Seed Starting Woes

The past few years, I have preferred to buy transplants from local garden centers. I figured, they are the pros, let them decide when to start seeds. I will just select the healthiest, best-grown transplants for my garden. Unfortunately, the garden centers also get to choose which varieties to plant or purchase. Last year, there were a number of varieties I wanted to plant but I could not find the transplants.

So this year I chose to buy seeds and start some seedlings myself. I am not new to this. I have started seeds in the past. I have the heat mat, the domed trays, and the grow lamp on a timer with a fresh full-spectrum bulb. I purchased seeds and made a planting schedule, So how did things work out?

Actually, not so good. Usually the two problems I have with seed starting is plants becoming leggy from inadequate light and plants becoming overgrown before I can transplant them. This year, the problem was a general unhealthiness and failure to thrive, true across all seedlings I planted. So what is different this year?

In the past, I have used traditional soil-less mixes based on peat moss and perlite. This year I used a starter mix based on coconut coir placed in peat strips, and some coir pellets for the cool weather items like lettuce, chard and escarole/endive placed in a small cell tray. The cool weather items would quickly go into the garden while the tomatoes, peppers and eggplants would grow on under the lamp.

Most seeds germinated fairly fast on the heat mat with a dome covering the tray. I had problems with a few of them. The Striped Roman tomatoes all damped off and were reseeded. I only got one cilantro to germinate even after re-seeding the strip twice. The major problem was that after germinating, all of the plants seemed to struggle, showing very little growth. Initially green, they started to lose color. Fertilizing with fish emulsion and then with an inorganic soluble fertilizer did not help. The seedlings were stunted and failed to add new sets of leaves. I wondered about the coir in the planting mix, the only change from past practice. Then I came across this research paper which pretty much describes what was happening to my seedlings.
I do not have a lot of documentation of what happened because I did not set out to fail, nor was I interested in running an experiment. I was just trying to start transplants for my garden. I can show you a few examples of what happened.

Here is a Matt’s Wild Cherry tomato. The plant on the left was transplanted into my SFG on Saturday, May 26. The plant on the right is a sibling still sitting in its coir-infested peat pot. This picture was taken on May 31, five days after transplant. You can see the transplanted tomato is greener and is stretching out, actually starting to grow. Both looked similar on transplant day, I simply picked the best of the sorry lot. If you look at my planting schedule, you will see that seeds were planted March 24 and they germinated on March 31. The transplant in the peat pot you see below has been growing for TWO MONTHS and looks like this. It has been watered, fertilized and given adequate light.



The sickly looking transplants below are Escarole Natacha. The plants just above them looked similar when they were transplanted on April 21, a month before, but are now green and growing lushly in Mel’s Mix. I started a second set of transplants for succession planting, which are the sickly transplants below. I am hoping they will now recover and start growing as well.



Below are transplants of Endive Dubuisson, and above them the same transplanted on April 21 along with the escarole.



Finally, in the middle row here are transplants of Broccoli Di Ciccio, germinated on March 22. They still are tiny plants but show less discoloration than other seedlings. The study I cited seemed to indicate that broccoli was more tolerant of coir than other species.But still, they are stunted in growth so much that I went out and bought replacement transplants, I did plant two of these several weeks ago but they are essentially not growing. I think I would do better now just direct seeding these. Come on, these plants germinated on March 22 and this picture was taken June 1.



I can tell you now I will never buy a coir-based planting mix again. The stuff I have is going into the compost bin where its negative properties will hopefully be diluted..I do use coir as bedding material in my worm bin and that has worked OK. But as a planting medium, based on my involuntary experience, coir is detrimental to plant growth and should not be used

Things Are Sprouting

Last weekend, Saturday and Sunday, was my big planting weekend. On Saturday I set out most of my tomato, pepper, and eggplant transplants. I also seeded most of .the warm weather crops (beans, cukes, and squash), figuring I can always re-seed if we get a frost or cold spell and things don’t germinate.
Today, six days later, most of the seeds (except my Diva cucumbers) are emerging. That’s pretty good considering some of our nights were in the sixties.Meanwhile, the transplants are all looking great.

