I have some shocking news: I am not perfect. I’m seriously chagrined to admit that, although I’ve been nurturing my tiny seedlings since January and have dived into the minutiae of seed-warming mats, the best seed-starting mediums, light timing, and seed varieties, I have made a serious and sophomoric error: Until last week, I did not give these poor little guys even a single drop of plant food.

In the past, I used Miracle Grow seed-starting medium, and that comes with built-in plant-food. Recently, though, I’ve become uncomfortable with this product, especially with starting plants that will eventually become food. So this year, I switched to sterile seed-starting medium, but that means my plants have essentially been starving for the past three plus months.

I had noticed in the past few weeks that the tomatoes were looking a bit purplish. I wondered about whether my lights were not full-spectrum enough to be the sole source of light for the plants. Then I wondered if I was shocking them with water that was too cold. When it came time to give a Zapotec seedling to a fellow heirloom tomato junkie, it finally dawned on me (as I drove to deliver the poor little seedling) that these plants needed food.

That night, with no garden centers open for business, I rustled up some Bonsai food and fed the poor little plants. They are already perking up, and now I have a seaweed/fish emulsion cocktail to feed the seedlings going forward. Looks like they’ll need a little feeding every week and a half or so to keep the “purple” ting to the leaves (phosphorous deficiency), or a yellow cast to the leaves coupled with green veining, and/or slow growth (nitrogen deficiency).

Three days short of four weeks after planting my flat of asparagus, I have surpassed 50% germination rate with 49 seedlings out of 84 planted! They are still tiny, and I admit that I will likely lose some of the tiny, fragile shoots when I transplant them outside and again when I cull the female plants, but I’m still pleased.

I’m up to a whopping two shoots of winecup and the creeping thyme (of which I have planted a full flat and could probably use twice that for xeric groundcover throughout the yard) is coming on strong. The best performers, aubrieta, all the rudbeckia hirtas (black eyed susan, gloriosa daisy, etc.), tomatoes, asters, and some, but not all, of the native grasses, are looking close to needing to go outside and I’ve still got at least three weeks to go before I can do that without protection, although I’ll start hardening off a few things this weekend if the weather holds (it’s been in the 70s!).

I got a bunch of seed garlic and have been sitting here watching it sprout on my counter top because my raised beds were not done. Until today that is…I see garlic planting in my future!

Julie

I had the pleasure of manning the Master Gardener booth at the Lyons Earth Day celebration this weekend and wanted to share a few pointers on sustainable gardening from my handout.

What is Sustainable?

Like zero-emissions, “green,” and zero-footprint, this is yet another term that, while an excellent goal, is not truly attainable on a large scale in Western society. Sustainable means living (and gardening) in a way that does not use more resources than are available per capita. Sure, we may have enough water, oil, and land now, but if we keep consuming at the rate we are at present, our children will not.

So sustainability takes into account environmental impact, as well as social and economic equity (it is not sustainable, for example, to rely on cheap labor coming up from Mexico to keep food prices down!). Water-wise irrigation, natural soil amendments, well-chosen plant varieties, Integrative Pest Management, and reducing inputs (chemical fertilizers, pesticides, trucked-in soil amendments, water, energy), are all a part of sustainable gardening.

Find Local Resources

The best people to talk to about sustainable gardening are other people who are gardening in your particular climate. What is sustainable here in Colorado may not be in Florida, Canada, or England, and the reverse is certainly true! We are truly blessed to live in a place where the environment is a part of the public dialog, but even if you’re in a place where that’s not the case, you can still find information from the local Sierra Club chapter, Cooperative Extension, or garden center to help you on your way.

I’d like to give a special shout-out to some of the folks who also had booths or information at our Earth Day Celebration. You all truly inspired me to do more!

• Urban Oasis Design - This family-run landscaping business does more than add beauty to your landscape. They really think about issues around water-wise gardening, sustainable landscape, and sustainable maintenance. If you need some help transferring a giant blue grass lawn to something a bit more manageable, give David & Lina a call (and tell them I sent you!).
• Boulder County Going Local - These folks might appreciate a little linky love to make up for the emails I keep peppering them with about getting the blogosphere more involved in the local food movement. This organization is a treasure-trove for people who want to grow local, buy local, and eat local!
• Green Heart Institute - After a delightful conversation about the challenges of choosing a greener car, I was able to discuss energy audits and improving home energy efficiency with the people from this organization that can help you live greener! Think about getting that energy audit and supporting this fantastic grass-roots organization.
• Will Shafroth - OK, I know it’s early to jump into the election fray, especially at the Congressional level (Colorado’s primary for this race isn’t even until August, so people are still getting signatures to get on the ballot), but I met a truly remarkable man who is running to fill Mark Udall’s seat in the House of Representatives: Will Shafroth. This is a man who has dedicated his life to conservation, a normal guy from Boulder with two kids and a dream of making the world a cleaner, greener place for his children. He has an uphill battle against some pretty well established career politicians, but I think he can do it!

