexpected heat wave or frost. A market gardener I know from Marrakesh, Morocco told me he sows all his vegetable varieties every 2 weeks, year-round because his weather is so unpredictable. That way at least some of the crops make it.
For most of us, the climate isn’t that extreme, but the windows within which to plant various plants are really quite wide.
If you take just one thing from this post, I hope it’s confidence to try sowing seeds at times other than the “perfect” ones. You really never know what the weather holds.
Most seed packs will tell you the number of days to maturity, or harvest. Sometimes they mean days from transplant, and sometimes from seed, which can be confusing, so read carefully. Those numbers are also calculated under ideal conditions, which of course doesn't apply if your conditions aren't ideal.
Once, as a beginner gardener, I planted carrot seeds in December. Seeing the “60 days to maturity” on the packet, I thought I’d get carrots in February. Turns out, carrots (like most plants) barely grow in mid-winter, and I got my harvest somewhere around May. Take the days to maturity more as a general guide than what will actually happen.
That caveat aside, the approximate time to maturity is helpful because you can look ahead to when you’d like your harvest, and work backwards. For example, if you want brussels sprouts for Thanksgiving, and they take 110 days from seed, you’d plant your seeds on August 8th.
But because climate is variable, and things happen, if you REALLY want brussels sprouts for Thanksgiving, I’d plant a batch on July 25th, August 8th, and August 22nd.
If, on the other hand, you don’t really care when you get your brussels sprouts, but you love them, and want to make sure you get lots, you could sow every 2 weeks from June through October, and see what happens.
So, not a plant list, per se, but some categories that will help you think about what to plant now.
All members of this family, from broccoli to kale and arugula to bok choi grow best in cooler weather, which for most climates means fall and spring. The conventional wisdom is that they prefer a warm start and a cool finish, making them the classic fall crop. The longer maturing varieties, like broccoli and brussels sprouts should be started sooner, and the faster ones like arugula should be started later.
Pretty much any leaf you like to eat comes out better grown in cooler weather. Even those that are heat tolerant (like collards and some lettuces) are happier when it’s cooler.
With the exception of basil (which really needs heat to thrive), most common herbs do well in fall: cilantro, parsley, dill, chives, scallions (aka bunching onions).
In most zones, fall is the best time to plant perennials. Their roots can grow and establish over the winter and be ready for vigorous top growth and profusions of flowers next summer.
If you’re thinking of putting in some perennials in October, now is a great time to plant the seeds and save yourself some serious $$. To make a full-looking display, you might want 10 plants each of 5 varieties, which could easily cost $200 - $300. In comparison, seeds are really inexpensive!
Or to be extra thrifty, while also researching which varieties will work at your house, you could have a walk around the neighborhood and collect seeds to take home and plant. Mind you, I’m not suggesting you wander through neighbors’ gardens stealing seeds. But once your eyes are open, you’ll see seed heads, brown and forlorn, dangling over the sidewalk and in other public spaces, everywhere you look.
Last year I saved seeds from a sunflower growing in the cracks in the pavement, and some rudbeckias barely hanging on at the edge of a road. Those tough survivors were strong and well-adapted, and their seeds have grown into vigorous plants.
Now is also a great time to take cuttings of perennials that you’d like to multiply. If you have one lavender you like, but you want 10, take cuttings now to have baby plants ready to plant out in October. Here’s a post I did on using Orta pots for cuttings. (The same method applies for regular pots. You just have to water more.)
What are you planting now? And what are you planning for fall?
]]>Have you ever had the experience where giving a name to something clarifies and legitimizes fuzzy mental notions? Bee Watching has done that for me and I’m eternally grateful to Jeannie Pham for introducing me to the concept.
Bee watching is really nothing more than spending some time in your garden on a summer day watching the bees. Not daydreaming or planning your lunch, but actually watching the bees.
A couple years ago I had the pleasure of touring Jeannie’s garden, which she describes as a haven for pollinators, a wildlife friendly patch surrounded by city. As part of her gardening routine, she described how once she’s finished the heavier garden jobs, she likes to put on her wide-brimmed hat and squat down to bee level and watch them buzz around in the heat of the day.
