Potting Soil

My Dad and little sister transplant Coleus

 This time of year is dirt making time.  We need potting soil for starting seedlings, planning decorative combination pots and hanging baskets and I always need some on hand for dividing perennials and rounding up volunteer seedlings.  I remember at my family’s greenhouse, in late winter, coming home to the smell of Dad “cooking dirt”.  He had a steam bed system set up in an old manure spreader.  He would mix up large batches in the spreader, cover it with plastic and sterilize it.  From there he shoveled endless yards into flats and stacked them for the transplanting crew who moved from house to house transplanting seedlings from the seed trays into the flats, comfy women in calico aprons with dirty fingernails and names like Beverly and Betty Lou.  They toted their radio from place to place, perched on old stools and marked their progress in a ledger whose pages were yellowed and crinkled from the moisture.  The warm earthy smell filled the greenhouses and our attached home and brought visions of spring to the bitter lingering winter.

Some people, I’m sure, have decent luck just shoveling regular old dirt from their garden into a pot but around here, with our clay based soil, if you do that, by the end of the summer, what you end up with is a pot shaped clay brick.  You need to amend the soil to lighten it to retain moisture and add nutrients to meet the demands of the plants with their root base limited.  You also need to solarize or sterilize the soil to reduce soil born disease which is the same reason why you should wash and bleach your pots every year.

I’m reducing my large decorative combination pots by about half this year because after last year’s extraordinarily long hot summer I’m really tired of watering pots.  Plus, the raccoons can’t seem to resist playing in them. There are several “self-watering” systems available that really do cut down on watering and I’ll show you my results further down this blog.  But these require “soilless” potting mixes which is basically peat moss or similar substance (that will wick water from a reservoir) amended with nutrient additives.  There are several recipes available on the web.

Of course you can purchase the ready mixed potting soil or soil less mix.  My favorite was Miracle Grow’s Moisture Control mix and I used to make several stops at the Home Depot each season loading my trunk with 3 or 4 of the large bags until I had carted home close to a dozen.  However, for the sustainable heirloom gardening crowd, Monsanto Corporation is the devil incarnate, and Scotts, the owners of Miracle Grow brand, are in cahoots with Monsanto so buying a dozen large bags of Miracle Grow potting soil holds as much gardener guilt as going to the bad part of town and buying the same quantity of crack.  It’s an ethical no no.  Another sustainable ethics no no, is basing your potting medium on Peat Moss, which is not a renewable resource and probably comes from far far away.  You can substitute your own compost for Peat Moss.  I mixed mine about half peat and half compost.

Once you have established your wicking base, you need to add nutrients to the soil.  The recipe I use contains Peat Moss, Perlite (used to improve drainage), Vermiculite (holds moisture), Gypsum (adjusts the pH), Blood Meal (nitrogen), Bone Meal (phosphorous) and Greensand (potassium). 

I love shopping for these ingredients and having them on my shelves in case I need them for a spot in the raised beds later on in the season.  For instance, bone meal, scattered at the roots of tomato plants and watered in with Epson Salts seems to halt blossom end rot in its tracks.  This satisfies the Mad Scientist in me.  It will also earn you the respect of your local garden center workers.  I choose organic brands and Non-Miracle brands whenever possible.  It always takes me a while to collect everything.  For instance, the only place I’ve found locally, which carries greensand, is Tractor Supply.  So I buy a year ahead when I spot the hard to find items.

I mix my soil in the loader of the tractor.  I use cup measures and cut up gallon milk jugs to measure and scoop my ingredients.  I keep the garden hose handy to dampen the ingredients to keep the dust down, use gloves, and avoid breathing the dust.

 

Then I fill all my planting containers, first making sure I have drilled holes in the bottoms of those which did not come predrilled.  If you think that there is no possible way that a 20 gallon pot could ever fill up with rain and flood, you are sorely mistaken.

 Now, about those self-watering systems.   I bought the ones from Gardeners.com   They consist of a reservoir with a fill spout and the reservoir has a grid lid which allows the water to overfill and wick from the bottom of the pot midway up your potting mix coaxing the roots downward and eventually straight into the reservoir itself.

