Urban Garden Magazine » Grubbycup

Catnip seed collecting

Grubbycup — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 20:26:05 +0000

The catnip is dry, and the seeds are ready to be collected. If you haven’t been following along, you might want to take a look at where they started.

The flower clusters have been collected and dried. At this point it is suitable for storage, enjoyed by kitties, or in this case, seed collecting.	If you look at the dried flowers closely, you can find the seed pods.

Here is an example of a catnip seed pod.	With a gentle touch, the pod opened, and three tiny seeds emerged.
After opening the pods, blowing and shaking to separate the seeds from the chaff, I wound up with a nice pile of seeds, ready for planting.
Peace, love and puka shells, Grubbycup

Upside Down Tomatoes

Grubbycup — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 00:53:33 +0000

Upside-down Tomatoes I didn’t see any reason to buy a new pot to try it, so I used a old strawberry pot.
Burbee Big Boy


I can say that it works, and it is a handy way to use space that I otherwise wouldn’t be. However, the tomatoes planted in normal pots appear more robust overall. So if it lets you extend your garden, by all means, do it, but I suspect it will hinder my final harvest. Something to keep in mind is that you will want to water the pots, in my case I ran drip lines for the job.

Peace, love and puka shells, Grubbycup

My First Tomato in 2010: Early Girl

Grubbycup — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 00:51:57 +0000

My first tomato of the season. There is something a little special about the first veggies to finish.
Early Girl
If you haven’t tried homegrown tomatoes, be forewarned, it will change how you view the flavor of store bought. Tomatoes grown for eating are very different than those grown for shipping.


Peace, love and puka shells, Grubbycup

Crochet Hydroponics: Part 5

Grubbycup — Tue, 25 May 2010 17:50:27 +0000

The second adventure in crocheted hydroponics is doing well enough to flower. Day 122 Although very short lived and sparse, the flowers of this black radish are very pretty.
The acrylic crocheted netting (left) has held up much better than the cotton trial. In fact it appears to be in good enough shape to wash, and be used again. The radish appears healthy (right), and I have every reason to believe that the system could continue to support a plant almost indefinitely. While I wouldn’t exactly call it ornamental, it is interesting looking, and taller than I expected.
Someday people are going to quit teasing me about my crochet hydroponics; but not today. Today, Gentle Reader I give you version three:
I started with two plastic colanders from a dollar store, lashed them together, made a hole in the top, and filled with perlite.
The encasing shell and wick are crocheted as one seamless piece. Then I suspended the “ufo looking crochet thing” over the pond, with the wick dangling into the water.My current plan is to top water the perlite to keep it moist, then as the roots grow down to the wick, allow that to water the plant, until finally the roots reach the water, and it begins to function as a deep water culture. At which time, the perlite globe will not longer be supplying moisture, but air.
Peace, love, and puka shells, Grubbycup

Half-Cooked Thoughts: Breeding without a net.

Grubbycup — Tue, 25 May 2010 17:46:50 +0000

Kits and Cats, boys and girls, gather around, this you are going to want to watch.

I know enough a lot of you tune in for the silly stuff, and that’s fair, I think it’s fun too, that’s why I do it.

But like I’ve said before, the only way to make absolutely sure you’ve gone far enough, is to go too far.

So for this particular project, I’ll be working with less of a safety net than usual. There are many things that could go wrong, and Gentle Reader, you’ll be the second to know. It may even take a couple of tries at it before it starts to go.

I would like to apologise to the men and woman who worked so hard on the tomato, pepper and radish varieties I will be working with, I mean no disrespect.

I am going to do something I bet you haven’t seen often before, I’m going to start three home-hobby breeding projects from scratch, with the hopes of taking at least one far enough to a “house” variety. I’m going to take you with me on the path, and explain my reasoning behind my choices.

To start breeding plants, the first thing you need, is plants. So I started some seeds:

Grubbyradish:

Radish should be the easiest to work with, as they mature quickly, and do not self pollinate.

Started Black (dark skin, white meat), Cherry (red skin, white meat), and Watermelon (white skin, pink meat) varieties. This will allow me the meaningful crosses BC, BW, and CW.

Grubbytomato:

Tomatoes do self pollinate, which makes crossing slightly more complex, I will try to cross that bridge when I come to it.

I’m not sure which tomatoes I want to start with, so I’m starting several and will decide from those that do the best in my environment: Beefsteak, Black Krim, Cherry, Rainbow(?), and Trip L Crop.

