seed tapes

I promised a very long time ago to show you how to make seed tapes.  Well, today I'm making good on it.  In fact, today I'm making good on all the promises I can ever remember making!

Hm. That didn't take long.

To move along.  Seed tapes.  What are seed tapes? Basically, just strips of paper with seeds glued to them at the proper spacing for the type of seed.  You roll out the seed tape, cover it with soil, water, and behold!  Your garden springs forth.  

Why not just buy seed tape?  Well, because.  Have you seen seed tape anywhere?  If you saw it, was it available for every one of your favorite varieties?  That's why. 

Now, why not just plant the seeds right in the soil?  Valid question.  There's something lovely about planting seeds.  Poking your finger in the dirt and sprinkling in tiny life after tiny life has something intangible to offer for your soul.  But if you:

a) go nuts trying to get the exact spacing

b) are bored and antsy in the house during the winter and are already lovingly fingering your already purchased seed packets

c) have a baby due the week the planting's supposed to be done and don't trust "the help" to get it right

d) need to run out and plant the garden and get back inside in record time before the your adorable demolition crew damages something valuable,

then maybe seed tapes are for you.  Also, seed tapes come in, well, tapes.  If you're doing Square Foot Gardening, paper towels might be more your speed.  They're square.  Like Square Foot Gardening. 

So what you want to do is grab these things:

paper towels
seeds
washable glue
ruler
pen

The seeds I'm using here require a 1" spacing.  So I'll draw a 1" grid on my paper towel.  Easy enough.  My paper towel happens to be an 11" square.  So I can either put them closer together, or leave an inch between them.

Fill the whole paper towel with grid.

Put a few dots of glue on a few of the corners...see where we're going with this?

Put one seed into each dot of glue.  Unless you believe in that whole two-seeds-in-one-hole thing, and you can bear to "thin" (also known as yanking up plants that took the trouble to make the dark journey upward by the roots.)  Completely up to you.

Keep going in that fashion until you've filled up your whole paper towel.  A few dots, a few seeds.  If you do all the dots at the same time, then go back to do the seeds, you may find the glue's started to dry.  I warned you.

Toilet paper works great for peas.  They need to be planted in a strip, not in a block.  Notice there's no grid on the toilet paper.  You may feel that your well-practiced estimating eye doesn't require it.  Or you may feel that strict regimentation would stifle your peas' creativity.  Either way, you might decide to shuck the grid.

When your seed tapes have dried, roll them up, put them in a plastic bag, and label them.  Don't forget to label them.  You'll wonder, I promise you, what the heck you were thinking.  Put them away until...PLANTING DAY!!!

When planting day comes, at long last, you can lovingly prepare a square of soil for your seed-tape paper towel:

Put it down on top, and cover it with the recommended amount of soil. 

Just like that!  Water it, and you're done planting.  The paper towel will break down pretty quickly and won't inhibit the growth of your seeds.  All the same, I'd recommend buying the cheapest, thinnest paper towels (just this once!) for obvious reasons. 

Same drill for the peas.  Only you'd lay out your row of peas at the foot of a trellis.  Those suckers can climb. 

Now you can slip outside, plant your garden, and get back inside before the kids even have time to break something. 

Hopefully.  They're pretty fast.

~MB~

pork box

Out in my side yard I wanted to grow a garden.  This, it seemed to me, was a simple desire.  When you want a garden, you a) get a tiller b) dig up the ground and c) plant seeds. Yes?  So we did.  I also knew that weeds grow, and if you want to protect your garden plants from weeds you have to hoe around them.  (I wasn't completely naive.  This time.)

So I set to taking care of my garden.  Industriously, I would say.  Never mind that it was a much larger garden than one person with only a few minutes a day could reasonably hope to keep under control, nor that Father Bird (I'm quoting him here) "stink(s) at hoeing."  Still I worked at it in all the spare time I had, making weedy green rows into pretty brown ones, over and over.  If I didn't look up at the rest of the garden, I was fine. 

What I did not understand about those weeds is this.  Most weeds act like normal weeds, in that you kill them before they seed and you've won.  But in my garden I have a much more formidable foe.  Say hello to Bermuda grass. 

Bermuda grass is a perennial weed, which means that it doesn't die every year and depend on the seeds it grows to continue existing.  It depends on its roots to live through the winter.  As soon as those roots get warm and wet in the spring, Bermuda grass takes off like mad, covering anything it can reach with runners and, yes, more roots.  Deep roots.  Many roots.  But here's the kicker.  Any time you pull up Bermuda grass and leave a little root another plant will grow.  Any time you chop Bermuda grass into x pieces, x new Bermuda grass plants will grow.  Which means, that if you hoe Bermuda grass...well, you can imagine what happens.