The spout has a cap, but I ended up removing the cap by the end of the season.  It’s hard enough to find the spout in a bushy pot of sweet potato vine.  You don’t need to fiddle with the cap too.  Make sure you leave the top of the tube far enough above the soil surface to make it easier to find. This looks awkward in the spring when the plants are small, but in a month, the pot will have filled in well enough to disguise the spout.  Disguise it very well.   The spout comes with a tube attached to a foam float which is supposed to tell you when you have filled the reservoir.  Just get rid of that.  You will know the reservoir is full when the water comes back out the top of the spout.  Obviously…

 My pots ended up being a bit too deep so to keep the spout high enough, I had to raise the reservoir up by placing used pots under it.  You could also use packing peanuts (not the eco-friendly kind which dissolve in water) or other plastic scrap that won’t compress too easily. Don’t use gravel.  Pots are heavy enough without it. 

You also want to avoid filling the reservoir with soil.  I used scraps of burlap to cover the grill.  The soil did bypass the side flanges and fill around the edges of the reservoir and pots below.

Last year was a very dry summer.  Through July I watered almost every morning.  The pots with the reservoir were much less maintenance. 

  I would fill the reservoir once or twice a week depending on how the plants looked.  And I did not just fill the reservoir up and walk away.  I found if I waited 30 seconds or so, the dry soil would immediately wick the reservoir almost dry.  I kept filling until the soil stopped wicking and the reservoir would take no more.  On very dry days, especially early in the season when the roots weren’t very deep, I also topped off the pot with some water to restore anything that may have wilted in the afternoon sun.  But overall I was very satisfied with the difference the reservoirs made.

I was also curious as to what was going on in there.  When I emptied the pots in the autumn, I found the roots had grown right into the reservoir and formed a thirsty mass.  They also grew down around the pots underneath, carrying soil with them and utilizing the entire depth of the pot.At the end of the season, you may be left with a root bound mass which appears to have devoured all available soil.  Some pots will have virtually untouched soil in the bottom.  I may reuse this in my pots the next season, or amend my beds with it. 

 The roots masses I generally throw into the compost pile.  The soil which appears used up, I dump into my raised beds.  The high percentage of peat and compost serve to lighten the dirt that I filled the beds with to begin with.  There will always be a “dead” spot somewhere in your beds you think could use a little help.  I dump the used soil there and cover with a thick layer of compost so it will be ready to go in the spring.

Happy Easter

Hope Springs Eternal

Spring may actually be here.  If not, we're carrying on anyway.  These crocuses were waiting in the snow cover in the morning encouraged by a sunrise and promise of 50* temperatures.

By afternoon the snow was disappearing from all but the darkest corners and the wide puddles covering the lawn the day before had managed to soak into the already saturated ground.  I got started on my To Do list labeled "March" (optimistically).

The first thing was to take some measures to protect my sprouting tulips from the now ravenous deer who are craving fresh fruits and vegetables as badly as I am.  Then I straightened the pots stored in the cold frame and potted up some geraniums I saved over bare root from last year.  They don't look too promising but I doubt they're all dead.  I watered everything wintered over in the cold frame.  It's now time to fill some flats and get lettuce and herbs seeded and make full use of the cold frame to start our season early.

Tim spent the afternoon on one of my wishes, a dibble board.  On the right you can see the vintage one salvaged from the family greenhouse.  Its missing many pegs and is cracked and repaired from years of use.  The board would have made holes in 4 six plant peat packs so the seedlings could have been easily transplanted.  My boards are intended for speed in planting beans, especially black beans, which, instead of rows, are planted in the whole bed, 2 inches apart in any direction.  I don't need to tell you, that's time consuming!  I can now poke 54 holes at once, and then lay the next board beside it and poke 54 more holes.  If I need to alter the spacing, I can just skip a hole or a row of holes.  The best part is that they were made entirely of scrap we had lying around.  2 hard maple plants, and some dowel rod and some handles that had been taken off of somethingorother.  If you would like instructions on making your own dibble board, here is the blog that I followed Beekman 1802

Black beans were my favorite crop last year.  I still have a precious few left in a jar, and there is a batch simmering on the stove right now.  After catching a Dr. Oz segment on homeopathic food and remedies this past week which included some of the fascinating benefits of black beans, Tim has agreed to try them :).  So I'm making up some to serve on leftover rice for supper.  You can find many versions of the recipe on the web, but tonight I'm going easy on Tim and not put anything fancy in them.  I'm just going to flavor them with some onion salt, garlic powder and chili pepper (Tim loves hot chili con carne).  I'll add some diced tomatoes over the top for me.

