Potatoes - And a Ton of Dirt.,,

 So I decided to try growing potatoes.  Decided to do it in burlap sacks.  Over the last few months I ended up with too many potatoes that started sprouting before I got them cooked, so mostly the seed potatoes were just potatoes saved from the compost pile, although I did get some seed potatoes from the Resource Center over at the Garden Project https://greaterlansingfoodbank.org/programs/programs-home/the-garden-project/ as well.  I had  total of 4 types of tatties, and I also got the burlap sacks from the Garden Project (leftovers from Coffee roasters. 

So, I pulled the trailer full of dirt up to the area of the driveway nearest the spot I was planning to use, put down some landscape fabric, and tucked in.  As you can see in the pictures I used a cardboard box with the bottom flaps cut open to keep the burlap bags standing up while shoveling dirt into them.  I put in about 4 inches of dirt in each of the 12 bags, planted potatoes about 8 to 10 inches apart in the bags (4 in each bag, the bags are 24x36 inches when flat so about 1.5 feet across when full), then covered with another 4-5 inches of dirt.  And as I was getting to the end I was hoping I had enough dirt.  Eventually poured the last dirt off the tarp into a bucket to finish filling the last bag, and had to steal a little dirt from a couple of the more full bags to make sure the least filled bag was full enough, but that did it.  So I have used the first trailer full of dirt.  My trailer can only officially handle 900 pounds, but I had bought a half-yard of dirt, which depending on moisture content can weigh half a ton plus or minus a bit of water.  Luckily it was pretty dry when I bought it, but I have now shoveled over a half ton of dirt this year, as this isn't the only shoveling I've done.  I was just saying this winter that I needed to add Strength Training to my walking workouts, and I think Gardening is adding that strength training in the form of shoveling and, well, I've also poured a full bag of Perlite and fifteen 2 cubic foot bags of Potting Soil.  Well, 30 cubic feet is more than a cubic yard, so I guess I've moved 1.5 tons of dirt this year, some of it more than once (container gardening means you can change your mind on what goes where).

Successes and Less Successful stuffs.

Today's conundrum: 

My first strawberry is blooming.  The gardening wisdom is that if you plant in springtime you should remove all of the flowers the first year so that you get much healthier plants and much more and bigger and healthier berries in following years.  I did not, however, realize how hard it would be emotionally to actually cut the flowers.  I went back and researched, and apparently everyone from gardening web sites to University Extension services to people who sell strawberries say that yep, you need to snip the flowers.  They say that maybe day-neutral or everbearing plants you could stop snipping  after June.  I knew that going in, and I planted June-Bearing berries in this planter.  So... I decided that I will let them bloom, but snip the flowers when they start to wilt so they don't put a lot of energy into the berry/seed production.

If the strawberry seeds I sowed in the other two planters don't germinate and grow, I will get more seed and try germinating in a controlled environment, then planting this fall, since they say that you don't have to snip fall-planted strawberries.

I knew going in that not everything in the garden would be a resounding success...  and so far the greatest failures have been garlic chives not growing yet, one of the lettuce varieties not surviving the frost/freeze cycles we had, a parsley plant that the squirrels stole, and spinach that started bolting before we got a real good harvest.  As far as the spinach goes, we will replant that for fall and hope it doesn't bolt, then try different varieties next year.  We have new parsley plants that have real root systems (the missing plant was an accidental "grew some small roots while we were keeping it alive in a bowl" plant, so didn't have the ability to stay planted when they tugged on it).  We can replant garlic chives and if that variety doesn't take get some other seeds... and the regular chives are taking off.

A Cornucopia of Greens

This morning we HAD to thin the lettuce towers, along with some radishes, turnips, peppercress, and possibly other items.  The Spinach in the towers had finally fully Bolted so it was weeded out.  We may have a little spinach from the second container before it bolts, as I read on one article that the later you plant it the longer it takes to bolt.