The Bermuda grass was growing in my side yard for I-don't-know-how-many-years before we ever bought the house.  So we walked out there into the Bermuda grass' home, stuck a tiller in the ground, and cut them into a million pieces.  It was like a Bermuda grass fertility drug.  The garden that year was an all-but-total failure.

After struggling with the Bermuda grass for a second year, we determined to get a handle on it somehow.  Digging, tilling, hoeing, crying, begging... was not working.

Now, the obvious solution here is to get a bottle of nasty poison and spray the side yard.  But I've never been up for the obvious solution.  I'd read somewhere that the best way to prepare a piece of ground for a garden was to put a pig on it for the winter.  It made perfect sense to me.  The pig digs up the garden, the pig...ah...fertilizes the garden, and when he's done doing your work for you, you get to eat him. Everyone wins, right? 

Well, except the pig.

I began to haunt the Farmer's Market Bulletin ad listings.  I adore this publication.  There are ads for everything to feed your inner farmer, and many of them are just plain entertaining to read.  At any rate, I built a pen in my yard where I wanted the garden, I got food and water buckets and a little A-frame house ready, and I sat down to read the Market Bulletin.

Father Bird, bless his soul, often has (very reasonable) objections to me doing something half-crazy like this.  So what do I do?  I do half-crazy things while he's out of town.  So that when he returns, there's a pig in a pen in the side yard and I have no idea where it came from. 

The last time he'd left town, I'd taken two of those big, lidded plastic boxes you can get at Wal-Mart and brought four chickens home in them.  It had worked beautifully.  Put inside a little box in the dark, the chickens had gone to sleep until I'd gotten them home.  But I was a little uncertain about whether a pig would actually fit.  I hadn't ever actually...seen a baby pig in person.  So I turned to my old friend the internet. 

I looked up every picture of a weaner pig that I could find.  Mostly I was interested in pictures of pigs standing next to people's legs, or standing next to small dogs, so that I could get an idea of what size they were.  Then I found a site that said that weaner pigs weigh around 40 lbs.  That did it.  I had a son that weighed 40 lbs, and he would definitely have fit in that box. 

So I found a listing in a town half an hour away, threw the kids' shoes on, and went over there.  Leaving my children in the car with the air conditioner on, I followed the toothless farmer between his rows of cabbages and down into his pig barn.  "Now, these pigs is ringed, so you won't have to worry about them rootin'" he said.  Hmm.  I asked if we could remove the ring.  He looked at me askance.  "Why would you want to?" he said. 

So I told him my plan.  And he began to chuckle.  "Yeah, you can take the ring out if you want, I reckon," he said, shaking his head.  I eyed his pen full of little pigs suspiciously.  I was half an hour from home, had only a little box to put a pig in, and these fellas looked...bigger than I'd thought they would. 

That one over there was smaller than the rest.  He might fit.  "Where are you going to put 'im?" asked the farmer.  The moment had come.  I went to the car for my box.  I brought it out, opened the lid, and presented it to my farmer.  He looked unbelievingly from the box to my face, and his chuckle turned into a laugh, then into a howl.  He laughed until he had to grab the back of a random chair that was sitting in his yard for support. 

I mumbled something about coming back later with my truck, and beat a hasty retreat.  The last I saw of that farmer, he was walking out through his cabbages, shaking his head.  The windows were rolled up, so I couldn't hear, but I'm certain he was still laughing.  As I pulled out of his driveway, he turned and waved, a gleeful, grateful smile on his face. 

He may be laughing still.  I never did go back to find out.  I found another listing for pigs in a town about five minutes away, and took my truck to see that man.  He let me borrow his pig box, a giant, welded steel-pipe contraption that hardly fit in the back of the truck.  I bought one of his little pigs and set it loose in my pen in the yard. 

All winter the pig ate Bermuda grass.  When he'd pretty well denuded the place, and the flies were driving us crazy, we loaded the (much larger) pig up on the back of the truck again and hauled him away to be made into pork chops. 

And you know, that darn pig must've left one or two Bermuda grass roots, because in the spring, the whole place sprang forth, lush and new.  We still had not won the battle with the Bermuda grass.  This year we humbly bought a little bottle of poison and a pump sprayer.  It turns out the pig didn't exactly make the garden miracle that we'd hoped for.   But he did make fantastic pork chops.

quadruped or biped?

If you find that you can't reach those high-up, most delicious branches, no matter how hard you try...

Just

stand

up.