Grubbypepper:

By far the most dangerous of the bunch. I started Bell, Cayenne, Dorset Naga, Ghost, Peter, and Ramhorn. Since I will be the chief judge and guinea pig of choice, I have a feeling my mouth will be taking one for the team more than once.

And of course, I had to order a bunch more seeds once I warmed up to the idea, so my starting plants could wind up being one of several not mentioned above.

Hopefully you can learn something from my mistakes too.

Wish me luck, and stay tuned.

Peace, love and puka shells,

Grubbycup

Book Review: Teaming with Microbes

Grubbycup — Fri, 21 May 2010 20:15:52 +0000

Teaming with Microbes: A Gardener’s Guide to the Soil Food Web

Jeff Lowenfels and Wayne Lewis. Portland: Timber Press, 2006. 196 pages.

If you are a gardener who isn’t afraid of some food for thought, read Teaming with Microbes: A Gardener’s Guide to the Soil Food Web.

It has an interesting premise, and does a nice job of supporting it: To reduce the amount of work and resources that you have to add and remove from the system, make better use of naturally occurring processes.

In a natural setting such as a forest or jungle, plants can thrive without any human intervention. There is a web of dependencies and products that allow resources to be acquired, used, and then made available again in some form to something further down the line. Plants need fertilizer, and if you follow the chain of events, they eventually become fertilizer with help from other parts of the web.

Conventional farming and gardening methods, on the other hand, attempt to restrict this web to the bare minimum required to produce the product that we want (fruits, vegetables, feed, etc.).

Now as any indoor gardener can tell you, the further you get away from a plant’s natural environment, the more responsible you become for supplying the needs that were being filled by other members of the web. For example, if you take a plant away from the sun, you become responsible for supplying light. If you remove the natural sources of nutrients, you become responsible for supplying the plants with nutrients, and so on.

In order to help explain what these naturally occurring factors are, the first part of the book describes the web from dirt and bacteria up to animal life. For material that contains a lot of Latin words, it is very straightforward and easy to understand. Much more the way textbooks should be written, instead of how they are. I have a feeling that I will be using it as a reference many times as I follow my own gardening path.

Once the Soil Food Web has been described, and the reader encouraged to take a more holistic, synergistic view of their garden, the second part of the book explains some ways to apply this knowledge. Instead of trying to force your garden to perform, you nurture and nudge it in the direction you want using compost, mulch, compost teas and so on. Like training an animal to perform tricks, you encourage your garden to do what you want, and discourage it from doing what you don’t.

To help readers distill the knowledge in the book down to a more manageable level for quick reference, there is a list of “The Soil Food Web Gardening Rules” which are nineteen statements that are the essence of some of the most important concepts in what the book has to say. It also has my only complaint about in the book: I would have liked a reference from the list of rules, to the relevant sections in the book.

It is the best book on garden interdependencies that I have read. Even though the topics discussed have given me a lot to think about, and the possible ramifications will have me referring back to it on a regular basis, the writing is so straightforward and smooth, that it has an almost “quick read” property to it. I finished it in two evenings.

If you want to consider yourself a “well read” gardener, put this on your list.

Peace, love and puka shells,

Grubbycup

Pond Hydroponics

Grubbycup — Fri, 21 May 2010 20:10:18 +0000

Spring is in the air, it’s a beautiful day, let’s take some of our experiments outdoors.
Just outside of La Mancha is a little pond…
I know that there are plenty of nutrients in the water. I can tell this by the following observations: There are plenty of fish in the pond, and plant nutrients are a known result of fish. The spring algae bloom is prolific (more on that in a minute). The system is already supporting existing plants very well.
	If faced with the glory of algae in springtime full bloom; when the water first turns warm, you have two paths to decide between: Fight it. or Don’t fight it. Gentle Reader, I suggest you just learn to accept that the pond is going to look a bit green for a while once a year.
After checking the piggy bank, and getting threatened with being turned over to the ASPCA if I don’t start feeding it a little something once in a while, I made the executive decision that this was going to be a budget minded enterprise. So perhaps a future version will include my aspirations to extend the deck, but for now, a couple of 4″x 4″s and a re-tasked wooden frame will form the base.
	Wicked pots sit on the platform. They will be top watered until the roots are established, then they should be able to pull pond water up the wick, and finally, send roots down into the pond itself.
This is where I got even with the piggy bank. The piggy bank now exists only as an abstract concept of anti-existence. I bought two inexpensive “mini-greenhouses” for $30 US each. There are several things I like about these racks: They are light enough to sit on the wooden platform. Easy to put up. Great to scavenge parts from. The shelves make for a nice training screen. They were cheaper than what it would cost if I built it. I tend to get carried away.
	And here we go. I’m thinking, that one way or another, I have at least a start to build on. How much this resembles what I wind up with at the end of summer, only time (and blog posts) will tell. This, Gentle Reader, is my process. I make a model, and learn from it. Then another, and another, sometimes I start making them a little bigger… So when I take the plunge on expensive things like the solar panels and water pump (I want to use to pump the water up to a reservoir, so the only “house electricity” it uses is a valve on a timer), I can feel confident that the rest of the design will work. Peace, love, and puka shells, Grubbycup

