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).

One of the reasons I love to grow my own food is that it connects me to the Earth and affirms my commitment to environmental stewardship. Another reason is that I love the variety of foods that would otherwise not be available to my family. One thing that I’ve realized during the course of my seed-starting adventures is that I need not limit myself to food production; there are other great things we can produce in the garden besides food.

First, inspired by my pal the Crunchy Domestic Goddess, I have decided to grow some dye plants in hopes of using natural Easter Egg dye next spring. So I’ve started some marigolds (their crushed seeds produce a yellow dye) and Hopi Red Dye Amaranth in the basement, and also hope to start some Hopi Black Dye Sunflowers and bull’s-blood beets in the garden a little later in the season. If anyone else knows of some good heat & drought-tolerant dye plants, please send them my way, as I’m just beginning my research on this.

Second, I’m going to be putting in a larger-than-ever-before cut flower garden. I love having cut flowers in the house and would have them every day all year long if only I didn’t realize where cut flowers come from in the off season. You see, tulips cut in Europe or South America and shipped in refrigerated cars to my local florist just don’t pass my enviro-meter That’s why I have African violets and zygocactus for houseplants and force bulbs just about every year.

Anyhow, the local greenhouse had a 3-for-1 sale going this week and, enchanted as I was by the 80 degree temperatures yesterday, I bought the following seeds for my cut flower garden:

• Heirloom Titan & Sun Samba Sunflowers
• Virginian & Ten Week Bouquet Stock
• Bachelor buttons (both blue & multi-colored!)
• Snapdragons
• Four varieties of Zinnias (I love zinnias!)
• Quinoa (yes, the edible kind is also nice for bouquets!)
• Cleome
• Coreopsis

I also got a free packet of the “Denver Daisy” rudbeckia that Denver Botanic Gardens is giving out in honor of the 150 year anniversary of Denver’s founding. Oh, and I bought “Big Max” pumpkin seeds last week. You know, the kind that grow up to 100 pounds. I’m thinking the kids will enjoy having those growing in their secret garden out behind the sandbox.

As an aside, yesterday’s sunny spring weather was replaced today with 2 inches of snow! Happy May Day, Colorado!

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

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

What can I say? We just got a puppy, I’m working on a major deadline for work, and I’ve been outside helping the landscapers place rocks and shrubs, all of which needs to happen before any of my seedlings have a hope of seeing real sunlight. So I forgot to water, and fried some penstemons, my Roma tomatoes, some Missouri Evening Primrose, and a couple of Prairie Zinnias, which really bums me out because those have such a low germination rate to begin with that I now have only four. Oh well, live and learn and come up with a more fool-proof (or should I say busy-proof) watering system for next year.

The good news is that everything that survived the mini-drought is now doing really, really well. I moved some tomatoes, peppers, Rudbeckia hirta, hollyhocks, and English lavender up to 3 1/4 inch pots yesterday. And did something I have never before brought myself to do: thinned seedlings. Perhaps it’s because I don’t have room for 24 Zapotec tomatoes, or because my stomach can’t managed a dozen habanero plants, or maybe it’s just because I’m becoming ruthless and selecting the plants with the strongest stems in hopes that they’ll be able to resist the Lyons winds. Either way, I had a fairly good pile of thinned seedlings to go on the compost pile after my work downstairs and that freed up room in the tetra-packs to start the other seeds that have been cold stratifying in the fridge since January.

One small lesson learned (besides setting some sort of reminder to water) is that you can’t give plants like tomatoes the number of hours of light they need (I’ve got them on 16 hours a day right now) and, under those same conditions, grow greens. Yes, it’s true. Despite the fact that my arugula is only an inch tall, it’s sending up the characteristic 4-petaled mustard flower. It would be sort of adorable–garden in extreme miniature–if I wasn’t really hoping to eat those greens. I might have to buy a second timer for the greens next winter, but I’m still trying to calculate return-on-investment before I, um, make more investments

I don’t know if it’s the time change, the warm weather, the nearness of the first day of spring, or the fact that our landscapers have kicked it into overdrive, but I seem to be bordering on spring-garden-mania!!!

Tuesday afternoon, I spent a blissful afternoon planting bulbs with the children. Yes, I know it’s the wrong time of year (these were spring bulbs!), but I bought a bunch of stuff on clearance last fall, half of which never got planted, so after a winter of cold storage in the garage, they were sending up shoots. So what the heck? We planted scilla, snowdrops, crocuses and grape hyacinth under the area where our grass will be. If they come up, they will dot the yard with purples and blues well before the warm season grass greens up.

Yesterday, they laid our tall fescue sod over the newly-planted bulbs and although the water-Nazi in me is in a panic about the three-times-per-day watering schedule, I know in the long run that we’ve minimized our turf area (<1000 square feet) and chosen a low-water variety. The water will also probably give an added jump-start to those bulbs, as will the bone meal that Gabriel & Lily carefully sprinkled in each bulb hole (while I fended off the pooch, who was determined to eat the bone meal!).

Today they started rototilling the soil, pulling out even more rock as they went, and really doing the fine grade. This means that I may yet make my goal of planting peas by St. Patrick’s Day (yes, I know that’s Monday!). I sat in the bath with my husband the other night laughing about the dirt between my toes and under my (broken) nails. It looks like his hopes for a girlie girl are dashed for yet another gardening season

The warmer temperatures have not yet driven away the wind and, although it doesn’t much bother me, the children and the pup protest loudly whenever they have to be out in it. Sigh. And all I want to be doing is digging in the dirt.

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?