Category Archives: Learning

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.

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?

Winter Potatoes

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Potatoes in Grow Bag

Tail End of Potato Season

I’m growing potatoes through the winter as an experiment. They don’t look too bad in the bags in the back garden. Though the planting in the front garden got hit by a little frost and was looking pretty ragged before it hit me that I should just hill them deeper and protect them with soil until it warms a bit.

I think if I timed it right, I could have potatoes growing year round. It’s only December and January that are tricky. If I had them ready for the plants to start dying back by December anyway, the potatoes in the ground would be safe here. The ground doesn’t freeze even if we do get a little frost. Then I could get new seed potatoes in the ground in January and could easily cover the sprouts for a few weeks after they were up to keep the frost off, letting them grow up after Valentine’s Day or so.

If each planting took ~100 days between seed potatoes and potato salad, I could plant January through September. Of course, it’s tough to get seed after March or so. I would need to store the seed or save my own for the April through September plantings. And some seed potatoes, though I honestly don’t know which varieties, need to rest before they will sprout, so I can’t just immediately reuse the potatoes I’d be harvesting. I’d have to set aside seed staggered three or four months before I wanted to plant it. (I’m gonna need a spreadsheet here in a minute.)

Seed Balls forming on Potato Plants

True Seed for Potatoes

I have some Desiree seed potatoes I bought for the fall planting that I haven’t used yet and they are barely starting to sprout now that it’s January. So, saving through that part of the year clearly could work. And I might try growing some potatoes from actual seed. This plant from the 2010 summer garden bloomed and formed seed balls. I know the seed may not breed true for the variety, but it could give us a variety that we like or maybe even one that would adapt to the conditions here over the years. Several gardening authors have information available on how to do those sorts of experiments. Though I can already tell from the current potatoes growing in the front garden that we’ve got at least one variety out there that has weathered the frost better than the others. Maybe it will make seeds and give us some material to start with that already shows an advantage for my year-round potato planting scheme.

January Blooms

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Thyme and 'Negreta' Fava Beans

Thyme for Favas

OK, fine. I broke down and grew a flower. Sure, the blooms might be technically edible, but I admit it, I am growing something in the garden that’s not for eating. Those of you who know me might suspect that it’s not actually just one flower. It’s a lot of flowers. More on that in a minute. First, these beauties, surrounded by my Extra Thyme plants, are ‘Negreta’ fava beans that are about ready to transplant into the garden. That will make three varieties of favas on the place, growing lots of biomass, holding the soil together and deflecting some of the compaction from the rains, fixing nitrogen, and making winter beans for the crock pot. And they do make really nice black and white flowers. But those aren’t the flowers I’m talking about.

Flat of Blue Borage, Rutabagas and Spinach

Baby Blue Borage

This year, for the first time, we’re growing over a dozen beneficial or “insectary” plants that are either good companions for crops we especially like, are good food for pollinators or insects we like having around the garden or do good things for the garden soil.  The first one we started, shown here on the right, is Blue Borage which is supposed to have flowers that taste like cucumbers but we’re trying it as a companion for beans, spinach, strawberries and maybe one of the tomato patches as well. It should bloom a good part of the year and we can always toss it in a salad in an emergency cucumber shortage.

We’ve also got some nice looking Calendula coming up from Seeds of Change seed I’ve been hanging onto since 2007. I had no idea it would still sprout but it looks fine so far. We’re also trying ‘Tangerine Gem’ and ‘Pesche’s Gold’ Marigolds, which are supposed to be bad for the bad nematodes, Cleome, Zinnias, Echinacea, Cosmos, Mexican Sunflowers, ‘Texas Hummingbird’ Sage and Alyssum.

Persian Cress Sprouts

Is Persian Cress like English Watercress?

And that doesn’t take into account the herbs, like my Extra Thyme, which is growing in several spots in the garden. We’re also starting Sweet Marjoram, Italian Flat-Leaf parsley, Mexican Tarragon and I’m not sure which category to put the Sesame in. I thought it would be fun to try to grow our own sesame seeds. Does that count as an herb? And does anyone know the difference between ‘Persian’ Cress and English Watercress? Are they related? That’s gardening for you. It always brings up more questions than it answers!