Garden Blues

So I have come to realize that I have the garden blues. I think that it can be evident by the lack of posts here. It’s depressing. No, it really is. There is nothing growing in the garden except for some year old parsley and some left over komatsuna, which incidentally is really tired. It needs to go. But it is the only thing there. Lest I not forget, the garlic did decide to sprout this week. Nothing being planted or watered. No weeding. Last but not least no harvesting.

We can actually grow quite a bit in the winter here, unlike the poor souls in the northern part of the country, however, there was poor planning last summer. Alas, it is brown and barren. The new chickens don’t arrive for a few more weeks. But, that is fine. I am a good full day’s work before I finish the new and improved coop.

The one redeeming feature is that it has been relatively warm (50’sF) and mostly sunny.

This blog may soon include more than just gardening, it may quickly expand to the actual eating of food too.

Changes

So I’ve been a little busy recently and haven’t given much of an update. Mostly it is because of new employment; dealing with organic agriculture. Aside from that there are some new arrivals. A few things have germinated: Sugar loaf chicory, Black Seeded Simpson lettuce, and some type of savoyed Italian cabbage whose name is escaping me currently. We just call it the chicken cabbage. It grew really poorly and neither of us really liked it. So the majority of what we grew we fed to the chickens.

Speaking of chickens, we ordered some new ones for this year. In about 3 weeks we will be getting the following breeds as pullets: Buff Catalana, Golden Campine, Ameraucanas, Buff Orpingtons, and Partridge Silkie Bantams. In addition we got the hatchery choice of males for meat. Commercial chicken just tastes badly now. In reality there isn’t much flavor nor texture. We enjoy home grown.

2008 Garden

The 2008 garden season is now under way. At least it is for us here in South-central California. We would likely be further along, if we didn’t live at 3400′ elevation. Either way, we are happy with our growing season.

This year, we are trying something different. We got sick of using peat pods and plastic pots. There was always transplant shock. Not to mention, we were just tired of using petrolium based product – not sustainable. This year we got a soil blocker. It is a little tool that makes soil blocks – fairly simple. I started with the smallest blocker. It makes 20 blocks that are 0.75″ by 0.75″, with a small indent on top to deposit a seed. After the germinate and get bigger, you can transplant them to a bigger soil block (2″ or 4″), which makes a small hole the size of the small block. As the season progresses, I’ll keep this updated.

Here’s how I did it.

Here I am mixing up my own soil mix for the blocks. It didn’t end up being as good as I would have liked, but live and learn.

The next step in the process is actually putting the soil into the block maker to form the little blocks. Not too difficult.

This is what the little look like; getting the flats filled up. Yes, the flats are plastic, just left over from a previous season and do not want to waste them.

Although the instruction for use stated so, I didn’t heed the neccessity of rinsing the blocker between uses. Learned the hard way. It helps.

Finally full, seeds planted, on the heating mat, and waiting for germination.

In the same space using peat pods, only 174 would fit in this space. With the soil blocker there are 600 starts in the same amount of space. I like it.