Wednesday, February 14, 2024
The Best Method for Germinating Luffa Seeds, Step by Step
Sunday, November 28, 2021
How I Plan My Garden Part 3: When do I start my seeds?
In Part 2 I decided what I wanted to plant, based on my big picture goals. In Part 1 I took a good look at last year's garden to decide what I want to repeat this year, and what I want to change. I'm ready to buy seeds. I know what in planting and how many, but when do I plant?
Good news! Starting seeds happens progressively through winter and spring, depending on the type of seed, not all at once.
Most seed packets include basic instructions around planting time, and many of these instructions reference your "last frost day" or planting before or after "all danger of frost." Thankfully, that's an easy to find date. It's the day in spring when you're likely to have one last frost before temperatures stay above freezing for good. Type your zipcode into a calculator like the one here at Dave's Garden and then take note of the date around the 30% chance, to be safe. Once that day comes, you'll need to look at your weather forecast to see if it's really the last chance of frost, but for now it's a date to count back from so you'll have plant-able seedlings when the time comes.
I mark this day on a wall calendar, and mark every week before it, going all the way back to midwinter. This way when I read, "start 6 weeks before last frost" I can easily flip to the week marked six and make note of which seeds need to be started then.
Last year I bought a nifty "perpetual calendar" from Fruition Seeds that gives space for three columns after each date. Each column is a year, so I can easily move information over from one year to the next. You can see entries here for two years, last year and this.
I sort through all the seed packs, find the information on when to start, and then write it down on that week. This way, I only have to figure this stuff out once and then look it up each week, instead of counting on my memory (dangerous) or re-sorting through seed packs every week wondering, "do I need to start any of these today?" which would certainly take a lot of the fun out of this hobby.
Once they're all noted on the calendar, I physically lay the packets out in order of planting week. Once they're in order, I put them back into storage in order, behind little cards noting the date. Every week I check the calendar "what do I get to start this week?" and then go into the seed box to pull out a preset collection of seed packs. I also write planting dates on the calendar, and hardening off dates 2 weeks before each planting date.
*Local garden shops, not the garden section of big box stores. Why? Because the employees there have to be ready to work in any department, and just because someone is working in the garden section that day, doesn't mean it's their area of expertise. My career is in building costumes for theater, dance, and opera. I'm an excellent tailor and seamstress, and right out of college I worked in a large corporate fabrics and crafts store. I could have been a great source of advice for anyone who had questions about sewing clothing. In two years, I maybe got that question once. Instead, thanks to that guy Murphy, I got asked about glue, and embroidery, and scrapbooking, which I know nothing about. My co-workers who could have answered the glue question got the clothing question on my day off. So if you have a question in a big box store about gardening and the employee doesn't know, don't hold it against them. You're probably talking to someone who is an expert in plumbing or paint. Better to build a relationship with the employees in a local garden shop, who focus exclusively on gardening, and garden in the same region as you do.
Tuesday, November 16, 2021
How I Plan My Garden: Part 2, What Do You Want to Plant?
Monday, October 25, 2021
How I plan my garden: part 1 assessing the past year
One of the best things about gardening is variety and diversity. Every garden has it's own soil, light, climate, microclimate, and variety and layout of plants. Even my next door neighbor won't have exactly the same conditions as me. My goal with this series is not to dictate to you, dear reader, the ONLY WAY TO GARDEN but to share my experience and point to strategies that I hope can apply widely. Take from this what is useful, leave behind what isn't. Combine it with all the other useful information, experience, and advice you find, and create your own garden.
Context--I garden in the northern hemisphere--Western New York State, not far from either Lake Erie or Lake Ontario. I'm in a small town in a fairly open space. Growing zone 5b, lattitude about 43*North, frost free from mid May to mid October. Summer highs in low 90s. Winter lows can get below 0*F, but don't stay there. Teens and 20s is more usual.
Take notes I have established gardens--a vegetable garden and several perennial beds. Planning any year's garden starts with a full assessment of the previous year. I take notes throughout the gardening year of anything I think I will want to know later. Planting times and weather conditions, harvests, what got eaten or died--it's all useful. Lots of people make spreadsheets or use journal apps. I tried, but have discovered that a notebook is what's right for me. I leave space around entries so I can go back and add relevant notes, like the one here. The original entry is seeds that I started indoors. I later added the note "6 weeks--good!" i.e. that they were exactly right to plant out six weeks later.
