Exploring gardening philosophies

Over the last year I have done a lot of exploring.
I just felt my garden could do better, I could do better in and for my garden.
Over the years I have experimented with a lot of ideas from books, magazines and info I find on-line, don't get me wrong they aren't all bad but after you read them all you constantly find that everyone thinks theirs is the best possible way to grow the greatest amount of vegetables possible or they contradict each other or you try it out and have the worst vegetable harvest ever, like I did last year.
Everyone nowadays seems to be an expert. Every garden show I go to have plenty of those experts some know what they are doing, but some don't, even they think they do.
I know a lot of things about gardening but I don't think I'll ever would think I am an expert to tell people how to garden.....nope I am not garden show ready.

So first here is my disclaimer: whatever I write here on my blog are my experiences and trials in gardening, and I don't take any responsibility of you are copying what I am doing and now your crops failed, your vegetable garden is a mess, whatever.......I don't know it all!

so that's being said, I have decided I am staying with the experts, I am going to learn and study organic growing philosophies that have been done for a long time, with lot's of trials and research that show it works.

Sorry weatherman, that lost his job and likes to garden and now gives lectures about his gardening experiment......your method just didn't work out for me. You don't know what you're talking about and I finally figured out why all my seedlings died on me last year, why my seeds did not want to sprout and my harvest was meager. It was the leaves I put in spring on my beds, the ones I got from the city leaf pile and were full of Oak leaves and Walnut tree leaves and you said it would be alright to put them on even that late in the season, short time before planting. Comes out these leaves have growth inhibitors that prohibits seeds from sprouting and hinders the growth of young seedlings, and those leaves need to be first broken down, composted, to use them in your vegetable-garden.

This I first learned from an old book from Rodale Press named "High-Yield-Gardening" that is out of print but still can be searched for and found used on the Internet.
I don't know about you but I trust the books Rodale Press releases, since Rodale Institute has a large organic gardening research facility that documents what works and doesn't work and they have been doing it for a long time. I also found many found references in the other books I have been reading,  "to only use composted leaves or if you put them on your vegetable-beds let them compost down on the beds for at least half a year or more until they turn into leaf mold" none said to put leaves directly on your beds a short time before planting.

I learned about the 'leave' issue in old Biodynamic gardening books,

the method Rudolf Steiner 
promoted after he found the food quality diminishing after long years of  industrial farming and tried to get farmers back to natural ways of agriculture in harmony with nature,

including in harmony with the moon, the planets and the stars .

I read about composting leaves first in the Bio Intensive books from John Jeavons

one of the founders of the Ecology Action Organization and Research facility in California. Biointensive is practically a combination of the French-Intensive Gardening technique from the 1800 and the Rudolf Steiner Biodynamic Method.

And I read about this in the Perma-Culture book "Gaia's Garden",
at least in concern for vegetable garden areas.
Perma-Culture which has the concept of using your garden and the whole property as an eco system, incorporating sustainable designs, natural areas, including backyard farm animals and food forests wants you to never have to bring anything from the outside in to feed and nourish your garden, it all is supposed to be sustained by what you grow and compost from your property and so you design your whole property accordingly......just think Permanent Culture.
Again Permaculture borrows much of its core philosophy from another method, which is Rudolf Steiners Biodynamic gardening even it lacks the mystical elements.

All of these methods tell you to compost your leaves before growing your vegetables in them, so that's what I am going to do.

At first when I started reading these books I thought it was all a bit too complicated but as I started to read all the books simultaneously I realized that all these methods really have all the same philosophy and follow the same principles. "Garden with Nature!" and "Garden sustainable!"and "Use the land to grow your food so you get most out of it with the least amount of land used!"
So I will take the principles that fit my need (sorry John Jeavon.....I don't think I'll do the double digging) and once I figure it all out, including that "Planting by the Moon" I think I'll be set.
Learning from the experts will make my garden grow better!