Waiting For Spring

I could go on for paragraphs about the fact that this winter is of normal length where as last winter was very mild and short and my potatoes were already sprouting.  But, those of you in the north are dealing with the same issue, and those of you in the south don't need to hear us whine about it...

This month's Country Living has a two page feature on collecting seed packets to tide us over.

www.CountryLiving.com

I've already spoken at length about my passion for seed packets (and vintage seed catalogs, particularly those of the Three Seedswomen, and covers for magazines with garden themes).  But I don't believe I've ever shared this relatively recent purchase with you.

This is the lid only of a seed store display box.  It is from the Card Seed Company in nearby Fredonia, NY where I went to college.  Card Seed packets are very easy to come by.  A large, unused stock of them was found in a warehouse and has been widely circulated.  Now and then I'll find an an example of an older version in an antique store.  Those are more fun to come across.  This lid hangs on the wall in my kitchen.  I'm so glad someone, nearly a hundred years ago, pulled it off it's crate and hung it up to enjoy so that all these years later, I could do the same.

I love illustration art and lithographs.  I am also a sucker for boxes and crates and such.  Almost every tall piece of furniture in our house is topped with a lithographed advertising box.   The Rush Park seed box below I got for a bargain on Ebay some years ago.  It stays on top of the Pie Safe and hides my seed packets from year to year.

This Nabisco (Niagara Biscuit Company) cracker box my mother picked up at an auction long ago.  It tops a chest of drawers and hides large salad bowls.  Sadly, someone painted over the litho on the front but it doesn't hurt it's looks much.

 This very rare Jamestown Baking box originally held "Honey Cart Wheels", or so says the label on the side, and comes from my hometown.  I eyed it at the antique mall for well over a year until such time as  a discount and cash in pocket tempted Tim and I beyond reason.  It now sits on top of our office hutch.

Well, that's all the garden inspiration I can manage for this week.  I just know my crocuses are up, buried under 10 inches of lake effect snow.  Spring Cleaning has commenced although Spring itself seems a bit tardy.  I am now off to order some Hollyhocks to cheer myself up.

Think Spring!

Soups and Sledding

Neither Tim nor I have a winter hobby.  We don't ski, we don't snowmobile and we don't often enjoy the weather.  We hibernate, pray for mild winters and count the days until Spring.  But now and then you have to get out there and enjoy it.  So when our nearby friends Gary and Myra invited us to come sledding we did not refuse.

Black Bean Stoup

The sledding party was an intro to their normal wine racking get together. Gary and Myra, and neighbors Mike and Shelly, and a whole bunch of other people, make their own wine.  It's quite a production.  Mike and Shelly keep us stocked with home made wine for most of the year.  You see, the Lake Erie Shore and Finger Lake regions of New York are second only to California in wine production.  Vineyards and Wineries are all over.  This group has been making delicious wine for many seasons.  Some times we tag along to enjoy the fruits of their labors, and this was one of three main work bees, the racking and testing prior to the final bottling.  When I asked what I could bring, Myra said "Soup.  Everyone is bringing Soup".  Sounds like a perfect idea.

My Black Turtle Beans from Johnny's Seeds

I like Bean Soup.  It only took me a few minutes to decide the logical thing would be to use my home grown Black Beans from last season.  Sharing them with friends is the best way to enjoy them.  I consulted Rachel Ray and chose her Black Bean Stoup.  The dried black beans have to be soaked over night and boiled for about an hour before being added to this recipe. I also used my own onions (the last of them) garlic and canned tomatoes.  I made it in the crock pot and served it with a topping choice of shredded Pepper jack Cheese or Sour Cream.  Most people added both.  There were no leftovers.

 Gary and Myra live on a hill, back by the woods, at the end of a long driveway... and they have a Big Sled.
This sled spends the rest of the year mounted on a rack on the wall of the house on the wrap around porch doing double duty as a sideboard.