And of course, I’ve plugged them before and I will plug them again: Colorado State’s Cooperative Extension information is truly amazing.

What else can I do?

The Earth Day committee specifically asked for someone with knowledge of xeriscaping, sustainable landscaping, and composting. This gives you a pretty good idea of some things to consider to make your garden a little more green

I’ve already blogged with a good step-by-step on composting–the fine art of turning food scraps and yard waste into soil–so please take a look. And there is some more technical information available in Fact Sheets 7.212 and 7.007 on the Cooperative Extension web site.

And Xeriscaping is something hugely popular here in Colorado, where the term originated. This is a proven technique for making your yard more water & maintenance efficient using the following seven principles:

1. Planning & Design
2. Soil Improvements (see composting above!)
3. Efficient Irrigation
4. Zoning of Plants
5. Mulches
6. Turf Alternatives
7. Appropriate Maintenance

Denver Water’s page on Xeriscaping is an excellent resource if you’d like to learn more. Also check back here for my adventures in starting seeds of quite a few native (and therefore, by nature, drought tolerant) plants.

Happy Earth Day. Now quit surfing the web and get outside!

I recently gave a talk at my local API chapter’s monthly meeting about adapting your hobbies for children. The main examples from my talk were all about gardening since that’s my number one hobby (obsession!), so I decided I ought to turn this into a post.

Both of my children started gardening in utero. I know that sounds crazy, but I seriously encouraged the progression of labor from periodic contractions to hard labor by going out to pick asparagus (i.e. lots of squatting!) about 14 hours before Lily was born. And I renovated our entire back yard during my first two trimesters of pregnancy with Gabriel. I remember planting the last shrub about a nanosecond before I was too big to wield a shovel, thank you very much!

Anyhow, Gabriel was at least big enough at 8 months to sit in the grass and watch me work or sit in the sling for a closer view by the time gardening season rolled around and the following year, he was big enough to drop onion starts and pea seeds into holes I’d made and to help me water a bit. This season, Lily joins our growing gardening crew at the energetic, if slightly destructive, age of 23 months.

So how do you garden with children? The first maxim I mentioned in my talk was scaling back your expectations. The kids are going to trample your flowers occasionally, are going to over or underwater, and are notorious for pulling out row markers or, as I learned the hard way, digging up your onions without your knowledge, leaving them to sprout in wild patterns instead of neat rows!

Let children participate in less complicated tasks so they’re more likely to leave you alone to complete the more complicated ones and either fence off delicate areas (like the rose garden or a place where you have delicate seedlings starting) to avoid disasters. Keep in mind that children do not know the different between weeds and seedlings, so if you have them help you weed (or even if they see you weeding), they may be inclined to copy you with disastrous results.

Repeat the activities that you do want your child to be involved in often so that the child knows what to expect & can master the task. This works especially well with tasks like watering where even a three year old can figure out how to water each and every plant and how to water gently so as not to blast new growth.

And finally, come up with something the child can do in parallel if you need less “help”! My children love spreading mulch, so I have them work with their little shovels and wheelbarrows while I do things like weeding and pruning that they can’t help me with. The whole point of including your child in your gardening hobby it to connect with them and to have fun–if it’s not fun, make a change!

What to plant?

I’ve already mentioned peas and onions, but there are other very easy garden vegetables that will delight your children. Herbs are great because the children can smell them and because they won’t hurt the child if he or she takes a nibble. Vegetables like pumpkins, zucchini, or watermelon are nice because they sprout quickly and grow nice big vegetables that, unlike a tomato or a pepper, cannot easily get damaged by tiny hands.

Before starting a garden project with your children, please do review CSU’s list of toxic plants. Some very common flowers are highly toxic: http://www.ext.colostate.edu/Pubs/Garden/07237.html  This is not an all-inclusive list, so please do contact Poison Control if you have a specific question.