Strawberry towers

This is just a funny garden year. There it is was mid June and still rainy outside. I looked at my weather report every day, hoping for this 5 day forecast of sun, just to be cheated over and over again.
I found myself planning my schedules by the dry and sunny days. Going shopping only happens on the rainiest days, forget going to town if it is sunny outside. I needed that day to catch up in my yard. 
But finally we got some nice Summer-like weather, I just hope it will last.
The weeds really seemed to like this wet weather, they are growing just like weeds. Or maybe it is just that I couldn't weed all the time and so there will be now weeds all summer. Since our summer arrived I have been outside almost all day, trying to catch up. This i one of the reasons I have been neglecting my blog for a while. I am just so busy outside I hardly have time to do anything else.
So I was really behind planting my Peppers and Eggplants, which I just managed to plant two weeks ago. But even they had been in the small pots for a long time, they are growing so nicely and are already setting peppers. I think using the home-made warming tray has really helped growing healthy and strong plants. Usually I was lucky to get a few peppers late season.
They do say that if you stunt the growth of the heat loving plants like Peppers, Eggplants and Tomatoes they sometimes never catch up anymore and greatly reduce production. My sun-room is just too cold in February to grow anything, having the warming tray is making a big difference.

My first Strawberries, even they were slowly getting ripe, were getting all mushed out by the rain. It wasn't too big of a loss since they didn't really taste all that good anyway. The rain washed all the sweet, strawberry flavor out of them.
But now the weather is perfect strawberry weather and I am picking a large bowl of Strawberries every other day and they are sweet and juicy. Since I am so busy weeding and catching up in my yard I mainly made some of my quick Strawberry Tart and some Ice cream with them. Luckily I only grow Ever-bearing Strawberries so I will have a long harvest and hopefully will be able to make some strawberry jam later in the season.

Strawberries use a lot of yard, especially if you grow enough to make jam and freeze. The area my strawberries are growing in right now will be my new flower and shrub garden, it is our second lot and eventually we'll built a smaller house there. Lucky me, I get to start some of my new garden before there is a house.

This way at least some of it will be established and I get to move my favorite plants from my old garden to the new. I already got started on some of the new garden, but the strawberries are in the way and need to get moved.

 I wanted to move them to my Kitchen-garden, which is fenced in. Already I grow all my other berries in the lower part of this garden, but there just isn't enough room for that many strawberries. To have strawberries down there I needed to go vertical.

For two years I have been looking at the strawberry towers at the Raintree Nurseries website, thinking I like to make my own, but I have been trying to find bigger diameter tubes then the ones they usually have at the Home depot, but never found anything larger then 4" or 8" which I think is not wide enough to grow them successfully. I know from searching online many people make them with the smaller sized tubes, but I just felt there wasn't enough room for the roots and enough dirt to sustain the roots in there.
I also think plastic just gets too hot for the berries and thinking of all the chemicals in the plastic I am not sure I even wanted plastic tubes for growing strawberries.

So one day I saw these strawberry towers in the  Stark Brothers Catalog, which consisted of a small wire cage and coconut fiber mats you can fill with dirt and then plant with your berries. It was a bit small but I liked the idea that the plants had more dirt around their roots and no plastic involved.
So I got the idea of making something similar out of sturdy fencing, some fence posts and coconut fiber mats.

I just cut the fencing into 6 feet high x 35 inch wide sections, rolled them into a tube 33 inch diameter, wiring the length sides together, overlapping just 2 inches to make it sturdier. Then I cut the coconut fiber mat into the same size, rolled it into a tube and inserting it in the wire tower. Now all I had to do fill it up with some good soil mix, watering it well and plant the strawberries. Since my new mail-ordered strawberries were already waiting for me, I had to plant them right away. To plant I just cut some holes into the coconut fiber mat, poked a hole into the dirt and carefully inserted the strawberries. It is a bit tricky to do without hurting the plants. Then I watered it again, to wash the dirt well around the roots. One thing I would do different next time is to let the dirt filled tower sit for a few days before planting the strawberries in it. After a week the dirt had settled a bit and pulled some of the berries down into the wire a bit. I pulled them back up, but my suggestion is wait a week, water it daily and let it settle before planting.