When I heard “bee watching” something clicked for me. I’ve always liked to pause and watch insects, but had never put a formal mental frame around it. And without a frame, watching insects was neither getting a job done nor fully relaxing in the shade, and so didn’t count towards “what one does in the garden.” But by naming it, mental permission was granted, and I’ve been immersed in a wonderful new world ever since, one that you can probably see yourself in your own garden or a nearby park, this very afternoon.
Easier than bird watching (because you don’t have to go very far), but providing the same sense of discovery, bee watching reveals a whole world parallel to and interconnected with our human one. It can literally change how you see the world and the nature outside your door.
Here’s how to do it. Bee watching isn’t complicated. Wait until the sun is out and the day is warm (bees are more active mid-day), find a patch of flowers and get comfortable. Your arrival might frighten some bees, but once you’re still, the insects will return. And then just watch them. You may be surprised (I know I was) to notice lots more types of bees than just honey bees and bumble bees. There are some that are about the same size as honey bees, but are a completely different color, and are way fuzzier. And there are the teeny sweat bees, named because they’re fond of landing on people to lick their sweat. (That’s never happened to me.) In California alone there are over 1,500 different species of bee!
Though you don’t have to be an entomologist to enjoy watching the insects in your garden, I’ve found this guide from the Xerces society to be extremely helpful. It’s a citizen science brochure to be used in conjunction with expert training in a formal program to monitor bees in California. But even without the protocols and the training, the information (and especially the pictures on pages 12 – 31) is an invaluable overview of how to distinguish bees from wasps and flies and from one another.
The features scientists use to distinguish bees are size, color, stripes, hair (how much and where it is), pollen carrying (where, what type, and how much), antennae, and flying pattern. Even just keeping that list in mind as you watch helps you see more.
The other thing that you notice, of course, as soon as you’re watching bees, is the butterflies. Watching carefully, you’ll see their long tongues uncoil into a flower, and you’ll see the wings’ intricate patterns when they rest. I’ve been watching the cabbage white butterflies lay eggs on the broccoli and kale seedlings I have on the patio where we’ve been eating on warm days. All through lunch, they come and go, landing on top of the leaves and wrapping their behinds around underneath to deposit an egg.
I go around once a day and take the eggs off the leaves. And I feel bad doing it, after having seen these butterflies work so diligently to lay those eggs. But I’d like my seedlings to become broccoli someday! Several were eaten almost to the ground before I figured out it was the caterpillars. And with cabbage whites outnumbering all the other butterflies in our garden, I don’t think their population is suffering.
The natural result of even a little bit of bee watching is to want to plant more flowers, to have more bees to watch. My 5-year-old has been enjoying our daily session with the bugs, and is excited now to plant for pollinators. Once curiosity is sparked, asking the internet “What should I plant to attract bees and butterflies?” is the easy part.
The top 4 plants we’ve noticed for attracting bees and butterflies in our garden are calendula, scabiosa, borage, and milkweed (ours isn’t in flower yet, but it’s the only plant where a monarch will lay its eggs, and we’re always checking for caterpillars). Fun fact: Borage is such a great bee plant because it refills its nectar once every 2 minutes, as compared to once a day for many flowers.
I hope this post helps you give yourself permission to spend half an hour this weekend doing nothing but watching the bees.
(By the way, all these images are from the last couple days in my garden. It’s been a fun challenge to try to catch these fast-moving creatures with a camera. The majority of the pictures came out blurry, but by chance a few came out well!)
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The one pictured above is mizuna, one of my favorite salad greens. It's a mild mustard green that is super easy to grow and makes really tasty salads. This is what it looks like before it sets seed:
What I love about this plant is that you can harvest the whole plant down to the base, and it will regrow several times, giving you many salads per plant. Here in Northern California it grows year round, and keeping some growing means always having something green to eat.