Anyway, we didn't actually harvest any full plants...  well, there were maybe a half dozen that were growing in the wrong place, like a Tango growing in the Bronze Beauty section or something, and there were a few places where the plants were so thick that a couple got pulled entirely to leave room for the others, but overall this was just thinning a few leaves off of each lettuce plant, cutting some peppercress, and thinning some radish and turnip beds.  I put the gallon jug there for size context.  We will be sharing with family and friends, as we already got a head of lettuce from our CSA on Thursday, so we currently have a bounty!

We were somewhat disappointed in the spinach.  If anyone in the north here has suggestions for a spinach variety that produces greens for a month or more instead of a few weeks we would be interested to hear about it.

Oscar

So the squirrel(s) have visited the garden again.  I don't think they even ate anything... the first picture shows that they dug a hole between the only two plants that are planted there (they already stole the parsley that had originally been the third plant - maybe they were looking for it again?), and the plants in the other two containers are small enough that the holes they dug wouldn't have been needed.  Either they just like doing damage or they buried something of their own in my dirt because it was easier than digging in the yard.

Oh well, the lettuce is doing well enough that tomorrow will be another salad day!

And I finished digging the garden bed for the first section of pollinator garden - so in the morning I can plant my milkweed and a couple of other native (wild)flowers in an 8 foot wide bed.

Backyard to Table Microgreens!!!

First garden meal - well, not a full meal, but Diana and I each got a full bowl of salad microgreens from thinning the spinach, lettuce, beets, turnips, radishes, and a little peppercress.  Extremely tasty, and you can't get much fresher than picked less than an hour before eating.  Even more important, since we grew it and picked it and washed it, we know EXACTLY how it made it from seed to table.

All from our container gardening, and we can go right back out tomorrow or Friday and do it again... just from thinning the plants.  For example, below is a picture of the garden towers and all of their lettuce and spinach.  You can see that the openings are crowded, so even with the leaf lettuces we can probably pick 50-75% of the and still have a reasonable batch growing to full maturity.

Community Gardening

So on Sunday I found out which plot of land I get at the Community Garden and met the garden leader.  Because new gardeners often try to bite off more than they can chew, The Garden Project of the Greater Lansing Food Bank assigns first-year gardeners a 10x20 foot plot.  Plenty to grow a lot of food, but not so much that it is likely to discourage a gardener from coming back year after year.  If you come back the next year and want a larger plot, you can do that.  The garden I selected a few blocks from home turns out to have been recently enlarged, and the plot I was assigned is luckily on one of the sunniest spots, and not down in the boggy end of the garden.

Now I just need to finish planting the living plants in the home garden... the ones that are not in the ground yet... so they don't die on me.  I have two Forsythia bushes, 12 milkweed plants (4 each of 3 kinds), 2 tomato plants, a dill plant, a dozen ajuga plants, plus 2 cabbage plants for the community garden.

After that I can get to planting in the Community Garden plot... the melon, squash, cabbage, rutabaga, and other vegetables that we didn't have room for here at the house.  I have another 3-day weekend planned, hoping to catch up on at least some of the tasks that I didn't finish last weekend.

Maybe tomorrow we can thin the lettuce, spinach, and peppercress enough for a small salad.  If so, I will try to get some pictures of the containers we are harvesting from...  It amazes us how well the garden is doing already!

Oscar

Strawberries

It has been a busy and non-garden oriented day... So I am going to talk about my strawberry strategy.  I heard from many people in my area that birds, squirrels, and possibly other animals tend to steal all of their strawberries, so I hope to grow mine in hanging baskets - then bring the hanging baskets into my screened in porch after the berries start to grow (after the flowers have been pollinated).  The first of three varieties I am growing this year, "Old North Sea", are from a viking settlement - shipped as plants and so I got them in the planter early.  I bought planters for my other two varieties today, so hopefully by the end of the week I will have the "Red Wonder Wild" strawberry (berries are supposed to be extra sweet and flavorful but wilt within an hour or two of picking so need to be eaten fresh immediately) and "Attila" alpine strawberry planted.

