spiceoflife's Blog

Seeds are in and Plastic is On!
Oct 29, 2007 | 8:00 PM PST
Tags: plastic , small greenhouse , pumpkins

Hello friends and readers,

I've planted all of my rhambutans (4), longan berries (10) and pomegranate seeds (53), now it's up to them.  The coconut still has another couple of days of soaking before I pop it in a pot.

We had a pretty good frost this morning, but it only froze on my car - the plants in the beds were fine.  :-)  Thank you micro-climates!  So when I got home from work this afternoon I put the plastic on my little green house/row cover/cold frame, call it what you like.  Pictures are in my album if you would like to take a look.  A couple of people seemed interested in what I did with the greenhouse after seeing the pictures, so I'll be posting a materials list, dimensions and some basic instructions.  I'm actually going to be covering another one of my beds, so I'll take some pictures as I go, too.

My son took one of the pumpkins with him to his mother's house.  Boy was he proud!  We didn't get a chance to carve one here at our house this weekend.  My niece and nephew didn't come down as planned, so I have some extras.  And I let the neighbors know about the pumpkins in the pumpkin patch so they can bring their grand kids over.  They seemed pretty excited about it.  :-)

 A new friend sent me some osage oranges that I have been craving ever since I came across them while trying to identify a plant that Meska had posted in the Mystery Plant forum.  I opened the box with my son this weekend.  They did sort of look like "green brains".  I have to take some time this week and figure out the best way to get the seeds out.  I'm thinking of trying a couple of different methods.  1) brute force - cut them open and pick the seeds out.  2) leave one outside under a pot to see what it looks like in the spring, since they will need to be stratified (exposed to cold for a period of time to mimic the change of seasons and allow the seeds to germinate).  3)  Put one in the ground and see what happens.  I'll spend some time researching it online, too.  Of course, if anyone has any additional info I would love to hear about it.

On a down note, when I brought in my plants, I had some hitchhikers - spider mites.  They were positively feasting on my bananas and elephant ears.  They don't seem to like anything else.  I picked up some pyrethrum spray for houseplants at the local Agway.  It seems to do a good job against the spider mites and the fungus gnats that also come in this time of year.  I tried watering less frequently to get rid of the fungus gnats by just keeping the soil drier, but all I got was thirsty fungus gnats.  ;-)  I had also tried using one of those clove oil sprays, but my plants didn't like it, and it didn't seem to be effective.  It didn't bother the gnats at all.  So pyrethrum spray it is.

Also, thanks to everyone who is reading my blog.  I saw that it's now ranked second.  :-)  If there are any gardening magazine editors reading this, I'm also willing to write articles for money, too.

Regards,

Robert

Time Flies, but my greenhouse is already up this year!
Oct 20, 2007 | 7:23 PM PST
Tags: sorry , baby greens , lettuce , mesclun , season extension , PVC , bok choy , greenhouse , small greenhouse

Wow, it's been almost two weeks since my last post. Time flies when you're having fun. I think I mentioned that I love the fall; it's my favorite time in the garden.

Before I start with what I wanted to enjoy talking about, I would like to apologize to the several folks that have not received the seeds they requested for the sunflower and the datura. My white and yellow datura seeds got mixed together on the kitchen table while I was sorting and packaging them up, so I wanted to wait until I got another batch of each so I could be sure of what I was sending folks. And I quite honestly just haven't gotten around to pulling all of the seeds off of the sunflower head and mailing them out. Sorry all. Please rest assured that this was not some elaborate scam to get 41 cents from you all. I'll get them all out to you before Spring - I promise!

Now that I've gotten that out of the way, on to fun stuff....

Early this week, Monday (Oct.15th) I cleared out the bed in which I'd grown my corn and over which I had let my pumpkin vines ramble. I turned over the soil, raked it smooth and picked out more rocks that always seem to come to the surface from the center of the earth, just north of he11. I then put down four rows of different lettuces: butter crunch, salad bowl, mesclun mix, and something else the name of which I can't recall now. I also put down seeds for some baby bok choy and a few large head cabbages. We have had a warm snap here in the Northeast. It's the remnants of all that terrible weather that spawned tornadoes in the midsouth and midwest this week. It's positively balmy here now - 70+ today, 75-80 tomorrow. That's pretty nice for the middle of October. As a result, all of the seeds have already sprouted!

What's that you say? I'm crazy to be starting lettuce, bok choy and cabbages in the middle of October? Well, crazy like a fox, maybe, because over the bed I've also set up my rowcover/mini-greenhouse frame that I designed and built out of PVC .  I've posted pics in my album, "Garden and Row Cover". 

I enjoyed reading two books that gave me ideas about what I wanted for my garden. The first is The 12-Month Gardener: Simple Strategies for Extending Your Growing Season by Jeff Ashton. He discusses several ways of extending the growing season starting out with very simple and very inexpensive floating row covers, all the way through to building your own permanent greenhouses complete with electricity and automatic venting and fans. The second book that I also recommend is Four-Season Harvest: Organic Vegetables from Your Home Garden All Year Long by Eliot Coleman. Both of these together gave me enough information to understand the requirements of being able to extend my growing season, choose appropriate crops, and design and build something that was genuinely my own.

I haven't had to cover it in plastic yet because it's been so warm; I'll do that next week, probably. I'll be happy to post a material list and layout if anyone is interested. It was real easy. It uses more PVC than the standard half-hoop row covers made by just pushing the two ends of a length of PVC pipe into the ground, but it not only looks MUCH nicer, but is also MUCH stronger. I think you'll agree. This is my third year extending the season this way. Last year my nephew helped me harvest three shopping bags full of lettuces and other greens for salads well into December. One of the coolest things about my frame is that I designed it to be expandable. it starts out being sort of triangular in cross section, but you can screw in legs of whatever length you desire to raise the height if you want to make it look more like a "house".  Maybe I'll swap out the short feet with the long feet and a post a pic of that, too, so you can what I mean about the design.

Right now all of the parts are just held together by friction. At some point I'm going to be cementing many of the parts together, not only to make it stronger, but to make set up even easier. I don't want to cement everything together because then I wouldn't be able to take it apart. Currently I can break it down in 15 minutes and store all the parts in a box about 6" x 6" x 46" and it's out of the way during the summer when I don't need it, and I don't have these 10' obnoxiously long PVC pipes laying around. I don't want that to change.

This year my son will be old enough to help me harvest the greens. He's like me - we both love a good salad with some blue cheese dressing. Mmmmmmm.....

Oh, and a boxwood update - I have it home. A picture of that is coming soon, too.