These sprouts are cucumber Summer Dance.This cucumber is a Japanese burpless type and is supposed to produce long, slim, dark green fruits. It has all female flowers so yield is high. I hope I get a few before disease wipes out all my cukes again. The joi choi there may have to learn to be less exuberant and stay in its square.

What, AAS Winners in My Garden?!

Most of the planting is now done and I am getting excited about some of the heirloom vegetables I have put in this year, particularly the heirloom tomatoes and some of the heirloom Italian vegetables like Costata Romanesco. And next year I hope to try more heirlooms, particularly Italian varieties. I have come far from the days when I would peruse the Burpee and Parks catalogs and be seduced by the glossy color photos of the latest All-American Selections (AAS) winners, I smugly thought. But in taking an inventory of the garden I find I have a lot of AAS winners in my garden. None were consciously selected because of the AAS label but because I wanted them for their characteristics and appeal. Some won their AAS designation more than two decades ago! That’s a real testament to the value of the AAS selection process. Here are the AAS winners I am growing this year but didn't know I was.

Eggplant 'Fairy Tale' (2005)

There are so many varieties of eggplant (Asian, Middle Eastern, Italian heirloom) but garden centers around here mostly offer transplants labeled “Eggplant”or “Classic”. I wanted to try something new, so that meant starting plants from seed. Fairy Tale was one of my choices, a miniature violet eggplant striped with white. It looks like an Italian heirloom type but it is actually an F1 hybrid and the first eggplant to win the AAS since 1939. The plants are petite as well and should work out well in my SFG at one per square. Unfortunately, this is a Seminis variety that I may not buy again, although Johnny’s is not listed as a vendor of the Seminis seeds. Check here for a list of Seminis varieties to avoid.

Memorial Day Weekend Planting

The new raised beds are complete and filled with Mel’s Mix and the Memorial Day weekend is here. It’s time to finish planting and we have perfect weather, mostly sunny, warm, with the prospect of a few showers or thunderstorms. I spent Saturday and Sunday planting seeds and transplants, and erecting the tomato trellises for the new beds.All the beds were mulched with chopped straw to preserve moisture and prevent soil from splashing on the plants.

This will be my first year in a long time growing tomatoes in a raised bed. I built 8 inch beds to give me an extra inch or so, even though everyone says 6 inches is enough. This will also be my first year in a long time training tomatoes up a string trellis. I do have experience with this and used the technique in my original raised beds back in the late 80s, where I did indeed plant one tomato per square foot.

So here we go. I have a pair of Juliet tomatoes I am trying this year, variously referred to as a mini-Roma or a really big grape tomato. My neighbor planted them last year because her husband likes them. Her vines were so loaded with fruit she lost a lot to drops and birds. So I am giving them a trial this year. If they get ahead of me they will become sauce.

Finishing My SFG - Adding the Final Beds, Part II

Finally it has stopped raining, although we still get a lot of cloudy and threatening weather. Over two days I took advantage of the weather to mix up two batches of Mel’s Mix and fill my new raised beds. The boxes are 4x6 by 8 inches deep, so doing the math that is 16 cubic feet of mix. Since 16 is not evenly divisible by 3, I rounded up to eighteen. One box required 6 cubic feet of each component. I happened to have bought two 6 cubic foot bags of coarse vermiculite, so that works out. Six bags of five different kinds of compost, check! For the peat moss, I bought one 4 cubic foot bag and one 2 cubic foot bag of Canadian peat moss and used the eyeball method to divide them.