I added a mini bubbler-dripper on top of each tower and connected it to my timed irrigation, the towers will dry out a bit quicker then on flat ground and the berries need a good amount of water to produce berries.
They are growing for about a month in there now and even I lost a few plants, the remaining plants are growing nicely and starting to set some fruit. As the berries produce some runners I will be pinning the new plants into new holes and by next year maybe have all of the tower filled with plants.

Growing them vertical will be not just a space saver I think it will keep them cleaner and more disease free.
And I get to use their old space for my new flower garden.

disclaimer: Not to be shared with the Dervaes Family of Path to Freedom Website. Thank You 

Seed tape update

I have been a bit to busy working in my garden to be posting. Spring and early summer is always my busiest time in the garden with weeding, pruning, planting new plants and getting things started. It should slow down somewhat soon, although I have a few projects I like to accomplish this year. I will tell about my garden projects in another post. Hopefully soon.

So I tried out the seed tape I bought online. I glued some seeds on with a cornstarch paste making sure I used a enough of the paste so they would stick to it. You are supposed to be able to just roll the whole thing up once the glue dries and then plant the seed tape when you want to plant it.
Well, let me tell you so far I am not impressed with the product, maybe I am doing something wrong but one should think you would get at least some vegetables out of the deal.
I started with carrot seeds, three different varieties, fresh seeds purchased this spring. I planted them right away after the glue was dry. I added some light dirt thinly on top of the seed tape and watered it. It would not stay moist, dried out faster then I could wet it. My whole vegetable garden is on automatic watering with drip irrigation, I even added some micro sprayers, thinking it needed more water then I was giving it. It still dried out to fast. I had my timer go off twice a day, total watering time was one hour but it didn't help. Nothing sprouted.
Then I set my timer to go off 4 times a day for 15 minutes at each cycle. Still nothing sprouted, it was a bit moister then before but still after about 1 1/2 months I only got a few carrot plants with my efforts.
We did have quite some hot days in May, but it wasn't that hot when I first put down the tape, they should have been sprouting.
Late May I tried the same with some Bulb Fennel seeds. Usually Fennel sprouts for me quite easy. I read something online that maybe the corn in the cornstarch might be responsible. So this time I used Elmers glue. I wanted to plant them next day, but then I didn't have time so I rolled the tape up and put it in my seed box to plant it out next chance I get.
By the time I put the seed tape in the garden, some of the seeds had fallen off. I somewhat suspected that would happen. I planted them at the proper depth for Fennel, kept it moist and even covered it with some lightweight garden fleece to keep the moisture in.
After 3 weeks I got about 6 Fennel seedlings that is from 48-56 planted seeds.
This time because the tape was a bit deeper in the ground it looked like it kept moist enough for the seeds to sprout. I don't understand why those seeds won't sprout. All my other vegetables started the old fashioned way have sprouted and are growing.
I even tried to grow Radishes with the tape, not one single seedling I got out of that, while the control group sprouted fine, grew and has been consumed already.
I used seed tape, which had seeds sandwiched between years ago, it was real thin tissue like paper which almost dissolved shortly after planting. Those seeds sprouted very quickly and easily.
Now I am thinking, could it be that the Chlorine in the paper is keeping the seeds from sprouting? The seed tape is made with white bleached paper, or could it be the printing ink?
Or is the problem that it is made with just thin paper instead of tissue paper?

This product if I would rate it from 1 to 10, I would give it a 1-. I won't use it again and I suggest to everyone to not bother ordering this product. Something should have been sprouting, at least the Radish should have.

I could could kick myself, because I first trusted this product so much that unfortunately I did not seed any carrots the conventional way and so now I am without the early carrots.