Before saving seed, however, it's important to know two specific things about your plants:
Seeds saved from open-pollinated plants will produce new plants that are the same variety as their parents. For example, if you plant San Marzano tomatoes this year, save seeds from one of the tomatoes, and plant them next year, those plants will give you San Marzanos because San Marzanos are open-pollinated.
All heirloom varieties are open pollinated, though there are many open pollinated varieties that are not heirlooms. Heirloom is a loose classification, generally meaning that a variety has a long history that can be traced, whereas open-pollinated is a technical term for plants that produce seed that can be saved.
Hybrids are best explained through the example of the mule. Two different species are alike enough (the horse and the donkey) that they can mate, but their offspring is sterile (the mule). Plants are a bit more complicated, but it's the same idea. Hybrid seeds (often called F1 hybrids) are created by traditional breeding methods, simply crossing one variety with another, to produce a new one that has desirable characteristics. Sun Gold tomatoes are an example, as are Early Girls. Often seeds from hybrids are not sterile (they will produce a plant), but the plants they produce are invariably unlike their parents. It's not worth saving seeds from hybrids.
GMO (genetically modified organism) seeds are a whole different category, where desirable characteristics are implanted into seeds using genetic technology in a laboratory. Home gardeners don't have to worry about these seeds because they're primarily for commercial farms. The only exception is for home gardeners in agricultural areas where there is a risk of cross-pollination from GMO crops planted nearby.
Both open-pollinated and hybrid seeds can be grown organically. GMO's cannot.
Some plants are what you might call promiscuous. They cross-breed freely and hybridize all on their own. The zucchini / summer squash family is a good example. If you plant a zucchini next to a yellow crookneck squash and then save seeds from one or the other, the squashes you get next season will be wildly different. Each saved seed could produce a completely different fruit, some delicious, some not so much. Unless you're ready to either isolate the plants by distance (generally 1/2 a mile), or hand-pollinate and protect fruits from which to harvest seed, don't save seed from veggies that cross breed easily. Here is a nice list of common veggies showing which ones will cross-breed.
Other plants, like tomatoes, do not cross breed easily, and you can confidently save seed from them without much effort.
In the case of these mizuna plants I'm growing out for seed, they will cross with other members of brassica rapa, including bok choi, turnips and mustard. Because I don't have any of those going to seed right now, I can safely save the mizuna seeds.
Arugula is very much like mizuna, but is its own species, and you don't have to worry about it crossing. If you have arugula plants that have decided they're over the heat and are starting to flower, you can leave them, and collect the seed pods when they're mature.
Here's an excellent, detailed article about saving seed from all the brassicas, written by one of my favorite seed growers, Kalan from Redwood Seeds.
Anyway, back to saving seeds from mizuna and arugula. The process is very simple. Keep an eye on the flowers, and watch as they develop into seed pods over a couple weeks. When the light hits just right, you can even see the seeds forming inside the pods.
Once the pods begin to mature and turn brown, harvest the whole pod into a paper bag. As they dry, the pods can burst open, scattering the seed (especially arugula).
For your lettuces that may also be going to seed right now, the process is similar, except that instead of forming seed pods, lettuce will make fluffy seed heads that look like a dandelion as it's opening. Once the seeds come away easily into your hand, they're ready to harvest. Just snip off the seed heads and put them into a paper bag.
As with all seed-saving, store your seeds in paper bags or envelopes in a cool, dry, place. And don't forget to label them as soon as you harvest!
]]>Gardening teaches you to plan ahead and to be patient, two virtues I'm not naturally blessed with. If you want homegrown tomatoes in August, you have to plant out your starts in May. Or better yet, sow your seeds in February. When planning ahead for groceries to last 2 weeks proves a challenge, as the pandemic has shown us all, it's no wonder vegetable planning 6 months out can feel mind boggling.
Fruit trees are a whole 'nother level of planning and patience. If you want to eat homegrown fruit in the summer of 2024, now is the time to begin. (Think of this as a post from your future self, or perhaps your children, reminding you to plan now to enjoy fruit then!)
Summer is the time to taste fruit, plan your backyard orchard, and order bare root trees to arrive next winter.
