Tools to grow your seeds

I just found a neat, low tech tool for figuring out when you need to start your seeds indoor or outdoor and when to plant them in your garden.
All you need to know is when your last and first frost is in your growing area, a printer and some printer paper. It is like a little booklet you print out and then you add your frost dates and then you fold it and staple it together. Voila! you are done.
It has a place for adding your notes, or you could add more vegetable names.
It is so nice, there are so many resources for the gardener on the web. Gardeners are very resourceful kind of people, very inventive and just as they like to share their plants, they like to share what they come up with. Thank you Ivory for sharing this neat tool.

Seedling potting mixes, home made

I have been looking in my garden books for some seed and potting soil mixes and like to share some.

Many of the older recipes call for peat moss, peat moss is not a sustainable material so I like to substitute coco fiber for it. This used be hard to find but now you can buy coco fiber in many home and garden stores. The other common ingredients in these mixes are vermiculite, perlite, sand, coarse sand, milled sphagnum peat moss, leaf mold, compost, good garden soil.
Then some nutrient ingredients you might need for potting soil, which are cotton seed, rock phospate, green sand, blood meal, bone meal, lime, wood ash.

Here are the recipe and the source they are from.

Seedling mixes

1. from the Lane County Master Gardener Association, Eugene, Oregon
'Garden Rhytm-A year round guide and journal for the maritime Northwest

Seedling mix

1 part garden soil or finished Compost
1 part equal amounts of sand, vermiculite, and perlite
1 part coconut fiber

mix all ingredients together. To sterilize, bake the soil in an uncovered pan at 180°F for 30 to 60 minutes.

2. from the old garden book stable Rodale,
'All new encyclopedia of Organic Gardening-the indispensable Resource for every Gardener'
page 529

they suggest for a soil less mix using the ingredient alone or mix two or more together. No proportions are given, so you have to experiment
Ingredients given are
vermiculite, milled sphagnum peat moss (you can substitute coconut fiber), perlite, and compost. Use it to grow until the seedlings have their first true leaves and then transplant them in a richer potting mix.

3. from the same Rodale book. If you like to start the seedlings in a richer mix so you don't have to transplant them.
combine equal amounts of compost and vermiculite

4. From the book 'Growing Vegetables west of the Cascades' by Steve Solomon

Seedling mix

1 part by volume garden soil
1/2 part by volume finely screened compost
1/2 part by volume sifted and premoisted sphagnum moss
Blend into each cubic foot (5 gallons) of mix:
2 cups complete organic fertilizer (see below)
1/2 cup agricultural lime (in addition to what is the complete organic fertilizer)

He suggests if you have sandy garden soil to add vermiculite instead of sphagnum moss

Solomon's Fertilizer mix

4 parts seed meal (cotton seed or canola meal are available in our region, also can use linseed meal and soybean meal, all oil seed is generally similar in fertility (6% Nitrogen - 4% Phosporos - 2 % pottasium)
½ part lime (best is an equal mix of agricultural lime and dolomite)
½ part phosphate rock or bone meal (steamed or raw)
½ part kelp meal (any kind of pure seaweed meal from anywhere)

5. from the book 'Great Garden Formulas' from the Rodale company
page 71

Seedling mix

1 part vermiculite
1 part compost (sifted)
Milled sphagnum peat moss, or clean fine sand

Blend vermiculite into compost and fill flats or small (4") pots with the mix.
sow your seeds as directed
Sprinkle a fine dusting of moss or sand on the surface of the mix to discourage the fatal disease called 'damping off' that can infect seedlings at ground level in moist conditions.

6. same book, page 74
This is a High fertility seed starting mix from the Zephyr Farm in Stoughton, Wisconsin

¼ cup ground limestone
1 ½ cups Fertility mix (see recipe below)
3-gallon Bucket (for measuring)
2 buckets sphagnum peat moss (substitute coco fiber)
1 ½ buckets vermiculite
1 ½ buckets compost, shredded and sifted (first spread compost on tarp to dry and shred (if possible), then sift it through ¼-inch hardware cloth)

Sprinkle the ground limestone and Fertility mix over the peat and mix thoroughly
Add the vermiculite and compost and mix well
Yield: 15 gallons of seed starting mix
note: to fill seedling containers, moisten the mix so that you can feel a little moisture when you touch it.
You don't need any extra fertilizer as long you don't overwater, which leaches out the nutrients.

The Zephyr Farm Organic fertility mix

2 cups rock phospate
2 cups green sand
2 cups blood meal
½ cup bone meal
¼ cup kelp (seaweed) meal
yield: 6-3/4 cups

mix all ingredients together
sprinkle the Fertility mix over 15 gallons of commercial potting soil, or stir into the seed starting formula above

Getting Ready Or Not

I am getting ready to start my new kitchen garden for this year. Or am I?
In this region, you must take your chance to go out, when it comes. The chance is, when the rain stops.

Last week I got out, it was a nice, rare sunny Oregon winter day. I was able to fill up some of my garden beds with some home made compost and some mint compost from Lane Forest Product, which is one of our local yard waste and wood recyclers. They sell all kinds of garden dirt and compost. Mint compost I have been told is a great supplement for tired and hard soil. I never heard of Mint compost before I moved here. Oregon used to have a lot of Mint farms, for Mint oil production, it leaves over a lot of waste material. Anyway I tried it last year and it seemed to do a good job. My dirt is looking better already. I am not making enough compost to fill these new garden beds so I am glad there are many places in town to get compost.

I just started last year converting some of my beds into raised Beds. Before, I just heaped the soil up into rectangular beds. There nothing was holding up the soil, eventually it all slipped into the walk ways, the neighbors cats, didn't help the matter either. They like to dig in my garden beds to do their business in it. I don't like the cats.
I didn't like how the weeds kept blowing into the beds from the walk way, it was hard to keep up with weeding. So I found these garden beds made in England at Gardener Supply Co, they are made of recycled plastic, you stick them together and they are affordable. They work and so far I am happy with them. Last year I did not have enough dirt to fill them. So I had to finish filling them up this year.
I also got a few more of the slim ones, for my Raspberries. I didn't like how the Raspberries constantly spread all over in the corner of the vegetable garden. They are shallow rooted and the boxes are 10" high. I put one of these fabrics for putting under mulch on the bottom, wrapping it in the inside of the box, then filled it up with my dirt mix and replanted them. I hope it works.
I like to garden, but I don't like unnecessary work. Anything I can do to reduce unnecessary work is good.


This week I was planning to put some of my seeds in the ground and in pots. But first I wanted to put all my seed information, when to plant what, according to the last Frost Date for our region into my
Garden Database software I have on my computer. Let me tell you, there is a lot of conflicting information about when the last and first frost is supposed to be. How is a Transplanted Gardener to know when to start what? Some claim the first frost to be May 21. others April 24., which is almost a month apart. I have been in this area only for 6 years, I have not yet seen any frost past April, so I chose the April date.
The week is not over yet, but so far I have not been able to get one seed into a pot. Instead I spent too much time, finding and sorting information on my computer and ordering new seeds.
Never mind I got some nice seeds, they were all open pollinated mostly Heirlooms. Open pollinated seeds fit more into my picture of trying to be a Self sustainable gardener. Luckily for me there are more and more companies selling Open-pollinated and Heirloom Vegetable Seeds. There are so many online companies, it took me a long time to make up my orders. I have more seeds of varieties then I need or could grow in one season. I am all for variety, trying new things.
To me gardening is all about the adventure, doing things differently, experiencing new things and constantly learning something new. And having fun doing it.
If I just could get organized and get them started.