Low Maintenance Gardens

I am severely overdue for putting my thoughts in my blog, but baby and kiddos have been keeping me busy!

I just wanted to put a quick note in here because I found a great blog post that I loved. It's on the ideology of low maintenance gardens, by a landscape designer.

Here's the link to the blog entry he wrote:

http://landscapeofmeaning.blogspot.com/2012/07/why-i-dont-believe-in-low-maintenance.html#more

I very much enjoyed his writing and agree with all his thoughts. Some very interesting things to think and garden about!

Tomatoes!

So I have never tried to grow my own tomatoes since I've always been told they are hard to grow from seed. But then I went to a local seed swap several months ago and there was a guy there giving out tomato seeds. I asked him about what I'd heard, and he insisted it was easy to grow tomatoes from seeds as long as you kept them in bright light. So I took some seeds and decided to try!


I planted the five seeds he gave me about two months ago (I forgot to date the label marker) and lo and behold, they are growing!

This is them now. Four of the seeds sprouted, one was small so I thinned that and then sepparated the other three to their own pots. They have already suffered through getting sunburned (go figure, who knew it could happen in Seattle) and my son plucking off several leaves, but they are truckin' on nicely!

I will also stop here and mention (I may have before) that I did buy a grow light ($8 from Home Depot) that I have been starting all my seeds under. I think that makes a big difference since I have extremely limited sunny window sill space.


Then my mom got some tomato seeds that a store was getting rid of since they are a year old, and I decided to try more tomatoes.

On April 3rd I started a few to see how they'd germinate and here they are now:

The seeds germinated quite well, I actually had almost all the seeds sprout and I had to thin the seedlings (something I hate doing, but I'm getting better at doing it). So then on April 14th I planted half a flat of tomato seeds. They all sprouted beautifully and I finally just thinned them today since they all are growing a true set of leaves:

I'm pretty excited to see how they do the rest of the year. Last year most of our tomatoes got what we think was blight (from the early spring rains they were subjected to), so this year we are hoping to make a little clear plastic overhang that will protect the tomatoes from getting wet but allow the sun to come through. I also plan on training all my tomatoes to grow up twine, and luckily all my tomatoes are indeterminate so they should work well.


I did just discover the difference between the kinds of tomato plants and even my mom didn't know!

Indeterminate (the most common kind) continue to grow and produce fruit until the frost kills them.

Determinate (called "bush" tomatoes) grow to a certain size, produce a crop of fruit, and then die back.


I realized last year I think I bought a bunch of bush tomatoes and then was trying to prune them to grow up twine while the poor things just wanted to stop growing and produce a crop of tomatoes! That may explain why several of my tomatoes didn't produce very well.

My First Lasagna Garden Bed!

Today I put together my very first Lasagna garden bed!

I used old fence boards to make a small, 5 x 4 foot grow box which will be one of six that will hold most of the veggies I am planning to grow this year. I have some leeks I started in the house I would like to get outside, so I am trying to throw together a grow box to put them in!

I put cardboard on the bottom, then paper bedding from my gerbils, then did a layers of peat moss, grass clippings, peat moss, dried leaves, green leaves, grass clippings, and a final thick layer of peat moss.

The box is still not as full as I would like it to be, but I'm short on things to fill it with right now, and since with leeks you "hill up" around them as they grow to promote a longer white part, I figure it will work to plant them in the box as it is now and then I can add more later.

I plan on getting some hay/horse manure from my parents house to help fill my boxes.

Lasagna Gardening

I've previously been exposed to Lasagna Gardening because my mom did it for several years when she first put up her above-ground grow boxes. This year I have really been wanting to expand my growing space, and unfortunately the only good growing spaces are where my lawn is. I have already started by putting cardboard down on top of the grass (I knew that much from my mom) but I did a little research into what exactly goes into a Lasagna Garden. I am interested in the aspect of being able to layer right on top of lawn and keep the weeds down, and hope that it will also help me save money on buying dirt.

The expert and inventor of Lasagna Gardening appears to be Patricia Lanza, who wrote the book "Lasagna Gardening" (the book my mom got when she dove into this endeavor). I found a great intro article by her in the Mother Earth News page here:
http://www.motherearthnews.com/Organic-Gardening/1999-04-01/Lasagna-Gardening.aspx

After reading several other blogs and comments on this method, I have definitely decided to try it out! It's a very simple method, and I think I can get many "ingredients" from my parents (since they have chickens, goats, and a horse that all produce fabulous manure). We'll have to see how it goes!

The First Seeds!

It has only been a little over a week and my seeds are all sprouting and growing fabulously!