Additional Resources

How to Amuse Toddlers - http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-Amuse-Toddlers/
Craft & Activity Library - http://www.creativekidsathome.com/activities.shtml
Cooking with Kids - http://www.cookingwithkids.com/
Gardening with Children - http://coopext.colostate.edu/4dmg/Children/children.htm
Gardening with Young Children - http://www.gardening-with-kids.com/gardening-with-kids-beginner.html

Two weeks ago, I posted about starting asparagus from seed. The few resources I found on the matter varied significantly on germination time, so I promised to post here when I knew some more from first-hand experience. I have to say, even with my careful variety selection, seed-warming mat, and meticulous watering (no way were my asparagus seeds going to fall victim to my habit of selecting plants for drought tolerance!), I was totally shocked pleasantly surprised when I walked downstairs to water on Wednesday, a mere 10 days after planting the seed, and found 11 asparagus seedlings.

Although it is early to calculate germination rate (I’m only about halfway into some estimates of germination time, but I had 13% germination at 10 days and now, at 15 days, I’m at 28.5%), I’m feeling very positive about the process. I have to say that I had two trays, one of which had some faster-germinating seed in it, so I had to remove the humidity lid, and that did negatively impact germination. So heat & humidity seem to be the keys here.

For those of you who might scoff at my germination rates, keep in mind that, in addition to oodles of vegetables, I’m starting tons of native plants for my landscape, some of which, like Lewisia (bitterroot), have a germination rate that would be lucky to approach sales tax (4% on the Lewisia meant I got one seedling out of a packet of spendy seeds from Denver Botanic Gardens and I only approached 12.5% on the desert four o’clock). So it’s all relative. I won’t deny that, compared to zucchini, growing asparagus from seed is a fiddly affair. But it is fun if you’re a garden geek like me!

In other news, the stone was delivered for my raised vegetable beds this morning and, if the weather holds, they’ll be finished this week. That means that the plants I have stuffed into every corner of my seed-starting rack (the tender ones) and covering a good portion of my patio (the hardier ones–peas, leeks, sweet peas, lettuces, asparagus crowns, strawberries, a chunk of rhubarb I brought over from our old house, and the rest of the fruit trees that need to be planted where the two–noticably-smaller–piles of mulch are sitting) may actually get out of their pots and into the ground this weekend. It’s official–my fingernails won’t be clean again until October

When I first mentioned that I was going to start Asparagus from seed, TopVeg commented on the difficulty that posed and I found a web site called USA Gardener that claims starting it from seed is downright impossible. A saner person might have heeded the warning, but I took it as a challenge. Could I do it? You know, not just get a few spindly plants, but actually grow some productive asparagus crowns from seed.

So I did a little research, bid on some Mary Washington Asparagus seeds from GroCo on E*Bay, and planted them in seed-starting medium with a clear plastic lid to keep humidity in, placed them on the seed-warming mat under the lights, and crossed my fingers.

Then I started thinking: Why the mystery around starting asparagus from seed?

Why grow asparagus from seed?

Here is my short list of reasons to grow asparagus from seed:

• A well-established asparagus bed can last 20-30 years and yields one of spring’s first and finest vegetables.
• According to trials at University of Minnesota, plants started from seed produce better long-term (although they take an extra year to get established) because they are freshly dug instead of dug, dried, and shipped bare-root.
• It’s much, much cheaper (organic crowns can cost you more than a dollar a piece!).
• You can buy a tasty variety and not worry about whether your crowns will be male or female (more on that later). Even if you pitch all the females, you’re only out pennies (mine were $0.03 per seed once I included shipping) instead of dollars.
• Although recommendations vary, it seems that an asparagus bed for a family of four should have a minimum of 40 plants or, as Rodale recommends for serious asparagus eaters like us, 150 plants. Again, the seed is much more economical for that scale of asparagus bed!

Facts about Asparagus

A Mediterranean plant originally cultivated and eaten by the Greeks, asparagus is a long-lived perennial whose spears are low in calories and high in vitamins A and C. The plants are called “crowns” and each crown is either male or female. The females bear small berry-sized red fruit that can cause weed problems in the garden due to numerous asparagus sprouts. And, as I’ve learned from experience, if you leave the females, birds like to eat the berries and spread them through your yard, leaving you with asparagus in some strange places. The female plants also produce fewer spears because they put so much energy into seed production.

Although there are some new all-male cultivars (including the Jersey Giant crowns I just received from Raintree Nursery), the older varieties, like my Mary Washingtons, will produce both male and female plants. It takes a hand lens and some knowledge of asparagus to identify and weed out the females based on the shape of their flowers (the females have a well-developed pistil with three lobes, while male flowers are larger and longer).

The seeds will germinate best–although at 30 days, time to germination is very, very long– at temperatures around 77 degrees, making my seed-warming mats a good choice for this experiment.

