RetroRevolution

The rack loaded and ready for the experiment.

It has been getting down into the mid teens at night, and into the upper 30′s to low 40′s during the day here in western Michigan.  The sun is out a lot more, the snow is starting to melt.  I had started some lettuce and broccoli a few weeks ago and it has been doing phenomenal in the window and under the grow lights, but it’s growth has substantially slowed down.  I haven’t got the cold frames cleaned out and ready yet, but I do have a rack with a plastic tarp over it that I picked up on clearance last fall.  I set it up over the weekend and decided to move one batch of lettuce and broccoli out to it and see how they would fare.

The bottom line is that 18º is just too cold for the broccoli.  It was looking pretty sad the next morning.  The lettuce, though looking sad, bounced back and is doing just great.  It has taken off in the last couple days from the extra energy it gets from the sun vs. the weak lights in the basement window.  I’m certain that the next batches I move out in a week or two will be just fine.  Furthermore I am going to fill the barrel next to the rack with water to act as a passive heat sink.  It was a little early in the year and I was afraid of the possibility of the barrel freezing solid and breaking so I didn’t do it last weekend.

Looking forward to fresh vegetables really soon!

The last photo of the broccoli before its untimely demise.

I’ve been starting some early seedlings. I’m going to try for a bunch of peppers this year. In and around the great lakes, peppers must be started from seed indoors or in the protection of a greenhouse. They need to be started in late winter to early spring. I have started them as early as mid-February and as late as the first of April. What is important with peppers is maintaining a temperature above 50ºF. If temperatures on plants fall below this point, the plants grow much more slowly and the leaves will even yellow and flowers drop off in certain circumstances.
The seeds for sweet peppers are slow to germinate and require constant warmth. If the temperature falls below 70ºF there is a good chance the seeds may rot before they germinate. Use a seed warming mat or germinate your seeds in a location that is very warm. I presently germinate my seeds on growing racks in the basement with domes, and warming mats. If these were not available I would consider starting peppers near a wood stove, on top of the refrigerator, or near a furnace outlet. Again keeping these babies warm for the duration of germination is critical.
I will typically start the seeds in a light loose starting medium with a high percentage of fibrous material. I’ve never had any problems with this choice so I keep using it. The seeds are planted about 1/4″ deep in 1″ cells and placed in the germination environment. At about 70º it takes about 8 to 10 days for germination. Even with seeds up to 5 seasons old, I still get about a 80% germination rate.

Peppers just after germination.

The seed beds need to be kept moist throughout the germination. With a lengthy germination time this introduces a problem of possible mold or fungus growth. This is usually treated by increasing airflow around the seed beds. This makes it harder to keep the seeds warm and moist. Supposedly if the soil temperature can be increased to about 80ºF the seeds will germinate in about 5 days. I am going to look into a heat cable arrangement of possibly a warming lamp from the chicken brooder to increase the temperature above 70.

The Banana Peppers are up!

I wanted to do a quick update on the lettuce I planted a while ago.  I planted two batches on the same day.  One batch was kept in a south facing window, but received no light.  The other batch was planted under seed starting lights and receives 16 hours of artificial light a day.  There is a clear winner here.  The seedlings started around the winter solstice just didn’t get enough light to start in the middle of December.  They were long spindly and gangly looking.  They couldn’t keep themselves out of the dirt.

Black Seeded Simpson Before Transplanting

The seed that have been operating under the grow lights are doing just fine.  They are off to a good start and have a nice healthy leaf structure.  I took some photos of them right after transplanting and I am very happy with their progress considering the circumstances.

Black Seeded Simpson Lettuce in Winter

My big take-away from this little experiment is that there is enough light to keep a large leafed green going in the winter even during the period of minimal light surrounding the winter solstice, but there isn’t enough to start a plant.  If you want to keep yourself in greens throughout the dark winter doldrums, you need to have a well established crop that you can gradually take the outer leaves from.  Do not plan on using succession planting late in the season and harvesting entire plants for use and planting new ones to replace them.

Please remember that I am growing plants a seven iron south of the 43rd parallel only about 30 miles east of Lake Michigan.  We have sun very low in the horizon when we have sun at all this time of year.  you may be able to pull off some much better results in your particular location.  I’m going to operate on the assumption anything not nearly mature by December 1 isn’t going to get any more mature until after February 1 with my minimal sunlight.  Going into next winter I’m going to shoot to have a minimum of 16 leaf lettuce plants just entering maturity in the cold frame on December 1st.  This would allow me to harvest at least 1 a week even if I loose half of them to frost or other abnormalities.

Here’s to gardening in Michigan!

The very early broccoli I have planted has sprouted.  After just 3 days in the soil, I have 8 seeds out of 12 sprouted.  That is a 75% germination rate and I suspect that I will get one or two additional sprouts before the weekend is out.  I’m pretty happy with that rate considering the seed is something I bought for use in the 2006 season and this is the 2010 season.   I use tray covers until the first seeds germinate to help maintain a constant moisture level in the seedling trays.  I’ve found that in the winter without them, the dry air in the house makes keeping the soil damp but not soaking very difficult.  There is a small danger in using them of increasing the chances of damping off disease.

Broccoli Seedlings at 1 Week

At this point the first thing I do is remove the tray cover.  This does a few things.  The first is it allows the soil and seedlings to begin drying out.  If the seedlings were allowed to remain as moist as they were for sprouting it would just about guarantee some sort of fungal disease of taking hold and killing them off.  The next is it allows more light to reach the seedlings.  The light in your basement is probably too low already.  By removing the tray cover, you allow as much light as possible to reach the young plants.  Finally the removal of the cover permits air circulation over and around your young plants.