 When you get older, you learn how to set up a sledding party properly.  This isn't a bunch of kids with plastic toboggans, soggy snowsuits and frozen bottoms. First you choose a beautiful bright blue day with several inches of fresh diamond powder.  Then you pack a cooler full of beer and light a bonfire with woodshop scraps.

Then you all get on The Big Sled.  Here we have Gary pushing Boots, myself and Myra.

 If you get too many people on The Big Sled, you will need a second pusher.

Myra and Boots push Tim, Gary and a bunch of kids from Gary's brother-in-law's down the hill.

Then you sled away to the horizon.  Midway down that hill there is quite a dip which you can't see in the picture.  You can work up quite a bit of speed there, especially if you've waxed your runners.  The hill levels off at the bottom giving you just enough space to stop the sled before crossing the county highway into the swamp.

If you get tired of waiting your turn for The Big Sled, there are several old fashioned runner sleds around to pass the time on.  Even Myra's 80 year old mother "Boots" seen above in the blue pants pushing the sled, will do a belly flopper on the runner sleds.  I don't recall runner sleds being this much fun!

Now comes the best part of Geriatric Sledding.

Someone will go down in the ATV to tow your butt back up the hill!

 When hunger sets in its back to the house for soup and bread.  Besides the Black Bean Stoup there was a wonderful creamy chicken wing soup and chile con carne.  There was also tossed salad and plenty of home made wine.

Ultimate Coconut Cake (aka Cardiac Cake)

As a grand finale, Myra had made the super heavy, super rich Ultimate Coconut cake.  It was incredible and there were no leftovers of that either.

Seasons Greetings

 

 

May your gardening Season start early

 

Oh Tannenbaum

For centuries, if not millennia, people have been bringing evergreen plants into their home to celebrate the winter Solstice and give them hope to get them through the bleakest darkest days of winter.  In the 1500s, the Germans and the Scandinavians began to bring in whole trees but the idea did not begin to catch on in America until the mid 1800s, and their presence has often caused controversy due to their pagan origins. 

I have not had a live tree for at least 10 years.  In fact, for the last four years we have not had a tree at all.  We no longer had an empty wall space to rotate furniture to and there simply wasn't room in this tiny, 900 square foot house to put one.  I've kept my eyes open for a good quality artificial table top tree, but so far, nothing has seemed right.

A Christmas tree is a rather personal thing. Each one has its own character and each decorator imparts some vestige of themselves in it. The very shape of an evergreen tree is attractive. So much so, that my sister, with her minimalist decorating style, has been known to put up her large prelit, and very realistic looking artificial tree, place a star on it, and call it done. Artificial trees are nice, but the live ones speak more to me. It's even better when you know the tree personally or associate good memories with choosing it and bringing it home.

This little Hemlock, and it's Siamese twin have been growing on the shoulder of the road along our frontage.  I remember when it was just a twig.  Heck, I remember when it wasn't even there.  It popped up back when the area was wild and unkempt, battling it's way through a thick layer of leaves and weeds and somehow survived the placement of a culvert pipe along the ditch.  I have admired it every time I drove by it for a few years now, thinking what a perfect little tree it was and how nice it would look as a Christmas tree.  I almost cut it last year, but couldn't commit.  This past summer, as we were working along the fence line, Tim said "I'm going to get the tractor and pull out those little trees.  I'm tired of mowing around them."  No!  I want to use them for Christmas trees!  I promise this year I will.  And so the stay of execution.

These little trees were growing side by side, not 6 inches between them.  I had studied them well enough to know the bigger one was the right size and shape for what I wanted.  I wasn't sure about the smaller one.  They were too close together to separate and replant.  Their symmetry was in doubt .  Tim was excited to be rid of one or both so he offered to help.

I thought maybe the smaller one could be left to grow and be used in the future, but it was pretty dismal looking standing there alone.  We decided to cut that one too, and Mom could either use it for a table top tree or cut it up for wreaths.  A couple of weeks ago we cut a 30 foot Hemlock for Mom's wreaths, but the top was too misshapen to use as a Christmas tree.  Mom would be happy to get this little guy as a replacement.

