One of the Joys of Maturity |
|
Affiliated Advertisers |
Clicking through one of our banner ads or some of our text links and making a purchase will produce a small commission for us from the sale. The Old Guy's Garden Record Friday, February 4, 2011 - A Nasty Winter Storm The winter storm that swept across much of the nation this week manifested itself as freezing rain in our area. The ice storm created beautiful scenes of ice covered trees, but left nasty situations of people without electricity for several days. We experienced two power outages at our house, the more serious lasting 35 hours. I'd forgotten how nasty kerosene heaters smell! But we stayed fairly warm (a "toasty" 58o F). One of our daughters who called to check in on us was surprised that we had both dogs, six of our eight cats, and our quaker parrot, of course, all inside with us. Generally, the dogs and most of the cats stay outdoors. While you could hear branches creaking, breaking, and falling to the ground during the ice storm, especially at night, we suffered little damage. That's probably due to the fact that we've already lost most of our grand, old, maple trees to lightning strikes, age, and disease. A day before the storm began, I noticed that the soil heating mat under our geraniums downstairs under our plant lights had failed and swapped it out for an older one that I rarely use. The interruption in bottom heat couldn't have done the germinating seed any good. Then the power went out, and both the flat downstairs and a half flat we had upstairs of germinating seed lost their bottom heat. Seed that did germinate became a bit leggy as it sought light.
The plant actually looked a lot better than the photo shows. I dropped it on the way upstairs, unpotting the plant, corm, and root system! Considering the wear and tear, it really looks good. The inset shows the fabulous center cluster of blooms developing.
To be sure we didn't have another disaster with a heat mat failing, I ordered another Gro-mat model (shown at right) this morning from the Greenhouse Megastore. While a good bit more expensive than the Hydrofarm model, our first one lasted several years before beginning to act up last spring. And now, it's back in service doing well!! (Note that when it acted up, it was not on a thermostat, but was always on in a cold basement. We also were using the wire rack it comes with. We no longer bother with it, now.) Monday, February 7, 2011 - More Geraniums
I seeded just four 3" square pots, with the rest of the seed going onto damp paper toweling in freezer bags. All of it then went into a half flat with a "humidome" cover I spray painted flat black last year. I had to touch up the corners today, so the geranium seed should have the total darkness it is said to require for proper germination. My old darkroom thermometer goes through a hole I cut in the cover and its base into the potting soil of one of the pots. And the whole mess then goes onto the shelf over a register that stays at around an ideal 75o F. If you're interested in growing geraniums from seed, I tell and demonstrate just about everything one can do wrong in the process in our feature stories, Growing Geraniums from Seed - 2009 and Growing Geraniums from Seed - 2010. Actually, growing geraniums from seed shouldn't be too awfully difficult. We've just had some bad luck and done some really dumb stuff, and I leave it all in for the reader's benefit. But I do describe the process(es), such as germinating geranium seed first on damp paper towels, in some detail. After two years of fun and games with the geranium feature stories, I decided to share this year's geranium exploits here in the regular Senior Gardening blog. Good Reading
Tuesday, February 8, 2011 - A Vendor of Gloxinia Plants An email today from reader Steve Paige brought the pleasant news that there is an online vendor for gloxinia plants! The Violet Barn appears to have a nice selection of colors and types (single and double). I've obviously not ordered from them (yet), but was impressed with their solid vendor rating on the Garden Watchdog on Dave's Garden. Plants run $5-10 each plus priority or express mail shipping. Milky Spore A year or so ago one of the folks at our local garden shop told me about a product called Milky Spore Since Milky Spore is a bit expensive, I put off trying it until now (well, this spring). It takes three treatments a year and really should be used two years in a row for maximum control (according to the label). Having made up my mind to try the product, I popped for a twenty pound bag of the granulated version, enough to treat all of our raised beds this year and next. And this time I didn't hunt for a bargain price on Amazon, but went back to the garden store that gave me the guidance on the product. It seemed only fair. Thursday, February 10, 2011 - Behind Again
Stokes Seeds' suggests that petunias "for Mother's Day and Easter pot sales are usually sown Dec. 1st. For May - June bedding plant and container sales, sow between Jan. 30th. - Feb. 28th. Seed sown Mar. 1st should produce flowering plants by June 15th." So, it appears I may be okay on planting time. I've sown petunias this late before and still gotten good plants by spring. Stokes also recommends not covering petunia seed, as some colors and types require light to germinate. They also suggest a daytime soil temperature of 80o F. Twilley Seeds recommends "70-75o F." Since my heat mat struggles to keep up with the 75o F setting I have it at right now in our cool basement, I'll have to be happy with that temperature. Of course, when I set about getting things together, I found it took longer to clean up our plant room in the basement than it did to seed a flat of petunias. I filled one of our heavy, Perma-Nest plant trays I topwatered the flat with warm water (again, outside) before bringing it inside to our well-lit kitchen for seeding. I used a finger to make a slight depression in the soil of each cell to center the seed.
