Category Archives: Growing

Divide and Germinate: Space Planning in the Garden

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Garden ViewI just calculated that we have 1,038 square feet under cultivation in the Dirt to Dinner garden, give or take the odd shaped growing bed here or there. Now, how do I divide that up to see how much of what we have room to grow this year? And how much seed do I start to grow that many square feet of a crop?

Thank goodness at least one engineer was here ahead of me to help figure this stuff out. Maybe if I think this thru I will finally understand how to use all the Master Charts in How to Grow More Vegetables.

Peas are the favorite Spring crop around here. And you can actually get a fair amount of snap or snow peas from a square foot of growing space since you can pick them over several months, or as long as the cool weather holds, which is more likely to be the determining factor for us most years. ‘Sugar Daddy‘ was the top snap pea producer in our 2009 Pea Trials, so let’s start there. Sugar Daddy peas need 7-10 days for germination and another 60 days to flower and mature the first pods. If they go in Feb 1st, that makes ten weeks later we’ll have out first peas, around April 12th. In an average year, whatever that is, Zone 9b would have six more weeks of favorable pea weather to enjoy before we could expect the daytime highs to get too high for pea pollen to do it’s thing.

Peas under cageSo, how many peas do we want to eat over that six weeks? Sugar Daddy peas are really best eaten straight off the vine, but a light steaming and some butter work too. I don’t intend to can or freeze them, so we only need to calculate what we actually want to eat fresh. My notes from 2009 look like we grazed over at least four square feet of pea vines to get a family ‘serving’ for a day. In good weather, three or four days later, there were enough new peas to pick those same plants again. So, each four square feet of snap peas could give us two ‘servings’ a week. If we’d like twice that I better put in eight square feet of snap peas, maybe ten to allow for slug damage would be safer. Add to that a couple square feet of snow peas and another four square feet of Alderman shelling peas and we’re up to sixteen square feet of peas.

Easy, right? Mark that on my handy spreadsheet garden plan. Now, just 1,022 square feet to go.

Worm Casting Experiment 1S

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On December 14th we seeded half a flat of ‘Guntmadingen’ Spinach in Ocean Forest potting soil. Ocean Forest isn’t perfect, but I’ve been happy with it and have used a lot of it this year.  Ocean Forest is a blend of worm castings, bat guano, Pacific Northwest sea-going fish and crab meal, composted forest humus, sandy loam, and sphagnum peat moss. Which brings us to the down-side, peat moss. I’m not sure how I feel about using it since it’s not renewable, most of it is imported long distances and it releases lots of carbon as it dries for harvesting. I need to research that to develop a more informed opinion.

My ideal would be not to need to use inputs like bagged potting soil but instead to make all our own compost and seed-starting mixes on site. It’s good to have a goal, but this one might be farther off than I would like since the garden keeps expanding.

Back at the spinach transplanting…

Roughly six weeks later, on January 22nd, we transplanted the best dozen spinach plants. They were all close in leaf size and root length. Six of the plants went into a container with more Ocean Forest potting soil on 6” centers. The other six went into an identical container in the same location with Ocean Forest potting soil on 6” centers. But, this group was also given additional worm castings by mixing fresh castings straight from the worm bins into the top 4” of soil before the spinach was transplanted.

Worm bin layerWorm castings have been shown to improve the activity of beneficial microbes in soil. I’ve seen some reports that 20% worm castings may be ‘ideal’ for flowers and vegetables, with additional worm castings not providing additional benefits. But since we don’t know what percentage of the Ocean Forest mix is already worm castings, we’re testing to see if adding our homegrown castings has a positive effect on plant growth.

Check back here to see how the trial progresses.