There's no point planting a tree and waiting years to eat fruit you don't like. Taste now to plant your favorites! We're well into stone fruit season, and backyard trees near you are probably bearing fruit. If you taste something good, make a note. Ask around to see if neighbors have fruit trees, and if social distance allows, perhaps you can visit and taste, and see how the tree looks when mature. Farmer's markets will also likely have lots of varieties you can taste, and you can ask about the trees.
The best selection and price for fruit trees comes when you buy bare root trees. Grown in the field, bare root trees are lifted from the soil when they're dormant (January - March usually), wrapped and shipped quickly, either direct to you, or to a nursery that cares for them until you can pick them up.
Even though bare root trees ship in the winter, they go on sale in the summer, and stock often sells out well before shipping time. If you go to the nursery in February to choose a tree, you're likely to find the left-overs, or a limited selection of much more expensive trees growing in pots. If you want a specific variety for a good price, ordering ahead is a good idea.
To secure your best selection, now is the time to do your homework. I've been deep into fruit tree internet rabbit holes these last few weeks as I think about trees for our garden. The best resource I've found so far is Dave Wilson Nursery, with tons of articles and videos on growing fruit at home, especially in small spaces.
I've found local master gardener and university extension resources helpful too, especially in discussions of chill hours. Chill hours are the average number of hours per year that the temperature drops below 45F, and they vary more than you would think, even in geographically close areas. Many fruit trees require chill in order to produce fruit, and different varieties need different amounts. Before ordering your trees, your local chill hours is a number you definitely need to find. Your local nursery can help too.
The other issue that commonly causes problems for fruit trees is waterlogged soil. If you have heavy clay soil that doesn't drain well, you'll have to choose from a more limited selection of trees that are bred to tolerate soggy roots.
I know that amidst all our current uncertainty, thinking about tree planting 6 months from now, for fruit 4 years from now, seems a bit beside the point. But to me, tree planting is fundamentally an act of hope and nurture, two things we could all use, regardless of the harvest. If you expand your mental math past your personal harvests to include stewardship of the land for future generations, the effort and money required to order and plant a $40 bare root tree seem like like an excellent investment.
If you don't have land to steward, you can still order unusual bare root trees to grow in pots outdoors. Or you can follow YouTube gardener John Kohler's example and impulse-buy some $9 bare root dwarf apricot trees from Home Depot to plant in your own containers. (I'd do my chill hours homework first to make sure you get fruit.) There are even some types you can grow in your living room.
In case you're wondering what I'm thinking about planting, here are my ideas so far: Smyrna Quince, Seckel Pear, White Winter Pearmain Apple, Sundowner Apple, Conradia Fig, and / or some type of pluot / aprium.
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As a thank you to my brother-in-law who saved my bacon this week, I put together a little care package of seeds that are appropriate to start right now. We're nearing the end of the main season to put in our summer veggie gardens, but that doesn't mean seed starting season is over. Far from it!
I'll give you a list of what I sent him, plus some other ideas for what to start now, but first, a tribute to the power of a well-timed technical support phone call. (Scroll down to skip the story and go straight to the seeds!)
These last couple weeks, I've been struggling to update the computer system that allows us to track how many pots we make, and what our success rate is. I couldn't open the program on the computer I'm using now that I'm working from home. I spent days shopping for alternatives. I had no idea there were quite so many programs promising to "streamline workflows," "promote collaboration," "integrate tools," and "get in the driver's seat" of my business. Literally dozens. But after an exhaustive search (including perhaps some tears of frustration), I found that none of them had the basic functions of our current system, mainly the ability to make it easy for someone making pottery, with clay on their hands, to enter data into a tablet quickly.
So I went back to trying to get the old software onto the new computer, and it's like this: Is it version 8 JDK? Or JRE-FX? And what if it doesn't have a DMG package? Just do a manual install (whatever that is?) and update my OSX PATH variable, but they've changed ~/.zshrc and .bash recently, and so it's all a mess, even for people who understand what I just wrote (which I still don't, really, but reading those links now makes me chuckle rather than cry).