I put a dribble of warm water on the center of each cell to aid the pellets in dissolving to release their seed. Note again that I did not cover the seed, as it needs light to germinate. With good germination, I'll probably have some cells with more than one plant that will need to be divided. The total "crop" will be enough for us to make several hanging baskets filled with petunias along with many petunias in the garden proper. Germination can often take up to 10-12 days.
Saturday, February 12, 2011 - Transplanting Gloxinias After doing my daily check of our geranium seed that is germinating, I turned my attention today to transplanting the last of the seedling Cranberry Tiger gloxinias that were still in the pot I'd used for germination. I'd let them get way too large. One of them had even put up a lovely purple bloom.
We get our 5/8" x 4" plastic plant labels from Twilley Seed (200/$9.90). While that's not an unreasonable price, it always seemed that I was running short of them when I most needed them. I started recycling the labels last year. To do so, I wash them in dish detergent to remove any foreign matter and then soak them in chlorine bleach to lighten the previous writing and to sterilize them. The coffee container in the top photo of today's posting is full of bleached plant labels. So far, it has worked pretty well. Update (2/13/2011)
Essential to the success of this task (and many of my other garden exploits) is an understanding spouse or significant other, willing to put up with stuff like plant labels drying on the kitchen counter, potting soil baking in the oven, and so on. My 14 year old grandson passed through the kitchen while I was laying out the labels and asked what I was doing. I could tell from his expression he thought grandpa was a little nuts or a bit too cheap, or possibly a bit of both. Of course, Amazon As I was shutting down the computer after making the initial upload of this posting, I found myself relaxing looking at my desktop background of alfalfa. I took the shot in the field across the road from our house in 2003. While the alfalfa has long since been turned under, the photo remains available as a free download for use as a desktop photo or wallpaper from our Desktop Photos page.
Vinca needs total darkness and bottom heat, if possible, to germinate well. Ours went into our half flat with an opaque cover that sits on a shelf above a furnace register. The dianthus went into a six inch pot downstairs under plant lights (although the seed is covered). While our basement usually is too cool for such stuff, we're in the midst of a warm spell, so the old seed may just get going. I also made my first application of granular milky spore on our garden plots and around our young apple trees today. The ground is mostly thawed and we have a chance of showers for the next few days to wash it in. I treated the area around our apple trees because the moles seem to love tunneling under them, playing havoc with their developing root systems. I must have spent an hour today just sitting on the glider on our back porch enjoying the springlike weather. When you get a warm, sunny day this time of year, it's sometimes hard to decide what to do first. We still have sticks (limbs) in the yard from the ice storm, kale that needed to be pulled from the garden, a cold frame in need of a new plastic cover, and fruit trees to be sprayed. And while it's hard to believe, it's also time to be starting the first of our brassicas for the garden, as we generally transplant broccoli and cauliflower the first week of April (April 7 the last two years).