After removing the cover I move the lights to within 2” of the tops of the plants.  This must be monitored as if they grow too close to the light they may touch it and be burned by the warm lamps, even if they are fluorescent bulbs.  You do want the lamps to be as close as possible to the young plants however to maximize the intensity of the light they receive from your lights.  The intensity of light falls off as 1/r^2, where r is the distance from the light to the point being measured.  Don’t worry about the math.  Just make certain you understand the concept:  if you move a plant twice as far from a light source the amount of light it receives in now one fourth the light it used to receive.  A plant at 3″ from a light receives 1/9th the light a plant 1″ from the light receives.  See how dramatic the effect of distance can be.

All of these items help prevent the development of damping off. This disease is very common and can be quite fatal to young plants.    Damping off thrives in cool, dim, and damp conditions.  Three adjectives that almost perfectly describe the typical seed starting location of most homesteaders.  This fungal disease can go airborne and quickly spread from tray to tray.  The disease itself appears as a small constriction at soil level in the young seedlings.  In a day or two the seedling will begin to appear limp and wilted and it will eventually fall over and die.

The best way to control the disease is to prevent it in the first place.  The following items will help prevent its occurrence:

• Provide air circulation
• Use clean disinfected containers
• Sterilize you seed starting soil
• Do not crowd seedlings
• Dry out the surface of the soil prior to watering

Further Suggestions I’ve never tried and no way of documenting or testing other than by trial and error:

• Soak seeds in a small amount of water and crushed garlic to prevent the disease from appearing
• Mist the soil with Chamomile Tea as a preventative
• Sprinkle soil surface with cinnamon

As seed starting time swings into action in Michigan, the time to begin acquiring potting soil begins.  If you are at all interested in gardening as a way of obtaining your own organic produce then you should consider maintaining organic standards throughout the entire growth cycle.  You need to start with organic seeds in organic starting mix.  Unfortunately, organic potting soil from the garden center can be very expensive.  Fortunately, there is a way to make your own organic potting mix or seed starting mix at home.  An organic potting mix can be composed and produced using a wide spectrum of materials.  Many of them available around the homestead.

All mix recipes are primarily a composition of soil, sand, and compost.  These are combined in different proportions to suit different applications of the soil.  A seed starting mixture has a different recipe than a container growing mixture.  The proper evaluation of the proportion of the elements and the preparation of the elements is essential to success, but relatively simple.

Soil

Your best choice for the soil component is soil from your own garden.  This is after all, where you are going to eventually moving most of your transplants to once the weather warms up.  If you choose to source your soil from the garden you should treat it so that it is free of soil borne diseases.  There might be low levels of these diseases that hardy full sized plants can withstand, but a young fragile seedling would succumb and die.

Pasteurization of the soil is simple.  Bake the soil in the oven.  Right now the wife is probably thinking…”Not in my kitchen!” So take my advice and:

1. Only do this when your significant other is conveniently out of the house.
2. Use a foil roasting pan or large pan that you have kept in the garage or corner of the basement
3. Do not spill.

Pasteurization (heating at 180°F) usually kills most diseases, weeds and insects in the soil.  After making sure that the soil mixture has adequate moisture for seed germination, put the mixture in a pan or glass dish.  The mixture should not be more than three to four inches deep. This is important because the outside will heat up much more quickly than the inside and this can cause problems. Place a thermometer in the center of the mixture, cover with aluminum foil and put in the oven.  The foil is important because it helps hold the moisture in.

Set the oven at 275°F, and heat until the soil temperature in the center of the pile is 180°F. Now lower the oven temperature setting and maintain the soil temperature at 180°F for 30 minutes. Remove the soil from the oven and allow it to cool before planting. make certain that any tools you might use in handling the soil have been well cleaned following the treatment.

I have been told that microwaving the soil will also pasteurize it.  I’ve often found that it is difficult to uniformly heat things in the microwave, so I am not to eager to try this method.  If you are looking for an energy efficient way to do this and the the microwave is all you have then please do so.  But if you are just looking for an energy efficient way yous should just consider baking it inside a black bag on a sunny day.  Just check the temperature regularly.

Sand

You want to pick the right kind of sand to add.  Coarse sand, aka builder’s sand, is your sand of first choice for this.  Builder’s sand adds air spaces to the potting mix. Do not use plaster sand and other fine sands. They tend to settle into the spaces between the larger particles, and make a dense mix. Clean, washed sand has a near-neutral pH and little  food value for plants.  It does add a substantial mass so that the containers do not become top heavy.

Compost

Compost is probably over used and more often than any other potting mix be people who want to be organic.  This is unfortunate because in most applications the compost by itself can be laden with excess salts and the pH is very acidic. It is however free if you have the time to wait.  According to Christopher Shirley in Profit Making Compost the ideal compost has the following composition:

• pH between 6.5 and 8.0
• no sulfides
• less than 0.05 ppm of ammonia
• 0.2 to 3.0 ppm ammonium
• no more than1 ppm nitrites
• no more than 300 ppm nitrates
• 30 to 35 percent moisture
• is at least 25% organic matter
• very few soluble salts

Seed Starting Mix

1 pound compost (sifted, if possible)
1 pound builder’s  sand
1 pound garden soil

If too dense, add some vermiculite to the mixture.  Bone meal and lime could be added as necessary, but don’t over do it.

I place the mix in growing flats on top of a 1/8-inch layer of oak leaf mold for drainage. Crushed eggshells should be placed between the leaf mold and compost for calcium-loving plants like cabbage.

Start Thinking about Seeds!