So, my brother-in-law the computer scientist came to the rescue. After kids in both houses were in bed, we talked for about an hour and he sorted it out. And I learned how to open that scary terminal window in my computer and type "./mementodb.sh" to log into the mainframe. Actually, it just opens a desktop program that connects to the machines at work, but it makes me feel like Matthew Broderick in War Games. Because, check it out:
And because he's the main gardener at their house, as well as running family IT support, I'm sending him a bunch of my favorite seeds. Their main crop is already in (tomatoes, corn, collards, herbs), but they've got some space left, and they don't have any salad greens yet. Here's what I'm sending:
Those are all the favorites I sent off to my sister and brother-in-law, but here are some other ideas for seeds to start right now:
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I’ve come home reminded of a concept from science fiction writer Bruce Sterling. He wrote that there is no such thing as utopia or oblivion, which tend to be the standard endings to sci-fi stories. Instead, he talks about “ublobia” where things improve a little bit, inching toward the better world we all hope for, or “otivon” where the world steadily gets worse, but like the frog in the hot water, we don’t really notice until we wake up and things are bleak. Sterling is also famous for saying “the future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed.” Ublobia and otivon were both very much in evidence this morning, and also unevenly distributed.
At the dump, amid the sea of masked men (I was literally the only woman there), laden pick-up trucks, and the enormous mountains of garbage being bulldozed, you come face to face with the sheer volume of waste we create. It’s humbling and smelly. The pressure treated wood is sequestered in its own special dumpster, separated from general construction debris because it’s so toxic. (If you read the fine print on pressure treated wood, you learn that not only can it not be composted, you shouldn’t use it where children might play and touch it. Yikes!)
On the other hand, it was a harmonious multi-racial mix of men, full of friendly, professional camaraderie, carefully dividing the refuse stream into categories in order to do the least harm. The pile of compostables was as big as the pure garbage, and toxics like pressure treated wood and electronics had their separate areas. Signs throughout reinforced zero-waste goals and processes. Though being there felt viscerally apocalyptic, looking more deeply made me feel optimistic about our relationship to waste and to each other.
The drive to and from the dump passed through areas affected by looting. And again it was an uneven distribution of ublobia and otivon. Many businesses were boarded up, but everything was peaceful, there was no visible destruction, and many of the plywood window covers were painted with positive messages and images.
My 5-year-old and her friend have been sending each other letters during their Covid-19 isolation. This week, they quoted the movie Frozen 2 to each other, in a way that seems very wise. (From the mouths of babes, who all seem to be Frozen superfans . . .) My daughter wrote to her friend “this will all make sense when we are older.” And her friend replied “and I’ll do the next right thing.” The events we’re living through now probably will make more sense when we are older, and the only thing any of us can do is the next right thing.
Socially and politically, I am no authority on the next right thing. I am listening and learning. But I can talk about gardens, which have been a big help to many of us over the last few months.
Regardless of whatever else happens, summer is coming, and plants will need water. And our washing machine produces lots of it that the plants will love. That’s why we’re building a greywater system.
We’re part-way through, and I’ll post details in a later post. But the basic elements are: a pipe to divert water from the laundry out the window, a used wine barrel, and a pump with a hose to distribute water to the garden uphill from the house. It’s been important for me to have something physical to do, that I know will make a positive, albeit admittedly quite small, difference. (And it's been very interesting for a 5-year-old, especially the part where the washing machine water starts gushing out the pipe.)
I can also say with authority that I will never put pressure treated wood into a garden. The task of removing the rotted boards, and trying to dispose of them has been brutal. They’re natural enough to decay (and not really last very long in the garden), but chemically treated enough to be too toxic to safely compost. The worst of both worlds.
After many weeks of trying to get rid of things from the old garden structures that neither compost nor recycle, we're trying hard to only bring in new things whose end of life will be more graceful. You can see the next chapter of that story in the lower left of the picture above. It's one of the ways in which Texas is way ahead of California: using stock tanks as pools. (Apparently there's a shortage in Houston for that reason.)