I really need to build a new cold frame, as our current one is beginning to come apart. It was built to hold standard seed flats with some rather heavy, treated 2x4 lumber. I still use it to cover seed flats, but often use it in the fall to cover late crops in our our raised garden beds. I need a larger (both longer and wider), lighter weight cold frame to fit our raised beds for late protection of fall broccoli, lettuce, etc.
The dog and cat shown are big buddies. Mac, the dog, is great with our cats. Buster, a butterscotch tom that showed up last fall, tends to take pretty big liberties with Mac. Buster also seems to prefer hanging out with the dogs, rather than with the rest of our all female cats.
Our Maverick Red geraniums are already showing some zoning on their leaves. Our first round of geraniums, the Maverick Reds, germinated well. Our second round that included some Orbit and Summer Showers (from Twilley Seed), did very poorly despite having ideal conditions. (Some more bad seed from Twilley?) Our flat of onions, freshened with their second "haircut," are looking good as well. They got a bit leggy (long and falling over) again, so after cutting them back to 1 1/2 - 2" in height, I brought the plantlight down a bit more over them. And peeking through the shelves and plantlights, one can seed a red, Cranberry Tiger gloxinia bloom and a tiny red bloom on our tuberous rooted begonia (variety unknown). Even with the sun out the last few days, a little color in the plant room goes a long way toward dispelling the winter blues.
I still need to get the brassicas going, but ran out of day before I ran out of things to do. Shep and I got busy and started the first of our brassicas yesterday. It was a pleasant day outside, so I chose to fill a standard flat of fourpacks with sterilized potting soil on the back porch. Shep watched for awhile, grew disinterested, and wandered off to sunbathe in the yard. I used a watering can of warm water with a bit of captan mixed in for fungus control to water the flat. While captan is pretty nasty stuff, it adds a measure of protection against damping off fungus and later against mold or moss growing on the damp soil surface. The sixteen quart cooking pot shown is one I bought for my wife years ago. Unfortunately, it tended to burn stuff on the bottom. When we found better replacements, the large pot found its place as a great utensil in which to bake, sterilize, and store potting soil.
The flat of damp potting soil came inside for seeding the following:
When I got done, I realized I'd left out seeding any Goliath broccoli. It performs for us almost as well as our best variety, Premium Crop. I think I got off track by seeding a new variety for us, Belstar. It is said to have good warm weather producing ability. The last two items are courtesy Vin Cain, who sent me some of his saved seed a couple of years ago. I successfully grew Choy Sum last year and enjoyed it's flowers in the garden. Our Kai Lan didn't get going very well, so I'm looking forward to trying these Chinese vegetables again.
If I transplanted all the dianthus that germinated, I'd be out of room under our plantlights. Currently, I still have room for one or two more seed flats before I have to begin sorting things to sit out from under the lights for a time. I can usually get away with setting our wandering jews and begonias to the side of the plantrack where they still seem to receive just enough light to survive. Following the directions on a Stokes Seed packet, I took our tiny, tiny petunia seedlings off the heat mat yesterday and also removed their humidome (clear plastic cover). With our heat mat now free, I'll soon need to start another flat of something that requires light and bottom heat for germination. Wednesday, February 23, 2011 - Seed Savers Exchange
I was a member of the Seed Savers Exchange (SSE) when it was in its infancy. I dropped out for several years when I wasn't gardening, and rejoined three or four years ago. SSE members seek to preserve and multiply open pollinated varieties of vegetables. When I lived on a farm, we worked primarily to preserve the old Reid's Yellow Dent field corn. We now work with several of our favorite and somewhat endangered vegetable varieties. We're offering other SSE members seed for the Moira tomato variety, our Japanese Long Pickling cucumber, and Earliest Red Sweet peppers. Moiras produce fruit with blood red interiors and an excellent flavor. Japanese Long Pickling cucumbers were the focus of our A Cucumber of Distinction feature story. And the Earliest Red Sweet pepper is a blocky, early pepper that we liked, but had our stored seed go bad. Another SSE member was able to supply us with seed a few years ago.
