The first seeds are up

Wifey let me know this morning that seeds that had come up since I planted them Sunday morning.  I couldn't tell anything from the pictures she sent, but I just looked for myself.  Sure enough!  We have some fledgling plants! 

In the marigold picture, it's reasonably easy: it's the line greenish thing in the middle of the picture.  It's sort of hard to tell with the petunias, though.  If I didn't already know that petunia seeds are black little dots, I'd be skeptical.  Since this is my second year starting petunias, I know that what we see in that picture is a bunch of little tendrils coming from the seeds.  Neat!

No sign of life from the other seed varieties.

The first Marigold

Petunia starters

2014 seed starting has begun!

I went into this weekend knowing that it was time to start my seeds for the year.  I have been thinking about it for a few weeks now.  It was finally time so I dug out my mini greenhouses that I purchased a few years ago.  Unfortunately, I found that one of my 8-piece containers has a few splits in it so I'll have to replace that.  I started what I could, though.

We now have both varieties of tomatoes, the cayenne and bell peppers, and basil in the large mini greenhouse.  Because we need them for companion planting, I filled the 8-piece container with petunia seeds.

After the monstrous bounty of cayenne peppers we grew and dehydrated this past year, we decided to grow fewer cayenne peppers, however, I do plan to harvest and replant seeds from an organic jalapeno (likely from MoM's) to grow those this year for a change of pace.  Because I didn't use an entire row devoted to cayenne, I had three pellets in the large box  that were vacant.  I decided to see if I could start sunflowers from seed this year.  Last year, I direct sowed them in their box and they took forever to grow.  We'll see if I can start them at home.  So, there's a gardening experiment to monitor.

Another interesting phenomenon was that as I expanded the seed starting pellets for the larger mini-greenhouse, they created entirely too much seed starting medium.  Even after tamping each segment down a little bit and filling in gaps, we had a lot left.  I ended up collecting the leftovers into two small Dixie cups.  To continue my theme of experimentation, I decided to try out our French Marigold seeds in there.  I've neither grown in Dixie cups nor started Marigold seeds so this is a double adventure.  We'll see how they go.

 

Once I get another smaller mini greenhouse or two, I'll start more marigolds, cosmos, and kale.  The watermelon and cucumber will follow in either late March or early April.

Restarting Celery - 2 weeks old

Two weeks ago I restarted a heel (is that what it's called?) of celery just to test out what would happen.  Well, there's been more top growth and it has sent out roots.  All I've done is refresh the water occasionally.

I've read that another thing that can be done is to actually transplant into soil and fully regrow a full bunch (head?) of celery.  I figure I'll try that some other time.  I'm content just to try this experiment on a hydroponic level.

It's snowing again

We returned from a trip to the Robinson Nature Center to entertain and educate the kids a little bit ago.  The snow made for a pretty visit at the Center and a treacherous trip home.  Upon arrival, we were greeted by the raised box once again protecting the spinach greens from snowfall. 

The greenhouse top on the raised box also provides a really neat exercise in contrasting colors.  The dark colored soil, the snow's white, and green of the spinach inside stand out against one another.

Status: Nuh'in goin'

We made it to the plot this morning to see if there was anything exciting out there. 


Nope.  Not really.


There are a few of the new Walking Onions showing above their leafy cover and some garlic is doing the same in their beds.  We were happy to note that our brussels sprouts had their leaves eaten off and many of those in other plots hadn't.  Ours must have been especially tasty!

The activity in the plot led to a lot of, uh, fertilizer being found in many of the beds.  We're guessing rabbits were kind enough to bless us with those little, brown gifts.

I also saw that in addition to the plot gate needing to be repaired/replaced, I also was reminded that one of the original boxes needs to have a side replaced.  One of the one-bys had broken off at the ground, likely due to water breaking down the wood at the ground level.

Learning about crops - Cucumbers

I've tried growing cucumbers for a few years now.  Unfortunately, I've had next to no success.  We try to pick varieties that are good for pickling, but are also good for eating raw.  When I get cucumbers, they end up looking like orbs instead of cucumbers. It's my belief that our temperatures have been too high as I've tried growing them.  I'll also be putting more effort into soil analysis this year.


Companion Plants
Nearby plantings of borage may also help suppress cucumber beetles as they may be intimidated by the insects that are attracted to the borage flowers.

Growing Cucumbers
Cucumbers like nutrient-rich soil with a pH between 6.0 and 6.5.  General fertilizers work just fine.  They like soil temperatures at least 60 degrees, however, they don't like temps that are consistently in the mid-90's.  High temps end up with more male flowers on the plant than females.  If temps are consistently high, providing a sunshade to filter out 40-50% of the sunlight is recommended.

Insect Pests
Cucumber beetles typically prefer cucumbers and muskmelons.  Insecticidal soap is a safe, effective treatment for most cucumber beetle infestations.

Nutritional Information
Cucumbers with peel, raw

Cucumbers are a "good source" (10-19% of RDA) of Vitamin K.  There are also trace amounts (1-2%) of a number of vitamins, minerals and amino acids.  There's a supercallafragiliciousexpialladocious amount (a lot) of water.  97% by weight, in fact.

I won't bore you with the lengthy list of vitamins, etc.

