by Graham Kerr
I have been the happy—although sometimes late—recipient of excellent advice about greenhouse and indoor seed germination and the journey to the great outdoors, which I pass along in “byte”-size pieces. There is no specific need for a greenhouse. Seeds can be started on window ledges from February on. All my notes are equally applicable.
■ Pots: You can reuse old plastic pots, but you must wash them well in detergent with a little bleach. You can also use paper cups that are biodegradable. (I think that clay pots are too expensive for this phase and take up too much storage space out of season.)
■ Potting Soil: Purchase a good potting soil from your garden center. Alternatively, you can sterilize garden soil. Place the soil in an aluminum foil roasting pan to 3 inches in depth, cover with foil, and bake at 200ºF for 20 minutes—at which point all disease and seeds are dead, and your soil is ready to use without contaminants, weeds, or other unwanted seeds. Or place the garden soil in about 2-pound batches in an unsealed plastic roasting bag, and microwave each bag for 3 minutes. It’ll create a horrid smell, but it is fast and effective. Before planting, do a porosity test. Start with damp soil in a small pot. Add water to the top of the pot and count slowly to five. If the water drains in 3-4 seconds, the soil is too porous. If it takes 7-8 seconds, it’s too dense. That’s one reason I like to use the Coco-Coir: it drains perfectly every time, and it’s more like the consistency of the raised-bed soil, into which the seedlings will be transplanted.
■ Planting Depth: The rule of thumb is the smaller the seed, the shallower the planting depth. That means that the seeds should be planted at a depth of about two to three times their width.
■ Watering: Keep the planted seeds moistened by misting, not flooding, until just gently dampened. I have a 2-quart misting jar that pumps up a small pressure and does the job very well. I’ve added a timer mister system (see page 34), so we’ll see how this pans out. Frequent misting also prevents the thin layer of soil that covers the seeds from drying out, which robs the soil of the moisture it needs to give the seeds a good start.
■ Drainage: All my pots and trays have drain holes, allowing for the regular misting (twice a day) not to accumulate and permitting the seeds to breath. I found this concept hard to grasp; surely when smothered in soil there’s no air? But here I was so wrong: the whole point of fine soil is that there is plenty of air, providing it isn’t saturated with water that has nowhere to drain.
■ Temperature: To keep the germinating seeds at the right temperature, you can use a specially designed heat-pad arrangement that is thoroughly waterproof (don’t use the one you bought for that back pain!) and linked to a temperature-sensing device, allowing you to regulate the soil temperature. There’s a range between 63ºF and 75ºF that works best on vegetable seeds. All you have to do is set your tray of freshly planted seeds directly on top of the waterproof pad and plunge the ceramic sensor into one of the small pots. When the soil temperature reaches 70ºF, the pad will turn off; it’ll kick back on when the soil cools slightly.
■ Light: Some seeds, especially really small ones like lettuce, need some kind of light source to help them germinate. Without light they will emerge, but they reach out for whatever glimmer they see and get tall and straggly instead of developing sturdy stems. Good greenhouse centers have excellent safe grow lights, very important in a watery environment!
■ Feeding: At their earliest stage, the seed has its own life support system and needs no added boost from outside until it has six leaves. It is at this time that the transplanting should take place.
7. Transplanting
Once I have a greenhouse or a sunny indoor window ledge, I can program my seed-starting schedule backward from the approximate date that a seedling can be put out in the raised bed. I say approximate because so much depends on local conditions that hard and fast dates don’t always work. Take Swiss chard, for example:
Plant in raised bed: May 20-30
Harden off (discussed in a bit): May 13-17
Early growth (about 6 weeks): April 15-20
Germinate seeds: early March indoors, in a greenhouse, in a heated cold frame, or on a sunny windowsill
My good friends advised me to always wait for the first true leaves after the cotyledons drop before attempting any transplant. “The what?” I questioned, as if those “coties” (as I called them) were some kind of elfin brigade that shelter under toadstools in a downpour and function like helpful bacteria.
I learned that these are the very first, purely altruistic leaves, which are used as food by the emerging, growing plant. They often turn yellow and fall off after giving their lives for the true leaves that follow.
Having just enough space in their 2-inch-square plastic pots, the seedlings begin their 4-12 weeks of growth. Some of the larger species may need a second home in a 4-inch pot. If so, grab the seedling by its leaf, never by the stalk (a crushed stalk is often terminal; a crushed leaf is expendable). Ease it out of moist soil and very carefully tease the roots away from a close neighbor’s roots, and make a suitable hole (about the size of a medium cigar) for the roots and the soil clinging to them. And again, gently shift the earth to cover the roots well and then mist the new arrival.
When it’s time to shift the starts outdoors, the plants may need to be hardened off. This takes about 1 week. The plants need to be exposed to wind and sun after their greenhouse home, but they should be sheltered from direct sun and need less watering, never more! They need oxygen around their roots, and overwatering starves them of air and makes their leaves go yellow.
Seed packets list the amount of sun needed and how to sow the seeds, including distance apart and depth. This is all well and good, but like everything in our nanosecond world, the information is too abbreviated.