Resources for Asparagus Growing

I got most of the information for this post from Rodale’s All-New Encyclopedia of Organic Gardening and a great article from University of Illinois’s Cooperative Extension. Rodale even had the interesting tip of salting your asparagus crowns (yes, the crowns, not just the harvested spears!!) to improve disease resistance. They recommend adding 2.5 pounds of pickling salt (not iodized table salt!) to the crowns either before spears emerge or sometime around July 4. Sounds like a good thing to trial here at GreenArtz next year!

A Google search of asparagus resources yields a lot of Cooperative Extension web sites that have a lot of the same information, so I recommend looking at the one that applies for your state (find your Cooperative Extension here) just so that it will be tailored to your growing conditions. A few other good resources include:

• The West-Side Gardener has some step-by-step information on starting asparagus from seed (including a slightly shorter time to germination–let’s hope this is right!).
• Farm & Garden has a little bit shorter, sweeter information than some of the Coop. Extensions, including on starting seeds.
• Vanderbilt has actual pictures of asparagus flowers, although they don’t indicate whether they’re male or female (d’oh!).

I guess there just isn’t that much information out there on starting asparagus from seed. Check back here in the future for pictures of asparagus flowers and the real skinny on whether it takes 2 weeks, 3 weeks, or 4 weeks for asparagus to germinate. Oh, and I only planted one seed per tetra-pack, so I should have some numbers on germination rate (at least of this particular variety) in, well, 2, 3, or 4 weeks

Fellow gardening blogger Elements in Time has issued a Growing Challenge and GreenArtz has risen to the challenge! She has encouraged us to blog once a week about gardening (yes, starting now in the off-season), to grow something we didn’t grow last year for our vegetable garden, and to start it from seed.

Since she encouraged us to add our own unique elements to the challenge, I’m going to go ahead and add that I’m going to use only heirloom seeds this year, that I’m starting asparagus (!!) from seed for the first time ever, and that I’m doing my darndest to turn our new backyard landscape into a hotbed of food production. How’s that for a challenge.

In case you’re wondering, the seedlings are growing like crazy and are about to take over the basement. Seriously. What was I thinking starting sweet peas this early? They’re enormous. And the native seeds I ordered from WesternNativeSeed.com is sprouting much better than expected.

One thing I will note, however, is that, if you decide to leave for a week’s vacation after starting some seeds, for the love of Gardening, turn off the seedling heat mats. Urg. Talk about fried green seedlings. It was ugly. So ugly I couldn’t even take a picture, although I might here in another week since things are starting to bounce back from the week of frying I dealt them.

What is gardening if not a learning experience?

Every January I am faced not only with some of the coldest temperatures of the Colorado winter, but with reconciling the insane bounty depicted in the influx of gardening catalogs with the bleak brown garden outside. This year is especially tough because I didn’t get to garden all last season due to a mid-summer move.

Thanks to my wonderful husband, however, I am happily gardening indoors this January. He built me a 4-shelf plant rack, the design of which he adapted from Hammer Zone. Using a few shop lights, a power strip, and a timer we used to use to turn the Christmas tree lights on and off, we now have a rack big enough to grow 16 flats of plants indoors. The shop lights are on chains so that I can raise and lower them as the plants grow and I have the lights set to run 16 hours a day.

Within a week, I had spinach, various lettuces, and kale sprouted and within two weeks the basil, chives, tomatoes, cilantro, parsley, watercress, and sorrel had sprouted too. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not going to try to grow tomatoes all the way to harvest indoors (OK, I may try, but I doubt I’ll succeed unless I upgrade my setup a bit), but by starting a few of the earlier varieties now (I started a 4-pack of Romas & a 4-pack of Yellow Pears) and planting them out early in my beloved Wall-o-Waters, I hope to have a particularly early tomato harvest.

I’m guessing we’ll be eating baby greens before St. Patrick’s Day, which is when my outdoor gardening season usually kicks off with a massive planting of peas and spinach. The most expensive part of this setup was the shop lights & bulbs–the wood was literally $40, the potting soil is about $5 a bag, all those seeds were about $20, and I had seed-starting flats on hand.

One thing I’m going to do differently with the next batch of seeds that I start is I’m going to try to replace the usual bleach wash-down the Cooperative Extension recommends to combat damping-off with a hydrogen peroxide rinse. I had forgotten how bad bleach smells since I rarely use it anymore and I couldn’t get the smell off my hands (or my garage floor where the wash-down took place) for what seemed like days! Has anyone out there tried this?