Oh well.

Seed tape review

I finally got the Seed Tape, where you can use your own seeds. It took a long time to arrive. Accordingly they got too many orders and ran out of it. Only they never mentioned that to me until I e mailed them asking what happened with my order.
I don't like it when they right away charge me and then don't send it out. Hey what is with that? I like my money do interest on my account, not yours!
I ordered March 20th and it arrived just last Friday, May 1st. I was not aware that they are producing it themselves, they don't say on their website. This was their excuse, they could not produce it fast enough because of the large amount of orders.
I thought it would be just like the fleece paper seed tape I am familiar with, where you sandwich the seeds between the seed tape and it is self stick.

Now I have it in front of me, I can see it is just thin, bleached, white paper, I don't even think it is made of recycled paper. It probably will disintegrate fine, but is it organic enough for me?
It certainly is not as I imagined it. You have to glue each seed on to the tape. I wonder if they will stick long enough to not fall off before you get them out in the garden. I certainly don't want to use toxic glue in my organic garden. Maybe I manage to sandwich the seed between to strips of paper. I was hoping for something quick and easy, this does not look quick. At least one can make seed tapes when it is raining outside, I guess that is a bit of a time saver.
Nevertheless, even I am a bit skeptical I will try them out. There will be an update.

Planting with home made Seed Tape

Sometimes I have a hard time planting the tiny seeds without wasting to many seeds. It is really hard to spread the small seeds at a proper distance, often you can't even see where you put them. I hate to waste so many seeds, but even more annoying is the extra work I have, having to pull the excess seedlings to make room for the ever growing plants.

When I still lived in Germany, 25 years ago, they sold many varieties of vegetables in Seed tape. It was a fleece type paper, similar to tissue paper which easily dissolved once planted.
It was so easy to plant. You just tore the right amount off and laid it in proper distance on the bed, spread some soil on top. Done!

In my early gardening days in the US, I often looked for Seed Tape in the plant catalogs, never found it until a few years ago.
Some things just take a long time to make their entrance to the US.
We are such a progressive country, for some reason we are often behind the rest of the world in new things.
For just a few years you finally can find Seed Tapes in a few catalogs, very few catalogs that is. But they have such a small amount of seed varieties offered that it is hardly worth bothering with it. Especially for gardeners which like Heirloom Vegetables.

Luckily they are easy to make yourself. All you need is some tissue like paper. Toilet paper works well, I like to use commercial type paper towels, like they often have in restaurants bathrooms.
Then you need some glue, like Elmer's Glue or you can do what I do, just boil some Cornstarch in water until it is thick like glue, it works just as well and there are no chemicals involved.
I don't have exact measurements for it because I just mix a little Cornstarch in water, cook it and if not thick to my liking I add some more Cornstarch and repeat. Just remember not to get it too thick, because it has to be able to come out of a squeeze bottle. After it cools down a bit transfer to an old glue bottle and you are set.
To make the Seed tape, I put little dabs of the glue mix in the right distance for the seeds to grow. I seed mine a bit closer, just to make sure I have enough sprouting. Rarely all the seeds will sprout, and the few extra seedlings I just pull when needed.


Then I put the seeds on the little daps of glue and cover the sheet with another paper towel, labeled with the varieties name, so I don't confuse the plants.
Now all you have to do let them dry, fold them up and next time you get out to the garden, lay them on the prepared garden bed, cover with a bit of soil and you are done planting.

The nice thing about it is, that when the weather is too rainy to go outside to plant, you can prepare the seed tape inside, knowing once the rain has stopped, you quickly can plant your seeds.

So after I made these seed tapes, I found this product on the web.
Make your own seed tape http://seed-tape.com/index.html, just like the Seed tape I knew in Germany. You just add your own seeds. I think I will order some of that.
Go figure, I have been looking for that for such a long time and right after I make my own, there it is.