I wanted more—really, as much as I could take! Fortunately, I found the Harvest to Table website (www.harvesttotable.com) and the admirable Stephen Albert, who has boldly gone where nobody (that I can find) has gone before: he has listed more than 30 need-to-know specifications that help the novice and expert alike. For all my selections, I had done 6 weeks of research on my 60 plants before even ordering his Kitchen Garden Grower’s Guide. I could have saved so much time, but it is a great source for confirming sometimes conflicting data!
In my first year, I adopted a kind of all-at-once approach to sowing directly into the raised bed just after Memorial Day. I marked out rows 4 inches apart across my 3-foot-wide beds and sowed carrot, parsnip, Swiss chard, and beets. They all flourished and left no room for weeds, but they were so difficult to thin!
I talked this over with Scott Titus, and we decided to change the direction and plant in longer rows (north-south) instead of short (east-west) rows. That should make thinning easier because one could reach a long line with greater consistency.
8. Watering
If you listen to Pacific Northwest stories about our annual rainfall, you might wonder why watering was even on my radarscope (so to speak). Well, this past year was a triumph—lots and lots of sun. My friend Scott called it “the best growing year I’ve ever experienced”—and here I had thought it was my newfound skills!
Regardless of my soil’s natural tendency to retain water, I did need a regular supply of water about twice per week. Since I had a preexisting sprinkler on a timer for the grass, I found yet another local expert to adjust the coverage to match the planting choices I had made in each bed I had prepared.
A few plants, like beets, did better receiving misting from above, but most of my plants benefited from ground up watering. We thought about this as we did the overall plan and decided to use drip irrigation, three lines to a 4-foot-wide bed.
It all worked out fine except for the large winter squash leaves, which eventually developed a powdery mildew because they had already gotten too much overhead water (a situation not helped by the fact that they were growing in partial shade, which is not advised).
My suggestion is to get advice from someone who really knows, and bit
e the bullet on cost. Once it’s done—and you understand what was done and why— then your approach to watering can remain flexible year after year with only you in charge.
In the greenhouse, it was more complex. I put in a special timer and rigged an irrigation line into which I could tap a variety of misting or drip feeds. It took time, but it will be much better than having to ask our neighbor to fill in for me when I find myself away from home for any length of time.
At this point I need to speak in a LOUDER VOICE because it’s so important.
Because I’m on the road unpredictably, I had always dismissed the idea of an edible garden and greenhouse because they would need attention, especially proper watering on a daily basis. But with a good timer and both light and heat sensors, the plants will still get their basic daily attention, albeit mechanically (and, perhaps, more reliably).
You’ve already made an investment (especially if you’ve got a greenhouse), so go the extra mile on the watering system and see that it’s done right! However, don’t allow automation to take over. Your plants need your personal attention.
My last units that needed watering were the EarthBoxes, which I watered by hand each day through the box’s reservoir filler tube. There is an automatic overflow system to prevent overwatering that worked fine, but since the boxes need help when unattended, I linked them into the greenhouse irrigation device to eliminate a potential source of failure.
9. Feeding
With the watering working well, I then had to turn to a far more complex issue: feeding. My local knowledge experts told me that there were two major errors made by gardeners: adding too much or too little fertilizer. I found this unhelpful. “So,” I asked, “what is the Goldilocks quantity—the just right amount?”
“It depends,” they replied.
And so it went on—with me getting no wiser and, if anything, more confused!
I know that my body needs a mix of protein, carbohydrates, and fats, and over the years I’ve learned enough to adjust how much of each I eat, but I don’t do this by numbers. I’ve learned to size it up with my eyes, and I know what a portion of leafy greens looks like (it’s a cupful when pressed down lightly) or whata ¼ cup of raisins looks like or a medium apple. Since I weigh myself daily, I know if my calorie intake and energy output is balanced (or unbalanced).
So, since I seem to be doing okay, why shouldn’t I think of my plants in the same way and avoid confusion?
There is one single marker for the Goldilocks equation, and that’s pH, a scale measuring from 0 to 14, with 0 representing pure acid and 14 representing pure lye. The neutral point is, logically, 7.
Wouldn’t it be nice if all plants loved growing in neutral soil? Unfortunately, they do not. But here we can still pull off a reasonable compromise, since most plants do well enough between 5.5 and 7.5. (A notable exception is the potato, which requires a pH of between 4.8 and 6.5, but which I don’t plant in my garden due to lack of space.)
At the very least you should get a start-out baseline reading of your soil (see page 18) and perhaps an annual check up in the late fall, when most of the harvesting has been done. A 1-pint sample is enough, taken from several parts of the garden from holes dug down 6-8 inches and scraped from the wall of the hole in a thin downward slice. Consult your local county extension agent or refer to the Yellow Pages under “Soil Testing” to find out where and how to send your samples.