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If your apples look like this, you have too many crowded together When they grow this way, the fruit competes for the tree's limited resources and will be of lower quality at harvest time. You should aim for just 2-3 apples per spur to give them space to mature into big, tasty fruit.
Here's another example of a crowded spur, and below, what it looks like after thinning:
There's nothing complicated about thinning apples. Just go around the tree and for each bunch that has more than 2-3 fruits, pick the extras to leave space for the remaining apples to mature. When choosing which to pick and which to leave, I tend to remove the smaller ones and the most crowded.
I know it can seem like a waste to send so much future fruit to the compost bin, but you will end up with more, and better, fruit in a couple months. Crowded apples trees will begin to drop the excess fruit anyway, after having used precious resources trying to ripen too heavy a crop. It's better to remove them now while they're still quite small. And they'll make a great addition of nitrogen to your compost pile, helping it heat up and creating a rich amendment to feed your soil. In nature and gardening, nothing really goes to waste.
]]>This may seem like strange timing, with much of North America under flood watches at the moment, but now is a pretty good time to plan ahead for your summer irrigation. As you put in your summer veggies, and before your beds and flower borders are crammed with plants, is the easiest time to figure out your irrigation needs.
Every garden is different, and even different spots within the same garden have different watering needs. Your watering plan will be as unique as your garden! I'm going to go through all the major irrigation methods to help you figure out what will work best for you.
Please note that all of my direct experience of watering comes from gardening in the wet winter, dry summer Meddeterranian climate of Northern California.
Hand watering is the most flexible method, and requires the least planning and extra gear. It's also the most time consuming and prone to mishaps. Over the years, I've heard many gardeners say that expert gardeners hand-water. Or I've have heard passionate gardeners humble brag about "only" hand watering. I'm not sure where this myth comes from, but it's pervasive. My best guess is that there is a strong correlation between people who have enough time to hand-water and those who have been gardening many years, i.e. retired people. For the rest of us, hand-watering can work, but it's a challenge to keep it up all summer.
Here are some tips on hand-watering:
Water more volume than you think, and less frequently. Most plants do well with deep watering, meaning that the water penetrates deep under the soil. This encourages plants to send their roots deep where they stay cooler and more consistently moist. Deeper rooted plants are more resilient in periods of drought and heat.
To water larger plants (and tomatoes from the time they're small) deeply, keep your sprayer trained gently on one plant for about a half a minute to a minute. Then don't return to that same plant for a week or so. Of course in hot, dry weather, you'll have to water more often, and in cool, wet weather, less often. A good test to see if it's time to water more established plants is to dig a few inches into the soil to see how it feels. If it's cool and damp, wait. If it's dry, it's time to water.
For younger seedlings and leafy, shallow-rooted veggie crops like lettuce, you'll need to water daily, sometimes twice daily in warm weather, especially if there is wind. For cooler weather, every 2-3 days is probably ok. The sure sign that you're not watering enough is if the leaves of your plants are drooping in the heat of the day and the soil is dry. Drooping can also be a sign of over-watering, but the soil will be wet around the roots, and the drooping plants won't perk up as the sun goes down.
A rule of thumb for when to stop watering is when the shiny surface on the soil dissipates about 10 seconds after you turn the hose off.
Or as Stefani Bittner from Homestead Design Collective once told me, "Put on a podcast, and water until it's done." (BTW, her company won't build a garden unless the homeowners install irrigation first because most hand-watering gardeners under-water their veggies and the harvests suffer.)
Water early in the morning, or in the evening to get the most out of your water. Mid-day watering leads to lots of evaporation and water loss. The only exception is to help some vulnerable plants through a heat wave. You may want to spray them with water to cool them down until the extreme heat subsides.
Sprinklers (the old-fashioned, non-automatic kind) give the flexibility of hand watering, but without the long time standing around holding the hose. Of course, evaporation and water wastage, where the sprinkler waters outside the bed, can be problems. But using a sprinkler carefully, early in the morning can be a good option if it’s what you have.