Purple People Feeder

I mentioned the Purple People Feeder - here is a picture of it and the flowerpot that the Zinnias are in.  The large bin is 22 inches by 24 inches, and over 18 inches deep - Food Grade plastic with four wheels.  It was milky white, but because Purple is special to me I chose to spray paint it.  Because it is deeper than any of the other containers we can grow different items in it - long carrots or long beets or anything else that can take advantage of either the width or depth of the larger bin.

For many of our containers we are hoping to succession plant - as in planting a second or sometimes even third or fourth crop after the current crop is harvested.  Some of them we even companion planted, like putting early turnip or radish seeds in with carrots - the turnips and radishes will be picked and eaten before the carrots even poke their leaves out of the ground.

Garden Towers

Last year we bought two Garden Tower 2 planters (Garden Tower Project).  They look almost identical to this picture except that ours have casters (wheels) on the three legs, and ours have dirt (and plants).

We had decided to try these as an option for container gardening that Diana could reach from her chair.  The total depth of soil is probably 4 feet, but they are designed such that there is a section in the middle where you feed compost into the center of the top, you put in Red Wiggler worms (the kind used in vermicomposting), and the worms and the compost is supposed to make them awesome.  There are 6 layers, and at each of the lower 5 layers there are 9 openings (45 total), then the top is shaped the same around the edge (9 "bumps"), but there is more width of soil, probably at least 6 inches from the edge to the edge of the center tube (which has a cover).

These were actually the first containers we planted, and when the nights were getting down into the 20s we used 55 gallon clear plastic "drum liners" to cover them to keep in the warmth and moisture.  The spinach on top of one even survived the ice storm when we ended up with two inches of ice over a five inch wide oval part of the soil.

At this time I can say that the experiment is sort of working.  We haven't started with the compost or worms yet, and the fact that we don't have anything working in the center means that we have to water these more than the other containers, but we have Spinach that is almost 2 inches high, and we have so many lettuce plants that we are going to have to thin some of the varieties soon.  Also, watering these when the seeds were freshly planted ended up with some of the seeds washing down to the next level.  I would say that next time we plant these we will want to soak the soil first so that we don't have to water the plants for a few days.  Extra water collects in a drawer that pulls out of the bottom, and once you have compost and worms working the center, the water that falls through becomes worm-compost tea.

We may not have them set up optimally, but as we progress I expect they will get better.  The worms should be able to survive our winters if we pull these into the garage or at worst the back porch.

Oscar

Lansing Wastebasket Gardening

About our Lansing Garden:

Oscar and Diana moved to Lansing in 2017 after purchasing a home on 1/10th of an acre.  They each have food allergies, and prefer the intense flavors of organic and ultra-fresh produce.

Oscar did garden tasks as assigned while growing up in the 1960s and early 1970s but didn’t really value or learn about gardening in a useful manner.  Since then he has attempted gardening twice with mixed results – the vegetable garden he tried one year was about 8x12 feet and the only crop he got was about half a dozen bell peppers.  Later, the flower gardening from 3 homes ago went pretty well, but the only edibles were currants, gooseberries, and black raspberries.  The black raspberries were very vigorous but produced for about 2 weeks a year and needed to be well watered during that season if they were to be good berries, and the currants and gooseberries did well for a year or two but eventually succumbed to an insect infestation.

Diana grew up in the country and her family always had a garden growing up.  She has a degree in Resource Development which was part of the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources.   She has gardened before, but this is the biggest gardening project for edibles she has ever attempted.

The Lansing Garden posts will be about our successes, failures, opinions, reviews of plant varieties, products and ideas, and in general about our attempts to improve our groceries.  The first year will probably not be as cost effective as just buying everything organic from stores and local farmers, but we will be trying varieties of produce that are not typically available.  For various reasons, a LOT of our gardening will be in containers, but in addition to the gardening at our home, Oscar is also signed up for a Community Garden plot about 6 blocks from home.