Rain or Shine

Potting Up

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By Hand in Hand Parenting February 22, 2009

The tomato seeds start out in little pellets, and the irony is not lost on me that I am growing “local” food by starting seeds in a product that has come all the way from Vietnam.

Starting Local Food in Fiber Grow from Vietnam

Digging up peat bogs to dry them and ship them to gardeners everywhere contributes to global warming, so I thought I was doing a good thing by getting Fiber Grow pellets. But once I got home and turned the package over and read the Made in Vietnam sticker, I wasn’t so sure anymore. It takes a lot of resources to ship not-peat moss around the world too.

Tomato Sprouts

Anyway, the tomatoes, for better or worse, begin their lives on the top of the refrigerator in their Vietnamese fiber homes. It takes a week or two sometimes at the right temperature for them to germinate. They like to be warm. The first batch I started, only about half of them ever sprouted at all.

Once they have “true” leaves, the tomatoes and their Vietnamese pots go into the regular 6-packs you might see at the garden store.

First Potting

They will stay in the 6-packs for several weeks until they begin to fill out, develop stronger stems, make more leaves and start to be recognizable as tomato plants.

The next time the plants are potted up, they will be set deep into individual containers with potting soil

Tomato Starts in 6-pack

and a little mature compost to help them grow strong. This may sound nasty, but you bury them deep enough in the new pots that some of the early leaves will be under the soil, so you carefully tear these leaves off. Where the leaves were on the stems, roots will grow in the soil making the plant sturdier when it finally sees the garden soil.

The tomato seeds that I started in early January are just now moving into their own pots for the first time, so this process has taken about 6 weeks. It takes a long time to grow tomatoes from seed but I am really looking forward to all the pasta sauce and sundried tomatoes, salads, catsup…

Tomatoes in Four Sizes

The Great Raised Bed Debate

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By Hand in Hand Parenting February 5, 2009

I was clearly naive about the number of options for raised beds there were to consider. Long gone are the days when my mother tossed a couple of railroad ties against the hillside and called it a garden. And the cost has changed too!

These gorgeous beds from Naturalyards would have cost well over a

Naturalyards Cedar

$1000 to hold the Dirt to Dinner growing plots for each of the kids. Not quite what we had budgeted for! But if money were no object, these would be the beds for me. They are beautiful, easy to assemble, available in lots of size choices and look like they would last a generation.

Link-A-Bord

I also like the idea of Link-a-Bord bins that would have snapped together. They are made of all recycled materials. They are light and easy to construct. They come with two different depths, both a little shallower than I like for vegetable gardening, but reasonably priced. They still have the nice, neat look that any realtors scanning the neighborhood would approve of.

There were also quite an array of sizes and shapes to choose from. Want a good geometry exercise for the kids? How many square feet of space do you get with this?

Traingle Raised Beds

It’s an equilateral triangle with 7’ sides. Then it has another equilateral triangle on top so you can have that section be twice the planning depth of the large triangle ends, so now you really need to look at the cubic feet,…

When the calculator cooled off, it didn’t make sense to go with the funky shapes, much as I wanted to.

Paver Raised Beds

Lee Valley had some great kits where you use 16” pavers and their hardware to build beds. These things probably would have survived the next Big One, but somehow concrete and kids and all those nuts and bolts didn’t work for me for this project. Though I love Lee Valley and the excuse to get some fun tools would have been worth it.

I was hoping to get back to the more natural “wild” look of at least the Natruayards design, if not something onto the other side of that when I came across a post on a gardening chat site that referred to the 600 year-old technology of raised bed design used in English gardens. That’s when I found mastergardenproducts.com.

Historic Willow Raised Beds

Modern Willow Raised Beds

Oh yeah. That’s as granola-y as they come. It’s perfect. Sadly, it’s nearly impossible to find enough Willow that size to make similar boxes today, but the ones we’ll be using in the Dirt to Dinner garden will look something like the modern ones before we seal them with linseed oil, line them and fill them with our garden planting mix.

I’m a little worried that the sticks will need some kind of covering on the top to keep from sticking us, but I’m sure we’ll figure something out. And we may even weave some of our own versions to see how they compare.

Garden in a Jar

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By Hand in Hand Parenting January 30, 2009

Sprouting Jar

When kids put a seed in the ground, what comes up looks nothing like the seed they started with. So, to get a bug’s eye view of the sprouting process that usually happens under ground, and to help in the identification of what is going to come up in their garden beds, it’s fun to make a sprouting jar when you are planting your garden bed with seeds.

Take any clear glass or plastic container and line it with a fairly sturdy layer of absorbant paper, like a good paper towel. Pour an inch or so of water into the jar and let it soak up the paper towel, wetting the towel to the sides of the jar. Adjust as needed to see that the paper makes good contact with the side of the jar.

As you choose seeds to plant in your seed bed, save one seed of each variety you plant for the sprouting jar. Using a flat plant label or a popsicle stick, slide the seed down into the jar between the glass and the wet paper towel.

Sprouting Seeds

Then mark on the outside of the container what you’ve added. I wrote right on the outside of the jar with a permanent marker. At this point it’s also a good idea to tape down the top edge of the paper towel so you don’t accidentally move the seeds away from their labels.

Set the jar in a warm spot where you won’t forget about it and make sure to add water every day so that the paper towel, and the seeds, stay moist.

Day 2

In just 24 hours we already had our first sprout, a radish!
jar-day-2_01-30-09_0151

Day 3

Here’s how the radish is looking. And you can also see that the cucumber next door has begun to sprout as well.

Radish Day 3

And here is the very beginning of a pea sprout.

Pea Sprout Tip

2/6/2009

Sprouts are here!

Cucumber Sprout

Radish Sprout

Pea and Bean Sprouts

Corn Sprout

From Dirt to Dinner

Learning in the Garden

Tag Archives: kitchen garden

Rain or Shine

Potting Up

The Great Raised Bed Debate

Garden in a Jar

Project Specifics