Once freed from its family entanglements, my little tree was just as perfect as I had pictured it.



Polish Table Top Tree

For several years I have been collecting pictures of perfectly decorated table top trees.  The one above is decorated with handmade wheat and straw ornaments as well as painted blown out eggs.  More details can be read by clicking on the caption link.  I love themed trees but hand making all your own ornaments requires quite a head start on the season.  If you had more than one tree to decorate this would be a fun project and you could customise them to each room.


Tinsel Tree

Commercial ornaments can be used to good effect if you keep your color scheme in mind.  Note that all these table top trees are placed in urns and not tree stands.  Their little trunks are pretty difficult to fit into most stands.  An urn, or even a galvanised pail full of gravel make an excellent alternative and provide enough ballast to keep a tree upright.

Pruning a Table Top Tree

Another thing all these little table top trees have in common is that they are not the bushy full trees you get from a Christmas Tree Farm.  They also bear little resemblance to most artificial trees.  They do look like the natural growing Blue Spruce we cut every year from my Grandfather's farm.  The open layers of branches leave room for the ornaments to hang straight down so you can see and enjoy them.  Instructions for pruning a tree this way are linked in the caption above.  But, pruning more than half of the branches out was not something I was ever prepared to do with a tree I had paid good money for.  Even if the trimmings could be used for wreaths or centerpieces, it seemed like an expensive experiment.

Enter my little Hemlock.  In hind sight, there were probably a couple of branches that could have been trimmed out of this one, but it looks quite good as it is.  The trunk was just big enough to fit my cast iron tree stand (with a little shimming) and the tree stand's tiny reservoir is just adequate for this size tree. 

I really had no clear idea in mind for this tree.  I knew I didn't want to use red.  I also had gold balls so I started with those.  Actually, of course I started with the lights.  The accepted practice for placing lights on a "designer hoity toity tree" is to run them along the center of each branch, over the tip, and back to the trunk.  My little Hemlock was too fine and flexible for this so there is a good deal of floral tape in there holding the wire to the branches.  I added some green ornaments and glittery icicles as a base for my special ornaments.

I wanted this tree to represent the things that Tim and I enjoy.  There are a lot of gardening themed ornaments in there, including lots of tomatoes, some pea pods, eggplant, beet, garlic and even Wellie boots.  There is a grey Saddlebred horse, and a red 1954 Ford truck.  Tim's gas station collection is represented by a gas pump, and his gumball machines by a rather clever little 5 cent gumball machine.  They truly make an ornament for everything. 

The Breyer porcelain ornament represents my horse William

This marvelous little gumball machine is made by Kurt Adler Co.

 

It's hard to photograph a Christmas tree.  They almost always look better in person.  There is just something magical about staring into their depths no matter what your age.

Even this little tree is quite an imposing presence in the room.  I haven't even decorated the pie safe or Hoosier because I think it would detract from the tree.

Its hard to tell, but in person the gold ornaments really highlight the brass hardware on the Hoosier, and the green ones pick up on the cream and green graniteware I have collected.

Yes, this Christmas tree says a lot about Tim and I and it fits perfectly in our home.  It was born and raised here.  It has been admired and intended for this job for several years.  Tim and I had fun, in our own way, picking it out and bringing it in the house.  The ornaments have been carefully chosen individually for what they mean to us.  It has a lot of country charm, this little tree.  And the other little tree?  It didn't get cut up for wreaths.  It is sitting in a pail of gravel in my mother's picture window, and I'm sure it has been decorated just so.  It had a purpose as well.



Happy Thanksgiving

Vintage Eat Less and Be Thankful poster, image courtesy of US National Archives

I know this is late, but I saw this terrific vintage poster on a fellow blogger's posting and had to share.   I hope everyone had a good holiday weekend and managed to work some of their harvest into the meal.

We had both potatoes and sweet potatoes from the garden, sweet corn frozen from the local farm stand, and the weather was so beautiful Thursday morning that I went out and clipped fresh sage, rosemary and thyme to mix with my homegrown garlic for this terrific recipe.  It was outstanding.  Why did I never think to pour wine under the turkey before?  It kept it very moist.