Problem: misters do not deliver enough water with the frequency that I can get round to using them;

SOLUTION: create a seedling waterer

Materials:

==>Small, mabe pint-size, take-out tub.  Preferably one of those ones that you never can find the lid for.
==>1/16″ drill

Method

Drill 5 or so holes in a rosette pattern around the bottom of the tub.  Now, hold it over your seedlings and pour water in from a pitcher or flask.  Watch raindrop-sized water droplets fall onto your seedlings.

As near as I can tell, the only problem is that when the tub is less than half full, the water pressure is about equal to the surface tension over the holes, so the water doesn’t flow out.  The workaround is to pour in more water.

Post is categorized “outdoors” even though it’s indoors, because the garden goes in that category.

The ones in the back garden have been attacked by slugs; this specimin was container-grown.

1) I had a conversation with my landlady yesterday about how we might not have any more conflict about the garden. We agreed that I can plant anywhere that I want to, so long as a) I put a border around my garden, and b) I do not use the fence as a trellis again this year.

2) The hops are budding aggressively, so I am now thinking about what sort of trellis they might like this year. I have a few weeks before I have to decide.

3) Today I planted mustard greens and sage around the hops, as well as a few perennial wildflowers.

I’ve been asked for pictures, so here they are, using a gatorade bottle as an example:

Materials:

Tools for the plastic bottle planters

I used four tools that I had lying around to make the planters:

• A pair of scissors
• An X-acto knife–I wouldn’t use one with a metal handle!)
• An old, 15-watt soldering iron.  A higher-power soldering pen or wood-burning iron would work better
• A small, hand-held butane torch.  This produces a 2400º flame and is powered by an ordinary cigarette lighter.  It makes me happy.

If you have a wood-burning pen with a hot knife tip, you can dispense with the knife and torch.  Alternatively, you could use a gas stove to heat the knife.  If you don’t have a gas stove, a torch, or a wood-burning pen, you can do this with a pair of scissors and a ball-point pen as your ownly tools.  It will just be less elegant.

Besides the tools, you will need a 1-litre or bigger plastic bottle, some soil, and something to plant in it.

Technique:

First, remove the label.  Hot water inside the bottle will dissolve the adhesive so it’ll come right off.  Just don’t put boiling water in a soda bottle–you will shink the bottle and possibly burn yourself!

First cut the plastic bottle.  For the gatorade bottle the picture shows where to make the cut.  If you are using a soda bottle, Inside Urban Green has tips on where to cut.  This is where the hot knife comes in–it’s easier to make the first incision with heat, but you could do it with an unheated knife and some brute force.

Cut Bottle

Click on the photo for a bigger copy–it’s cut right below the curvy bit.  The gist is that the curvy bit, upside-down, should fit in the other bit so that the lip of the bottle just touches the bottom.

Next, it’s time to poke some holes in the curvy bit.  These holes allow the soil to drain excess moisture, and there’s some suggestion that humid aeration is good for the roots.

Here I used the 15-watt soldering iron.  This is an old iron that barely gets hot anymore (I think there’s some corrosion impeding thermal conductivity), but a better-working or hotter iron would do the trick.

Finally, the planter needs a wick–this will irrigate the soil by capillary action from below.  Or in simpler terms, it will suck water up into the soil!  A scrap of fabric from an old pair of jeans works marvelously!

That’s it–I just scooped some potting mix into the planter and added a few mustard seeds–they should germinate in 4-10 days.

The cranberry kombucha is all gone.  It was lovely, but it tasted so unlike tea that I tended to foget there was caffeine in it.  I think next time I will not use black tea for this.

Meanwhile, I have a new 3-quart batch of rose hips kombucha that’s looking close to ready!

Below the cut, Weinkraut and Sourdough

Weinkraut

My parents got me a Harsch Crock for Christmas, so Adrienne and I put it to work last week.  I bought 15 pounds of cabbage for 10 liters of kraut, that was about 2.5 times as much as I needed.  We packed about 6 pounds of shredded cabbage into the crock with a head of lightly-smashed garlic and a few caraway seeds.  The cabbage was apparently quite dry, it took about 3 litres of bugundy wine to fill all of the interstices and cover the weights.  It has been fermenting for four days now; the Gospel According to Katz suggests it should be done in about a week.

I have never had weinkraut before, but I hear it is a German tradition and I look forward to trying it.  Then again, all of the (non-fermented) recipes I’ve seen online use white sauerkraut and white wine; I’m using Rotkohl (red cabbage) and red wine.