I was told to add peat moss or good compost to add acidity and ground limestone to increase alkalinity. But frankly, this is where I bowed to my friends and their local knowledge. Most textbooks speak of 50-80 pounds of lime to change 1,000 square feet of soil by 1 pH point (from 5.5 to 6.5, for instance), but that’s not what I saw being done. Because I’ve got only about 400 square feet of raised beds, I figured that 10 pounds would do it, but Scott did it by eye (like I eat), and it was more like 7 pounds, according to my obsessive-compulsive observation! This is another of those areas where local knowledge is king. No amount of technical estimation can take the place of experienced organic growers in your area who work with similar soil and climate.
Scott added fertilizer with the same practical eye and told me to watch the leaves. “If they yellow, feed ’em.” He handed me a container of his own organic fertilizer, Intrepid, and left. (Should you be unable to find his fertilizer, I’m sure you’ll be able to locate a good natural alternative at your nearest nursery supply store.)
In my search for what (on earth!) to do next, I ran headlong into a whole catalog full of nifty instruments that promised to take all the guesswork out of watering and feeding. You just stick the various pronged devices into the soil and, bingo, they tell you what to do. My first reaction was relief. At least I’ve got a solution! But I had learned through ample experience not to jump at technology on its face (advertised) value. I decided to think it through for a couple of days before ordering.
One week later I was convinced that I’d prefer to follow the billions of farmers who observe how their plants are doing and through years of experience know instinctively how to respond. If I began my journey with a reliance on high tech, it might mean that I’d never know what “high touch” was like—and machines would have created a dependency that could have reduced my direct involvement with the plants, which I’d gain through observation. So I decided to buy the tester and do both and keep a good record.
Over the first year, I added fertilizer twice—about 5 weeks apart—using beet leaves, Swiss chard, and peppers as a visual guide. If their leaves wilted and discolored, I responded. I added a third feeding for the winter squash.
I also tried a fish-based liquid (see the Glossary on page 58) that comes in concentrated form. Just add water and apply every couple of weeks. I’d walk about with a long wand-like watering device attached to a pressurized tank, directing the spray just at the union between soil and plant. Since my plants flourished, I can only assume this helped.
So far, this observation with technical support has worked, but I’m still feeling the need to more clearly understand how to give my plants the best feeding possible within natural sustainable guidelines.
My local knowledge friends tell me that I may never really understand, because the health of an individual plant can be affected by weather, pests, and windborne disease, and the best soil in the world, while it will definitely help, isn’t an absolute guarantee of a healthy plant.
So I observe and I measure and I record the results. I’m concerned. I weed and I feed, and in so doing, I’ve discovered a truly rewarding connection to my garden.
10. Pest Control and Plant Diseases
Of course, I’m not the only one who looks hungrily at my beautiful plants. There’s an army out there with tiny legs, furry bodies, scampering feet, fluttering wings, and bright slimy trails.
Since we have deer and rabbits, we put up a fence with 12-foot-high posts and 8-foot-high plastic netting. As I mentioned earlier, I’m told that deer have poor eyesight and see only the 12-foot posts, not the top of the net at only 8 feet. We also buried 2 feet of plastic netting in a trench, since, I am told, rabbits don’t burrow any deeper than 2 feet.
Slugs can be drowned in beer (an apparently organic death) by setting out small paper cups of your least favorite brew on their happy trails. A simpler answer is Sluggo, an aptly named organic substance.
I was advised to patrol the garden each morning and look out for bugs ’n’ beetles on and under leaves. These can be handpicked into a small pail and destroyed. As it happens, I usually take a morning walk in the longer-light days at 8 a.m. and simply extended my routine with a 10-minute patrol.
I’ve also been introduced to orange sticky cards to catch small flying pests like aphids and white flies. I’ve also used diluted neem oil as greenhouse spray—especially on tomatoes. This spray worked well—though, once again, don’t expect perfection. Absolute death to all critters means using chemicals that kill the good and the bad and may even accumulate in fat cells in your own body. A go
od home remedy is boiling two cigarettes in some beer, straining it well, and spraying it on the leaves; nicotine kills!
There are any number of reasons why plants fail—both obvious (lack of water or fertilizer) and mysterious (diseases). There is no real alternative to observation, and nothing beats a brief daily inspection.
If a plant looks strange compared to its neighbors—shriveled darkened leaves, all droopy and tired—and I can’t determine any specific reason, I pull it out, put it into a plastic bag, and take it immediately to our local extension service to get an opinion. Just like a person with the flu, a diseased plant may be contagious and must be removed, but you can learn why it suffered and perhaps prevent the mishap from spreading.
11. Composting
Now here’s a subject that every green-minded reader will find essential: what to do with the heap of discarded leaves, old root stock, stalks and vegetable trimmings, coffee grounds, and tea bags—those by-products of growing and cooking that made up my own evermounting compost heap. Frankly, I simply assumed that any organic material would rot if I left it alone. But it didn’t work out that way!
At first, I was more concerned about the aesthetics of my compost, in that my initial pile at one end of the garden looked untidy. So I asked Richard, who had done such a good job building the fence and gates, if he could build me a two-bin unit outside the fenced area, behind the greenhouse. He managed to find some discarded mahogany and built it with slats that allowed air circulation. This worked out to be cheaper than some of the plastic tumbler bins.