Half-Cooked Thoughts: Pond Filter or Hydroponic Planter?

Grubbycup — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 17:32:34 +0000

Hydroponic lilies or pond filter?

It’s both. Water from the koi pond is filtered through a series of 4 wooden half-barrels.

In this way, I get both a cleaner pond, and attractive, almost maintenance-free plants.

Each barrel is slightly lower than the one before.

Pond water is pumped into to the top half barrel, and gravity takes care of the rest.

These plants are obviously not nutrient starved. From the levels they get in these last two, I’d say the system could support another pot or two.

If I were to use a more traditional design, I would have pots that needed added fertilizer to do well, and a normal pond filter to remove unwanted elements from the koi pond.

By combining the two, not only do I avoid expenses like fertilizer and new filters, I avoid the work in adding and changing.

I do not claim this system to be maintenance free, but most of the time all it needs is simply clearing the pump intake, or removing plants so they don’t overgrow.

Peace, love and puka shells,

Grubbycup

Half-Cooked Thoughts: Eggshell Hydroponics

Grubbycup — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 21:33:44 +0000

Here is a demonstration of some basic hydroponics principles using eggshells.

Version One
Here is my first attempt at eggshell hydroponics. It is a simple passive system. The top egg has a couple of cotton balls, and drains into the lower egg. Slits are cut into the top egg, so allow for both airflow and drainage. It was working pretty well, until one of my lab assistants pointed out an intrinsic design flaw: it looks like a cat toy, as my assistant demonstrated by completely obliterating it in a catnip induced frenzy.
Version Two
So back to the drawing board. I needed a less tempting design. For my new base, I picked an egg cup which, not surprisingly, fit the bottom egg rather well.
	The bottom egg is whole except for the top hole.
The second egg has slits cut into the shell, and a couple of cotton balls inside.
The third eggshell is similar to the second, but the holes are larger to hopefully accommodate roots.
	The top egg has a large hole in the bottom. I thought that this might be a chance to take a closer look at a seedball, so I put one in the top, and watered.
Although I did have the foresight not to put tassles on this version, I thought it stacked a little precariously for feline curiosity, so Gentle Reader, I put it in an open glass jar. Peace, love and puka shells, Grubbycup

Seedballing

Grubbycup — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 20:57:00 +0000

Seedballs: a little clay, some high grade soil, and some native seeds. I happened to have a little leftover premium potting mix. Not much, but enough to do a little something with, and I had just the something in mind. Seedballs or, more specifically, my take on them. The concept is pretty simple: a combination of clay and rich soil is used to help seeds introduced into a less than ideal environment take hold. The prepared pellets are placed in the desired location. Rain soaks the seedballs enough to sprout the seeds, which receive additional benefit from sprouting in the soil-clay mixture.
If you can make mud pies, you can make seedballs. 5 Parts dry clay (hobby shop, health food store, art supply store, etc.) 3 Parts premium soil-compost-worm casting mixture (Just Right Xtra is my current favorite). 2-3 Parts water, based on mixture consistency. Just enough to form balls with. 1 Part seeds native to your area.

Dry powdered clay is harder to find, but easier to work with. (above)
	Mix well, adding just enough water to form a dry dough.
	For seeds, pretty native wildflowers are great choices. Whatever seeds you select, keep in mind that you are responsible for their start, so only use plants that would be good to have more of in your area. I’m using California Poppies. (Left) They are native to my area, they are my state’s flower, and they are very pretty. Besides, I’ve had good luck with them in the past.
Fold in the seeds, and gently knead to mix.

Roll into balls, and let dry for a couple days. To use, toss on the ground at a suitable location. Then, gentle reader, just walk away. Peace, love and puka shells, Grubbycup