At right you can see that I'm the only one making Japanese Long Pickling cucumber seed available in this year's SSE yearbook. And of course, if something should happen to me (Remember, the name of this site is Senior Gardening.), and no one else is growing out the variety, the variety could be lost forever! Now after doing some evangelizing for seed preservation, let me add that it is incredibly cool to just page through the annual yearbook to see what is available. Some years I just look and enjoy without buying anything. Other years I'll try something new or a variety we've had, but used up our seed or had it go bad in storage. Membership in the Seed Savers Exchange is $40 per year, but they also offer an "optional USA membership for senior citizens, students and others on a reduced/fixed income" at $25 per year. (I remember when the reduced membership was pay what you could!) Saturday, February 26, 2011 - Seed Starting Calculator
Rain, Snow, Tulips, and Daffodils
During that time, I contented myself with replanting some cells where seed didn't germinate in our brassica planting and transplanting a bunch of dianthus seedlings. The warm weather we had last week and still relatively warm weather we're now having has brought up our daffodils and tulips.
If we have a really hard freeze before spring really arrives, these plants might get nipped. I'm hoping to get some more seed starting in the coming days, as gardening season is right around the corner. I've been sorta swamped this week with my other web site covering the teacher and union protests in Wisconsin, here in Indiana, and elsewhere. I wound up the month of February with a flurry of planting. I got so into it that my camera just sat on the kitchen table, totally forgotten while I planted vinca, snapdragons, impatiens, beets, herbs, more onions, and lettuce. It wasn't until I sat down to write this evening that I discovered I needed to go to our plantracks in the basement and snap a few shots. I'd planted some old vinca seed a few weeks ago, but didn't get anything from it. In the meantime, I'd placed another order with Stokes Seeds that included fresh vinca seed. I seeded Pacifica XP for garden plants and Mediterranean XP for some hanging baskets. I also seeded some Envoy Impatiens, anther trailing variety for hanging baskets (and planters). Our snapdragons this year will be Madame Butterfly and First Lady. I spent a lot of time making sure I got right which plants needed light and/or bottom heat (snaps and impatiens) and which ones required covering the seed or even total darkness (vinca). Trying to trim down the number of varieties planted also took some time, although I sorta wimped out on that one and planted 13 varieties of lettuce, 5 varieties of beets, and 3 of onion. I replanted onion because I just don't like the way our current planting looks. I can't really describe it, but the plants are really slow to grow this year. The onions are sharing a half flat with three rows of beets. I don't do well direct seeding and thinning beets in the garden, but transplanting them often works out well for me. While I started 5 varieties, I just planted a few of each. Even when our kids were here growing up, I was the only one who really liked beets! I'm trying two new hybrids from Twilley, Kestrel and Merlin, along with the red ringed beet, Chioggia, and Burpee's Golden Beet. I also seeded some very old Red Ace, a variety I like but has probably been in the freezer for a bit too long.
Our crowding under the plantlights is an annual problem. For several weeks in late February and March, I end up with more plants than can fit on our rickety plantrack. Some plants, such as the hanging basket plants shown above, have to sit on the floor next to the lighted area and do the best they can. When things warm up enough for plants to begin going under the cold frame outside, the problem eases. While we have six, four foot shoplights, we generally only have three or four of them in use during the rest of the year. Some "just for the fun of it" stuff I planted included three varieties of parsley, some common sage, oregano, and celery. I grew good celery just one time, years and years ago. I didn't start our basil yet, as it's a quick grower. I generally start it about the same time I start our tomatoes. And I really don't plan to dry basil this year, as we had a bumper crop that we dried and stored last year. But it is nice to have fresh basil for cooking during the summer.
From the
at Senior Gardening |
©2011 Senior-Gardening.com