This year I purchased a plant light from Home Depot and suspended it using a cord from an old paper lantern style light fixtures (without the shade). The results have been better than I expected! The light provides a lot of warmth and the seeds have all been sprouting in a matter of days! These seeds were all started on February 24th and came up only a couple days after I planted them.

Starting Green Onions and Garlic

I have discovered it is actually quite easy to get plants for most of the onion family from leftovers you may have bought for eating! These here are a large green onion (like chives, but thicker) - perhaps a young scallion. If you leave at least 1-2 inches on the root end intact (so feel free to use all the greens for your meal) you can then place the root ends in some water in a glass. Change out the water daily for best results. The little bulbs then start sprouting more greens!

And here's a bonus I've learned: chives are perrenials! If you harvest only half of the onions, the rest will keep growing and multiply into more the next year!

Any type of onion bulb or garlic can also be growin into a full plant.

For bulb onions or garlic, simply let them sit somehwere, preferrably warm and with some light, and they will start to grow (after all, they are a bulb). For garlic, each individual clove will sprout and can be grown and will produce a whole new bulb with lots of cloves.

(Disclaimer: I have only ever grown garlic this way, so I cannot personally attest to the success of onions grown this way. Depending on the type of onion, they may in fact need two years to grow to full size. However, they are edible at any size!)

Garlic and onions are fairly cold hardy, so here in the pacific northwest farmers are already growing them out in their feilds. Some even start them in the fall and grow them over the winter!

Last year I planted garlic in my garden (simply by planting old cloves that had sprouted) and then planted pole beans among them not knowing that beans and garlic don't like each other (and also thinking the beans were the bush type). The pole beans completely smothered out my garlic, and then after I pulled out all the pole beans in the fall, my garlic all started growing again! They have been out there all winter and have kept growing even through a week of cold snow very uncharacteristc of Seattle.

Feruary's Seeds & The Newspaper Pot

This month I have a few seeds I'm trying to start. They consist of the seeds that I think will take the most time to reach maturity/harvestability.

Leeks and Chives both have a long period of time before maturity (as do most onions I'm finding) and then I have several flowers, including German Chamomile and some seeds gathered from my own perennial plants (of which I do not know the names). Last year I grew lots of flowers, like snapdragons, marigolds, and nasturtiums, but the snapdragons especially took FOREVER to grow! And then those snapdragons survived all winter out there (we even had a good week of lots of snow!). I can't find my snapdragon seeds (maybe I used them all up last year) but I am starting some other flowers early just in case.

Last year and this instead of buying seed flats (which I may still do later for my veggies) I am using a newpaper-pot maker. It's a small wooden two-piece contraption that you use to make little newspaper pots that then can have seeds grown in them and be transplanted straight into the ground. This really helps with the money side, and I feel good recycling newspaper instead of buying more plastic pots.

It's super simple to use and since I'm using newspaper that comes in the mail, it's like getting free pots! My mother gave me the pot maker, but I think they are not too pricey and will easily pay for themselves especially if you grow from seed instead of buying young plants.

Garden 2012

It's already the middle of February of 2012! I have been thinking about my garden all winter long and now finally is the time I can start doing things.

I purchased all my seeds at the end of last month. I tried out two new seed companies this year: Bountiful Gardens (www.bountifulgardens.org) and Le Jardin du Gourmet (www.ArtisticGardens.com).

Bountiful Gardens is a sustainable agricultrure research company located Willits, CA. All their seeds are open-pollinated and heirloom, and most of them are also certified organic. Since I want to be able to learn how to gather my own seed for the next season, I chose to try out this company. They have an extensive amount of seeds they offer, and all are very reasonably priced. They only have seeds, so no live plants, so you have to be confident in your seed-growing, but I am very excited and am very impressed with the quality of their seed and what their business supports.

I actually found out about Le Jardin du Gourmet from a flyer in a mailer packet (go figure). They specialize in the "40 cent sample seed packets". Since this was very inexpensive I decided to give them a try even though I knew nothing more about them. Their website is obviously simple and not super proffesional-looking, but it's effective and I was very glad to have an option to order online. They had a very nice selection of garden fruits and veggies, and also had some live plant options. I opted to just try out their seed this year, but if they grow well I may try their live plants next year to add some more herbs and perrenials to my garden. They also sell onion and shallot bulbs which I may try next year. All their products are very reasonably priced, and the 40 cent seed packet option is just right for a small gardener like myself. I still got a very decent amount of seed in each packet, definitely enough for my one-family garden.


So now I have all my seeds. I have sorted them by the month in which I should start sprouting them. With my new baby it has been a challange to make time to actually get things done, but here's hoping she starts sleeping longer!