Compost and Cabbages

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Coffe Coir Cardboard CompostIsn’t that beautiful? That’s what’s leftover after you get your morning Trenta latte. And now it’s all mine. Of course, I added a few things to the recipe. I started with a layer of sticks and stalks and brush bits that were laying around the yard. I topped that with pulled weeds, spent cole crop leaves and any soil leftover in flats that had been transplanted. Then a layer of cardboard saved from online holiday shopping. I topped it all off with a block of coir someone was throwing out and half a dozen bags of spent coffee grounds. Stir. Wait three months. Serve. Though halfway through I have been known to toss some good potting soil on top of the pile and plant into it ‘half baked’. Wouldn’t be the only thing around here…

Broccoli Sprial 'Veronica'I was surrounded with beauty in the garden today. Just look at this. Is it a broccoli or a cauliflower? I have no idea. It’s called ‘Romanesco’ Broccoli but all I know is it’s fascinating to watch the heads develop. It’s actually a spiral made up of other individual spirals. Think of the math lessons we could cook up with these things. And, broccoli in name or not, when it does cook up, it does so much more like a cauliflower. It has a very mild taste but holds it’s fun shape fairly well post stir-fry.

I planted the Romanesco within a week of the other broccoli starts in the same beds which have long since developed their central heads. So plan on it taking some extra time. Perfect for the family food garden.

Broccoli Side ShootsOf course, the other varieties of broccoli aren’t done. Most of them are just getting to the best part. In many varieties of broccoli, once the plant has produced a central head, which is then removed, it spends it’s energy pumping out lots of delicious side shoots. These perfect side shoots are slated to meet browned butter, garlic and Mizithra cheese right around dinner time tonight. Any shoots that get past the tightly formed stage before I catch them go into salads. Over last winter our fall-planted broccoli kept us in side shoots well into spring.

This year I think it’s going to be arugula that will be the plant that keeps on giving. Though it does eventually go to seed and stop producing edible leaves, it suddenly seems to be everywhere. It’s planted with the onions. It’s planted with the cabbages. It’s coming up in the old bean bed. It’s holding it’s own next to the ‘Purple Osaka’ mustard that is also going to seed for saving. I wonder if I can make pesto out of arugula.

Red Acre Cabbage and Dwarf Siberian KaleAnother thing I need to start cooking more of is cabbage. Though I hate to pull these up, I do have a good recipe for borscht I’ve been meaning to try. I just love the way the deep purple leaves look with the ‘Dwarf Siberian Kale’. Not that they are probably good companion plants. They are both in the same family and have essentially the same growing requirements. I haven’t noticed any ill effects from growing them together. Certainly the kale is happy enough. But slugs will slime across hot cement to get to my red cabbages. I set out a bowl of beer under a patch of cabbages I was trying to save and I swore I could hear slugs laughing at me the next morning. They had ignored the beer completely and eaten the red cabbage leaves down to the leaf spines they left sticking out like bare bones. Remind me whether or not Sluggo is organic.

I may try The Melon Trick, since my husband is eating frighteningly out of season cantaloupe lately. You’re supposed to take a melon rind and lay it dome side up near the slug buffet. If they actually prefer it to my spinach and red cabbage, they should climb into the melon rind during the night and in the morning I can scoop the whole thing up and out of my vegetable patch. My worms certainly love cantaloupe rinds. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Cabbages and CarrotsOr maybe I just need to plant more carrots. These cabbages aren’t totally unblemished, but they have minimal slug damage, especially compared to the red varieties we tried. These are ‘Stonehead’ cabbages grown with ‘Amarillo Yellow’ carrots on one side and ‘Danvers 126 Half-Long’ on the other. They all seem very happy together. The carrots are even starting to size up enough to give us slender ‘baby’ carrots for salad when I thin the patch.

Maybe the red cabbages are just more delicious to slugs? Maybe carrots are hard to slime your way over in order to get to the cabbages? The next thing to test is the amount of slug damage to a patch of red cabbages planted with these same kinds of carrots. Sounds like a great project for next fall.

January Gardening

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Arugula plantPlease try not to hate me. It might be hard when you hear it was over 70 degrees Saturday and I had to spend the bulk of the day in the garden. I couldn’t stay inside. I know it’s January. I know weather like this can’t last even in California. But it was still wonderful.

I found this giant volunteer arugula growing contentedly on the edge of last year’s bean patch. I may have munched a few of those leaves after the picture was taken, but it clearly has plenty, and it’s not even close to going to seed. Several of the pampered arugula starts in the raised bed nearby are already sending up fuzzy flower stems. I was planning to let five or ten of them go to seed for saving, but maybe I should wait on this one instead.