Drip is a whole world unto itself. I'll just cover it briefly here. It's considered the gold standard for water efficiency, when it's working properly. When Stefani Bittner talks about her clients installing irrigation, she’s talking about drip.
Drip slowly releases small amounts of water into the soil so that it penetrates much more deeply, instead of spreading out on the surface. This is both good for the plants because it helps them establish deep, robust root systems, and good for your water bill because much less water evaporates.
However, anyone who’s had a drip system will probably have noticed and rolled their eyes at the “when it’s working properly” bit from a couple paragraphs ago. Drip is notorious for breaking. All. The. Time. Animals chew on the tubes, parts get clogged, pieces wear out and break. And often the breakages happen buried under mulch or hedges and you don’t find out about the damage until a plant dies or you flood the neighbor’s yard. (Or get a startling water bill.)
This spring we removed the drip system that was in our garden when we moved in. I’m relatively handy with irrigation, and was conscientious about checking the lines, but it still malfunctioned regularly and predictably enough that we had to turn it off if we went away, which kind of defeated the purpose.
More robust drip systems can be installed specifically for veggie beds, using drip lines (instead of the individual emitters used for perennial plants) that are less prone to clogging. If you’re a diy enthusiast and don’t mind a trip down the rabbit hole of fittings, tubes and filters, it’s not a very hard project, and the parts can be economical if you don’t go for the fanciest controllers and valves. Hiring a contractor can be quite expensive, but if your head is already spinning at “emitters,” “controllers,” and “valves,” it might be a good investment, especially if the work is warrantied.
Soaker hoses are a really convenient, water efficient alternative drip, but they can be toxic.
The soaker hose concept is a good one. You lay it out in your veggie bed and connect one end to a garden hose. When you turn on the spigot, water seeps out the pores in the soaker hose giving an even deep watering to the whole bed. You can bury the soaker under mulch to prevent evaporation. And best of all, you can easily hook the whole thing up to a cheap timer.
However, and this is a big "however," standard soaker hoses are made from recycled tires. Which is great because it's less tire waste going to the landfill, BUT when you think about what tires are made of, and where they've been in their lifetimes, it's not exactly what you want watering your lettuce.
I've had good success with a diy soaker hose made from drip irrigation parts. You connect one of these to about 15 - 20 feet of this (with the end folded over and fastened), and you’ve got yourself a very inexpensive, much less toxic soaker. It’s still plastic, but drip tubing is made from polyethylene, one of the simplest, least toxic plastics.
Ollas are an ancient technology. Basically it’s a buried terracotta pot filled with water. The water seeps out through the terracotta, keeping the deep root zone moist while allowing very little evaporation. I’ve never tried them because I’ve never had garden beds where the shape would have made sense, but I’m planning to test them this summer, and will let you all know what I find. Over the years, I’ve talked to gardeners who rave about them, saying that the plants growing around the ollas are the happiest in their gardens.
The downside of ollas is that because they’re small and round, they serve a limited area of the garden. Getting widespread coverage can get expensive because you would need lots of them. Which is why there are tons of DIY olla solutions on the internets, mostly involving gluing two standard terracotta flower pots together.
Strictly speaking, greywater isn’t an irrigation system like the others. It’s a source of irrigation water that can be used in many ways.
Greywater is lightly used household water that, while no longer good for bathing or drinking, is perfectly good for irrigation. (It’s mainly water from laundry and showers.) It’s generally not used for veggies, but if you use greywater for your perennials and flower beds, it frees up time and water to focus on your vegetable beds.
The simplest systems divert laundry water and send it straight out into your yard. Until recently, these systems were outside the usual permitting process (i.e. technically illegal), but many jurisdictions now have processes for permitting greywater systems, especially the quite safe and simple “laundry-to-landscape” ones. Greywater action is a great resource to start to learn about reusing your household water.
We’re planning a greywater system here at our house, but it’s going to be complicated because most of our garden is uphill from the house. We’re going to need a pump and a tank, and some complicated (read: expensive) plumbing under the house. The project was in the planning phase when Covid hit, and has since come to a halt. We’re hoping to get it done this summer, and will share progress as we go along.