At first these goats ate everything at goat level.  Then they rolled out the circus-goat act to eat everything that wasn't.  It's hilarious to watch them standing around back there, eating leaves off the trees.  They can walk that way too.  Now we just need to teach them to balance and walk backward on a rolling ball...

fall gardening

Ahhh, fall...lovely time when summer releases its sweaty, iron grip on the world and lets us breathe, and go outside, and actually work there without dying.  Fall, when we're bored with all the green we wanted so badly back in the spring, and we're ready for some red and gold.  There's finally a crisp breeze, and it's time to get some gardening done!

No, I'm not delusional enough to believe that it's fall right now. But it is time to start thinking about maybe considering planning a fall garden. 

Now, why would you even garden in the fall? (So glad you asked.)

*Temps are lower, making for more pleasant gardening.

*Fewer bugs to deal with, especially after frosts. 

*You can grow an entirely different set of plants in the fall/winter than you can in the spring/summer. They have a different personality, in general, growing in a slower, more leisurely fashion.  You won't walk in the house one day and come back out to find they've taken over overnight.

*In some places there's more rain in the fall than in the summer.

*And hey, who doesn't love fresh vegetables in the fall and winter?

What can you even grow in the fall, anyway?

Look, look, look!  I've got a little set of fun diagrams for you.  I'll explain. In the square foot gardening method, you plant vegetables in squares, rather than in rows.  They're each spaced as far apart as they would be in a regular row, but the "between-the-rows" spacing is junked and you just put the next row the same distance from the first row as you put between the plants. 

SO, if I have a 4'x4' area that I'm gardening this fall, I'd just take whichever of the squares I want and sorta cut and paste them in there. 

"Scatter Thinly" is pretty cryptic, isn't it?  The reason I put that there is, these are vegetables with itty bitty seeds.  You'll open up the package, read that they're supposed to have 3" spacing, look at the dust-sized seeds inside, throw up your hands, and dump them all on the ground.  Upon which, they'll all grow in the same space and kill each other.  I mean, you would have done that, before you read this.

Take that pack with the tiny lettuce seeds way down in the bottom and fill it up halfway with something coarse and grainy.  Sand is good.  Sugar will work in a pinch, although if you've got ants, they'll probably come carry that away.  Sometimes if the soil's dry and fine enough, I'll just use the soil that's there.  The point is to thin out that seed with something else so that it "scatters thinly" Get it? 

Do not use salt.  If you use salt your plants won't grow, and neither will anything else until you remove that soil and throw it away.  Salt's what the Romans used at Carthage after they conquered it, to make sure nobody could ever grow crops there again.  Don't do this to your garden.

Okay, when do I plant?

If you're in Georgia, here's the link to UGA's vegetable planting chart.  The dates are there.  If you're not, well, your state should have an extension service, and they'll have lots of great information, like what varieties do well in your area, and when to plant them.  Hurrah for the extension service!  To find it, Google "(state) extension service".

The point is to get your plants in the ground after it's cooled off a bit, but long enough before the first frost to let them get out of that tender-tiny-baby stage.

But what about frost?

These plants fall into a couple of categories when it comes to frost.  All of them are at least a little frost hardy, or they wouldn't be on the fall gardening list.  All of them like cooler weather better than hot, which is why they're even here.  But some laugh at frost, no matter how hard.  Some like frost. 

Here are the "I can only take light frost" pansy babies:

Arugula, Beets, Broccoli, Carrots, Escarole, Leeks, Lettuce, Mustard, Onions, Radishes, Spinach

These you'll want to take a little better care of than their tougher brothers below.  Keep a little hay or straw over in the walkway next to them, and when there's going to be frost, cover them with it.  All that's required is that you keep the frost off the leaves.  Take it off when  the frost's over.

Here are the tough fellas:

Brussels Sprouts, Cabbage, Collards, Fava Beans, Garlic, Kale, Turnips

Throw these guys in the ground and leave them there.  They'll be happy.  This past winter I planted way too late, but I still had carrots, spinach, and garlic that happily lived through the winter and started producing first thing in the spring. 

Later I'll show you how to make fun seed tapes that'll make your gardening a breeze.  For now, though, dig that grubby, dog-eared seed catalog back out and start planning your fall garden!

Best of luck!

~Mother Bird~

salt on watermelon

City life got you down?  I have just the thing.  For the next one-minute-and-thirty-three-seconds, you can pretend that you are in this video.  That this is your forearm, your hand holding a piece of watermelon rind while a goat sloppily gobbles what's left.  Those are your funny-looking feet, your red-painted toenails, your flip-flops (haven't you learned yet not to wear those around here?) and those are your helium-high children's voices in the background.

If you're not cured after seeing that, well, I'm not sure what else I can do for you.  Maybe you need some goats of your own.

~Mother Bird~