Sourdough

I had about a cup of leftover cooked rice getting stale on my kitchen counter, so I took a suggestion from Katz and mixed it up with a cup of whole wheat flour and two cups of water to make a sourdough starter.  He quite correctly points out that the yeasties will eat the rice carbs just as happily as the flour carbs, and by the time I go to make a loaf out of it, the original grains that I put in the starter will be fermented beyond recognition.  What a fabulous way to recyle stale rice!

*This post is tagged “locavoracious” even though none of the food involved was locally-sourced, because next season I hope to be fermenting my very own home-grown cabbages.  Eventually I’d like to be gowing my own wheat, too.

I had assumed it was a total loss.  When I moved to Massachusetts I showed the plot to Shannon and told her that if she felt inclined to rip out the weeds and see if she could salvage any produce, she was welcome to.  She didn’t.

Last weekend I went back to Ithaca and slogged through the prairie formerly known as my garden, in pouring rain, to take down my fence and retrieve my hose and tools.  To my joy, I found that my produce had actually produced!  In the absence of any effort on my part for the past three months, I got six stalks of brussels sprouts, a HEAP of basil, and exactly one tomato, which I promptly ate.

It totally made getting soaked worthwhile.

Can anybody explain how a 50 foot roll and a 25 foot roll of chicken wire only make it 3/4 of the way around a 60-foot perimeter garden?

Also, good news!  The potato that I thought was dead is not.  One stalk died, but the other one that was just emerging is still healthy, and a new one is emerging right next to the dead one.

Bad news: the things that I thought were volunteer lettuce may well be weeds after all, but I am going to keep them around until I can identify them.

More good news!  Ginger bailed out of her apartment for the summer and left her entire herb garden with me!  I now  have oodles and oodles of thyme and mint that need to be planted, plus a few other herbs including a horehound.  For now, they are all on my roof.  I think I am going to propagate the horehound and make some horehound ale or mead.  If anybody has a good recipe for such a thing, I would be much obliged if you would leave it in the comments.

The horseshoe of plants in the foreground are my pepper plants (aside: pepper plants produce peppers and gardeners gather garlic are two morse code exercises that I will never forget doing, although I have long since forgotten much of the code!), others are scattered throughout.  The herbs in the peat pots still haven’t sprouted, which is possibly related to my being injudicious about keeping the soil moist between rains last week.  The horehound is the white, scraggly thing on the left.  The Alberta Spruce in the background is not quite dead yet.  Possibly getting better.

Better news: WordPress suddenly handles my image alignments properly!

Because I’m a big nerd, I also picked up a soil sample at the garden and brought it home to my soil test kit, which told me that it’s good on Potassium, and Phosphorus, but low on Nitrogen.  It also tested VERY  alkaline (pH 8.0).  I thought at first that the result was just confounded by alkaline tap water, but my tap water came up at between pH 6 and 7.  Time to take samples from a wider area of the garden, and if they’re all this alkaline, to spread some Melanterite (FeSO4*7H20).  Or maybe just manure.  The internet tells me that manure is generally neutral and buffered, so maybe that would do?  Does anybody have experience with alkalne soil and could make a recommendation?

Other vegetables in the pipeline: I’ve got two jalapeños, six habaneros, and six bell peppers growing as seedlings on my roof.  I’ve got a potato plant that’s doing quite well, five tomato seedlings, and just yesterday seeded basil, oregano, and summer squash.  I have seeds for radish, spinach, and broccoli to go straight into the ground.

Peppers in front, seeds back right, potato back left.

Today’s project: work five gallons of Cayuga Compost and some manure into the soil, and install my rain gauge.  Plant radishes, spinach, and broccoli.

After spending time with you and reading your letter, I’ve wondered if perhaps I did, as you imply in your letter, present a unfair caricature of Whole Foods in “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” suggesting a store where organic, local and artisanal food is just window dressing to help sell a much more ordinary industrial product. Indeed, nothing would please me more than to conclude I owe you and the company an apology. I’m not quite there yet. But I sincerely hope you will prove my portrait of Whole Foods wrong, that the company has not thrown its lot in with the industrialization, globalization and dilution of organic agriculture, but rather stands for something better. For my own part, I stand ready to write that apology, and look forward to doing it.

In the balance of the letter, Pollan makes clear that Whole Foods is not the Big Organic Boogeyman, but it ain’t your farmers’ market either.  The moral of the story is really the same as the moral of his whole genre of food commentary: being a smart food consumer requires researching and understanding the issues involved, not just shopping at a different store or buying food with a particular badge on it.