It's worth noting that the serving size is only 1.8 oz.  I couldn't visualize how much cucumber would actually represents 1.8 oz (other than "not much") so I weighed a Persian cucumber from either MoMs or Trader Joe's.  It's 5" long and 1 1/4" diameter.

Let's just say that unless you're looking for a lot of Vitamin K, cucumbers are basically nature's water bottle.

Happy Birthday to me

Happy Birthday to me.  Well, yesterday anyway.  I've been 36 a whole 24 hours now. 

My apologies for anyone reading this, but this isn't exactly about gardening per se.  More of a reflection.  If you're not interested, I don't blame you.  I promise this sort of thing won't become a habit in the blog.

I find myself up having been up for a little over an hour after feeding The Girl and watching a show on Netflix that's new to me (Alaska: The Last Frontier).  I guess it's the presentation of the homesteading family and, maybe, sleep deprivation that has me thinking a bit inward now.

I was fortunate that I received a few gifts from my wife, a good friend, and my inlaws (another gathering with my parents is still to come).  Receipt of gifts was certainly not necessary, but reflecting on what people provided and what they thought I'd like and could use has changed through the years.  It both is an indicator that these dear people are attentive to what makes me tick, but also that my tastes have changed as I've aged.

I'm not entirely sure what it means.  Ordinarily, I'd label it "maturity" but anyone who's known me for a while would scoff at that notion.  Regardless, there's something there that's more.....earthy.  In the last few years coinciding with my growing interest in gardening, I've leaned more and more toward trying to simplify my life and that of my family.

Even a few years ago, I was still playing video games with regularity.  That's pretty much gone now.  My old Mustang is gone now, replaced with my grandfather's Shopsmith which has seen more use in the last few months than the Mustang saw in a number of years combined.  I'm much more excited these days about trying to build fires with minimal materials as I once did in my Wilderness Survival Merit Badge coursework in Scouts.

The gifts. 

• My friend gave me a package of goji berries.  She and I have a common interest in gardening.  A recent topic of conversation was my intent to try to grow goji berries this year.  Having never had any, she brought a few in to work last week.  A gift was even more.  Wonderful and I'm happy to report that The Boy loves them! 
• My son - what a wonderful boy he is - told his mother that he wanted to get me peat pots.  Boy did they ever!  I opened a large cardboard box to find three sizes of pots ordered from online just for seed starting.  Good thing, too, since our seeds should be arriving from Southern Exposure in another few days.  
• Wifey got me a few shirts because, well, I work and need nice shirts for work.  Somebody else must be wearing my shirts and getting stains on them..... She also got me a pocket hole jig that I had been eyeing.  Should be useful as I gradually experiment with furniture building.  
• Lastly and still quite notably, my inlaws provided me with a very nifty gadget/axe called The Chopper.  Had I never used one, I would have scoffed and called it gimmicky.  Well, I found myself splitting wood on Christmas this year and the wood exploded off the side of this thing like I've never seen before.  Simply amazing.

Maybe all this means something.  Maybe nothing.  Maybe I'm feeling old.  Who knows, but I'm happy that I'm feeling more grounded and pleased by simpler things than in recent past.  That's good for me, Wifey, and I think should set a good example for our children.

Restarting Celery - 1 week old

In reading gardening blogs and other articles, one topic that periodically comes up is that of restarting plants.  We've previously restarted scallions (aka green onions) from nubs with great success, commonly getting them to 5" long from a 3/4" long leftover piece.  I recently came across another idea of restarting celery from the leftover base.  I'd never considered this before.  Typically, I just eat the celery all the way to the heart.

Last week, I remembered this idea as I was getting to the end of some celery.  I took the leftover bit and put it in a small glass with about 1" of water.  There's no fertilizer in there.  I just add water as it evaporates.

One week later, we have some growth.  Nothing super fantastic, but it'll be neat to see what happens.

2014 Plot Layout and Planting List

It took some time, but I finally finished the plot layout for 2014.

A few comments about this years' planting:

• I wanted to try for more Spring/Fall crops.  We're going to plant kale and lettuce to add to the snow peas with that in mind.
• If you compare vs the 2013 layout, I switched the sides of the garden where the tomatoes/peppers are and where the beans are. Crop rotation.
• I'm gambling a little bit by starting the green beans adjacent to the garlic and shallots.  I've done reading which indicates they don't like growing adjacent to each other.  Hopefully, the few weeks that they'll overlap won't matter much.
• I wanted to move the watermelon trellis this year, but wasn't able to.  I'd planned on putting it next to the bench and rotated 90 degrees from what I had last year with the trellis spanning two boxes.  Unfortunately, there are shallots currently planted in that area.  I've never grown those before, but from what I've read they're on a similar growing season as garlic.  If I end up harvesting the shallots in June, that wouldn't work since I plan to transplant the watermelon starters in May.  
• I'm going to rotate the watermelon trellis 180 degrees such that the downward slope faces southwest.  In my reading, it appears that cucumbers have difficulty flowering when they're over 95 degrees for very long.  My hope is to grow them in what shade that is provided by the watermelons.  It'll be interesting to see if that works and what I end up having to do to trellis the cucumbers, themselves.
• We added a second box of Egyptian Walking Onions this past Fall.  Wifey transplanted some of the fallen bulbs from the original box into the box that had had the cosmos, nasturtiums, and a central volunteer tomato plant.  By having two boxes of them, we're hoping to be able to harvest more of the onion blubs for use this year.