Assess the previous year In late summer/early fall I walk through all of my gardens and write a detailed summation of how everything did, what kind of harvest I got, etc. If I worked from memory I would probably remember all of the failures and half of the successes. By physically walking the property and writing about every bed, I better capture the full story. This is the time of year that most of the vegetable garden is either in full production or has just finished, so I can capture in the present tense what I wish I had harvested more of and what looks like it struggled due to lack of sun, too much water, too little, etc. I can also note what did really well. This is the starting point for planning next year's garden. I can plan to move the plants that need more sun, grow twice as much of the vegetable that was a big hit, eliminate the one that didn't produce enough to justify the space it took up, or try a new variety that might taste better, produce more, produce sooner, etc.
Sunday, February 28, 2021
Replacing peat moss with PittMoss
Recently, I've been looking for a way to replace peat moss. I have been using it as a major component of both potting mix and seed starting mix.
I've found it difficult to really get good information on how sustainable the harvest of Canadian peat is. I fully admit that intelligent people have and will come to different conclusions about it's sustainability, based on the available information. I've decided to find something that I can be sure has a smaller environment footprint, and doesn't threaten an ancient eco-system.
Lots of people have switched to coconut coir. If it's working for you, great! You have my blessing. For me there are three reasons I'm not impressed. One is that I've seen other gardeners do comparisons between starting seeds in traditional peat mixes and in coir mixes, and the plants in coir did terribly. Downright sickly compared to the peat. Second is that I'm not convinced that shipping coir halfway around the world is more sustainable than responsibly harvested peat from my own continent. Finally, if coir can be a useful soil amendment, I have issue with removing organic soil nutrition from poor nations and further stripping their agricultural wealth.
So yeah, that's a no for me on coir.
A few years ago I heard about a peat substitute being made out of waste paper near Pittsburg. It's called PittMoss, because it's like peat, but made in Pittsburg, get it? So right away that ticks some environmental boxes for me. It's using a waste product, so not only is it not being harvested from a threatened ecosystem, it's also taking garbage out of the wastestream. And it's being manufactured practically in my backyard compared to far northern peat bogs or Asian coconut trees.
I had to try it.
My garden is my science outlet, so I love setting up good, single variable, side by side comparisions when I have a question I want to answer. I mix my own seed starting and potting mix in order to save money, have control over the ingredients, and make a lot at one time. So my standard mix is: 1/3 compost, 1/3 perlite, 1/3 peat, and a small amount of ash to correct the acidicy of the peat. Using 5 gallon buckets for the big components, an old tea cup of wood ash is enough, as pictured.
Tuesday, May 26, 2020
Missing Glimmerglass
The paper tag identifies these as the seeds for Cooperstown. |
Egyptian walking onions, indoor onions about to leave the pot and joint their outdoor sblings. |
Snow peas and snap peas safe and sound above browsing height. |
Years ago we realized that there were iris leaves growing in a shade garden at the costume shop, but they had never flowered. We transplanted them to the sunny side of the shop, and not only did they flower, but they have multiplied to the point where I had to thin them. I spread the thinnings to other iris plantings around the Glimmerglass campus, and still had extras to give away and to bring home. These pale purple iris bloom earlier than other colors. They are always part of my first weeks at the Festival, but for now I am glad to enjoy them at home.
An iris transplated from the Glimmerglass costume shop to my home gardens in Wheatfield |
Tuesday, April 21, 2020
Accessibility in the Age of Corona Virus
I think about accessibility a lot. Maybe because I work with clothing, and I know for sure that "one size fits all" is a lie. Maybe because I'm left handed. 10% of the world's population is left handed, and yet I challenge you to go to any event, class, whatever, where scissors are provided for the participants and check whether 10% of those scissors are left handed. I bet more often than not none of the scissors are left handed.