Like everything with gardening, watering is an art form and there is no one way to do it right. And there is no universal system that will always work. The best course of action (and this will sound familiar to regular readers) is to watch your plants carefully to see what works in your garden. At first you probably won’t know what you’re looking for, but over time, you’ll learn to read the signs of health and stress in your plants. I’ve been paying close attention to plants for about 10 years now, and I’m just beginning to feel like I understand how to water. Hopefully I’ve been able to at least fast-forward your learning curve a little bit!
]]>And then it rained. And they looked like this:
And after a few days, they looked like this:
The silver lining of this unseasonably big rainstorm in the middle of this build is that we saw how poor our drainage is. If the weather had stayed dry, we would have just put in the gopher wire, filled the soil back in with amendments and planted the beds. Then when the first winter rain hit next year, all our plants would have drowned. The standing water would have been below the surface of the beds, hiding the problem. It would have taken quite a while to figure out why our plants were dead. So, even though it caused a big delay in fininshing the build as we drained the beds and put in drainage for the future, it saved us a million headaches.
The culprit here is our super heavy clay soil. The first foot or so of our soil is ok, but below that is a khaki gray colored dense mass not unlike the clay we buy at the ceramics store. Even though I was focused on getting the veggie beds in, I was tempted to make some pots from the clay we were diging up. (I still might.)
We dug channels to drain the standing water:
Hard work, I can tell you. I've got some pretty good caluses going from all this!
We dug trenches down the middle of each bed that we filled with gravel to help the beds drain. They connect to a series of channels that will eventually lead to our flower beds downhill from the veggies. And you can see here the all-important gopher wire!
Below is probably the hardest part of the project. We used the flagstones from the old patio to build raised bed walls. Getting them to fit was a serious puzzle, one that required moving 40 pound rocks over and over to find just the right spot for each one.
In the middle of all this, our daughter found a newborn fawn hiding behind our shed. We looked up some best practices, FYI, and the consensus is not to touch a fawn if you find one. Mama is probably nearby and will come find it, and if it smells like human, she might reject it. In our case we were a bit worried because the fawn was just inside the fence that keeps adult deer out. (It must have shimmied through the space at the bottom of the fence.) We tried to shoo it back through the fence, but it wouldn't go. So we just left it and by the next morning it was gone. I hope it found its way back to Mom!
Once the beds were built, we began the process of refilling. We ordered 2.5 yards of amendments from our local landscape supply company to jumpstart the process of improving our heavy, poor soil.
Because we live on a hill, and our backyard is up many stairs, the amendments came up to the beds via 5-gallon bucket loads. A lot of them. (And in case you're wondering why the mask: carrying a bucket of dusty amendment right below your face as you huff and puff up stairs leads to lots of coughing.)
Finally (finally!) the beds are finished.
And I've begun planting them!
And here is the view of the beds this morning, about 2 weeks after we finished the build and got the first plants in:
The tomatoes have grown like crazy, and the greens (lettuce, chard, mizuna, arugula) and herbs (basil, cilantro, parsley) are just starting to take off.
You may also notice the large pile of soil in the background. And if you look closely you can see that between the soil pile and the little marking sticks is a track. Once we got the veggies planted, we got started building a track to loop through the yard. Because once you've got your shovels out, why not?
Though it's not particularly horticultural, the backyard track will certainly be a major garden feature. And even though it's not fully built yet, we've been getting a lot of wiggles out by going round and round on foot and on bikes. A necessary garden feature? Hardly. But for us, now, when we're at home quite a lot (!) it's turning out to be pretty great. More on tracks in future posts.
But for now, we'll close the story on building veggie beds. Time will tell if we built them right. For now they're doing great, but spring is easy. Late summer will test if they hold water well. (Holding water was the reason we dug them down as well as having some soil raised.) Winter will test if they drain. And years will tell us how our soil building goes. We'll post updates as we go along. Thanks for reading and taking this trip with us!
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