French Green Lentil SproutsAnother wonderful surprise was seeing how well the lentils have sprouted. In our family, my mother-in-law is a legendary cook. If you want to get the kids to try something new, all you have to do is tell them, “Grandma Susan made it,” and they head to the table salivating. Our youngest is especially partial to Grandma’s lentil soup, which is made with the small ‘French Green‘ lentils that look like little grey rocks. When I saw these available through Bountiful Gardens, I had to try growing some. And the sprouts look healthy so far. French Green lentils are supposed to like cool weather, unlike the Asian varieties that are a lot prettier, if you ask me. But what really matters is how they taste in that soup!

Rat-tailed radish sproutsWe’ve also got some Rat-Tailed Radishes and two small sections of Golden Beets coming up nicely–for once! Germination for Golden Beets here has been a fraction of what we get for the red beets we grow. And I honestly don’t know why. Maybe the red beets do better in warmer weather and the golden ones need cooler temperatures to germinate well? I’ll keep experimenting because I love golden beets and this is the first time I have gotten them started well. Hopefully, I’m on a roll. The patch has already been through it’s first careful thinning. I thought I would need small scissors but it ended up working fine to just pinch the stems of the beets chosen to be eaten as micro-greens with my fingernails. I’ll go through the patch again in a week to keep them spaced far enough apart that their leaves don’t touch.

Persian Cress transplantsThe rest of my day was spent on the Spring Salad Garden, which ended up planted in containers on the patio in the back garden. I transplanted Persian Cress, a variety of lettuce varieties, Bloomsdale and Guntmadingen spinaches. I seeded one pot with Beta Salad Mix and another with two varieties of Romaine, because we like it and because Frank Tozer says it’s one of the most nutritious kinds of lettuce to grow.

The salad garden ended up on the back patio because it’s close to the kitchen and well-lit. Even if it’s already dark when it’s time to put together a dinner salad, we can still pop out to the patio and snip away. And I am hoping that slugs and snails will find it very annoying to have to climb vertically on dry terracotta in order to attempt to ruin my salad greens. Earlier this week we were running late getting dinner together and had to pick spinach by flashlight. We discovered dozens of slugs had gotten there ahead of us. Yuck!

Salad Days

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Green onionWe actually managed to over-winter a few loose-leaf varieties of lettuce and a surprisingly hardy French chicory whose leaves turned a gorgeous deep burgundy in the cold weather. But most of our winter salads are made of chard, spinach, mustard greens, beet greens, radish sprouts, arugula and green onions we discovered bursting out of a compost pile. Now that we are on the far side of the Winter Solstice, I’m starting the Asian greens–the Pac Chois and Chinese Asparagus–and a much more expansive salad garden.

I chose High Mowing Seeds ‘Beta Mix’ to anchor the salad garden this spring. It’s a blend of beet and chard varieties that should have no trouble germinating even if we have a cold February. Of course, that’s anybody’s guess. The next ten days of weather here call for Sunny and 60’s which will make a wonderful germination window for just about anything I want to plant as long as I can keep all the seedbeds moist enough.

I plan to include spinach, mostly the Guntmadingen from Adaptive Seed, several Romaine varieties and some ‘Rubin’ lettuce they gave me yesterday when I made the pilgrimage to Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds in Petaluma. The ‘Rubin’ leaves have a warm red-gold color that just has to be good for you.

If I can bear to cut and compost more of the favas and other cover crops, I’ll also put in some of Territorial Seeds Italian Saladini blend. But the problem with lettuces is that you really don’t want them all at once, you want them over time. Unfortunately, the window of optimal eating for any individual lettuce plant is actually very short. I’m using two different strategies to try to keep the family in salads this spring. First, I’m planting mixed varieties, so not all the plants in the mix are ready at once. And, second, I’m planting in small sections every couple of weeks from here until the weather gets settled and really warm and we switch over to eating orach and other summer greens and tomatoes and cucumbers fill our salad bowls.

Are you starting the spring salad garden yet? What are you putting in this year?