We can erroneously fall into thinking that accessibility is only about disability. Making sure that our built spaces work for people with legally defined disabilities is important--those laws ensure that public spaces include notices in braille, that TV shows are captioned, that businesses have accessible parking near the entrance with clear space to load and unload out of a side door. But accessibility is so much broader. For one thing, the only reason that any built space doesn't accommodate someone, is because it is just that--a built space. Human designers made it, and at some point made choices that work for a few bodies and minds, but not all. There is no problem at all with the person who the space doesn't accommodate, the problem is with the design plan that didn't take everyone into account. Like my brownie troop leaders who didn't buy a single pair of left handed scissors...in three years.
"One size fits all" is a lie. There is not one way to build a space that is fully accessible, and another that is not. The stairs are best for some, ramps for some, elevators for others. Providing multiple options to the same goal tends to be the best way.
That's not to say that accommodating everyone is easy, or obvious. Here's a mistake I made: among other things, my job includes teaching students how to sew at a sewing machine. I am just a bit over 5 feet tall. One of my tall students was having real difficulty learning to use a sewing machine. He figured out, and then pointed out to me, that the tables our sewing machines are built into were too low for him. His knees banged against the front of the table when he tried to reach the pedal. At my height, it had honestly never occurred to me that this would be a problem for someone with long legs. I asked him to let me think on it. By the next class I had gone to the book store and bought the risers they sell to prop up your dorm bed so that you can shove more crap under it. They worked perfectly!
Even though I solved his difficulty pretty easily, I felt awful, because not only had I failed to see the problem myself, I knew I had had students his height in previous classes, who must have struggled just as much. They hadn't spoken up, I hadn't noticed, they had to struggle for no reason other than that the sewing machine tables were all the same size, but people aren't. I failed to imagine that what fit me comfortably wouldn't fit everyone.
The solution wasn't to raise all of the machines. It's no good to go from only accommodating the shorter half of the class to only accommodating the taller half. the solution was to provide a wider variety of heights, to better accommodate a variety of people.
So yeah, access is important, and easy to miss.
And now that schools at all levels across the country are teaching remotely, there is another layer to access. All of us experience the world with different bodies and different minds, but now we are also experiencing it with different equipment and internet speed.
I am seeing so many assumptions that "what's on my screen must also be what's on your screen" or that video is the only way to conduct class.
What assumptions are we making about what students have access to at home? What assumptions is the school making about what teachers have at home? How do these new access issues stack on top of any student's current access issues around their ability to see, hear, or read print?
Internet speed is different in different locations, especially rural vs. urban. I know so little about "computer stuff" but as I understand it some forms of internet are slowed down by how many people are using it. I was chatting on video with one of my students while we were waiting for the rest of the class to enter the meeting. She was in one room of the house video conferencing for our class, she had two parents both working online from home in other rooms, and a sibling somewhere else in the house also taking class online. I bet this is pretty common for students, whether they are living with family, still in the dorm (some of my students are) or in an apartment with other students.
So I'm trying to keep my eyes open, question my assumptions, and vary the assignments around different platforms. I love getting on video and seeing my students' smiling faces, but I can't assume that video is the best answer for every student, or for every lesson. So I'm doing some video, some discussion forums where we type to each other during class time, some written assignments that can be done in their own time and turned in on the day of class.
Finally, here's the big win for accessibility that we could all pull out of this. All of this stuff we're learning, like how to broadcast a class or meeting while it is happening, we can still do when we are back to meeting in person. So for a student or employee whose attendance is affected by illness, whether something long term like chronic fatigue, or short term like a non-pandemic flu, they can stay home and I can put the class online in real time. At home, I've been doing this by mounting my tablet on a tripod. I can do that on campus too. And that student can either follow along in real time or watch the recording later. It may not be as good as being in attendance, but it's way better than getting notes from a classmate, and it protects the rest of the community if that student has something contagious.
And yes, hopefully lots of businesses are realizing how many of their employees can work from home, and how that opens those jobs up for people whose disabilities make reporting to a work space a lot harder than working from a home work space.
There is a lot that is hard about what we are doing right now, but with some creative thinking we can pull a lot of good from it to carry with us into the future.
Are you working remotely right now? are you teaching? I'd love to hear what you're trying, and what's working to accommodate your students across so many different levels of computer/internet access.