The technique for mixing the ingredients is detailed in an earlier post so I will not repeat it here. Instead, I will offer a few observations. When mixing up a batch of Mel’s Mix the fourth and fifth times, I was considerably more relaxed and less anal than the first few times I did it. Practice makes relaxed. Mixing 18 cubic yards of mix is a heck of a lot easier than 24 cubic feet, the amount needed to fill three 4x4 boxes. Still, I figure I mixed about a half ton of Mel’s Mix, so it was a significant amount of work to fill the two boxes. Mixing 18 cubic feet when calculations called for 16 turned out to be fortunate, yielding an amount of mix that almost filled the beds to the top. Finally, I was at first skeptical about the #4 coarse vermiculite but I now like it and believe it makes the mix much lighter and fluffier than finer grades. Finer grades allow the mix to compact and settle more.

This picture shows 6 cubic feet of #4 vermiculite dumped on the blended compost. You can see the size of the pieces, some almost a half inch in size with very little in the way of fine particles.

Finishing My SFG – Adding the Final Beds, Part I

Last year I planted my tomatoes in a row at the end of my plot in the Bolton Community Garden since I had already built and filled 8 raised beds and planting season was well underway. The plan was to finish the implementation of raised beds this spring with the addition of two 4x6 raised beds. These beds were going to be used for tomatoes along the long side of the boxes, planted 1 per square and trained up a trellis.

I began looking at alternatives, buy versus build, cedar versus composite. I actually bought a couple of cedar raised beds from The Farmstead. They had a 4x6 box using 5/4 rough sawn white cedar lumber with mortise and tenon joints, 8 inches deep. These same beds are sold by other vendors, including White Flower Farm. The best price was from The Farmstead itself, $104.50 for a 4x6 including shipping. Unfortunately, the specification were a bit lacking. The quoted dimensions were for the total length of the side pieces, including the mortise and tenon. When you assemble the boxes, the interior dimensions are a bit more than 3x5 feet, or 15 squares, quite a bit less than the 24 squares I was planning on. I decided to keep the Farmstead beds and use them at home for strawberries and herbs. For the community garden, I decided to build my own beds.

The decision to build my own was based on the discovery that Lowes carried 1x8 cedar lumber (the Home Depot I checked only had 1x6 and I wanted a little more depth for the tomatoes, despite what Mel says). So the boxes were going to be constructed of 1x8 cedar (Lowes had 8 and 12 foot lengths, which was perfect). I also bought some 1x2 and 1x4 pieces to use as corner blocks and as braces for the bottoms. The beds are going to sit on blocks to keep them out of the standing water that we frequently get after a hard rain, so I would need a bottom. I planned to use hardware cloth rather than plywood for the bottoms, with landscape fabric to keep the mix in the boxes. Assembly in the garage was fairly easy, as shown below.

Organic Compost Survey

I am in the planning stages for adding the final two raised beds to my garden. These will be 4x6 foot beds and will house 12 tomato plants along the long edge, trellised up nylon cords, leaving 36 squares for other plants. Since I have to fill these beds with Mel’s Mix and my own supply of compost is limited, I have been researching what types of organic compost are available in my area west of Boston. First of all, I have written off Lowes, Home Depot and Wal-Mart. I am only looking at what is available in bags at  local garden centers and nurseries.

The following is the list of bagged organic composts I have found and review in this diary, along with my own compost:

• Dave’s Own Compost
• McEnroe Organic Premium Compost
• Dr. Earth Natural Choice Compost
• Vermont Compost Company Compost
• Coast of Maine Quoddy Blend Lobster Compost
• Gro-Well Organic Garden Compost
• Jo-Barb Farms (Bolton, MA) Compost

Dave’s Own Compost

I have a black plastic compost bin behind the shed which I use to produce my own compost. I used to use 4” square plastic-coated fencing cut into sections and rolled into cylinders. I could fill these with leaves and pine needles, then throw in kitchen scraps and some top soil. Harvesting was easy by just pulling the fencing straight up, leaving the pile standing there. The top layer of partially decomposed material could then be pitch-forked back into the bin, leaving the pile of completed compost sitting there to be screened and used in my garden.

Unfortunately, the open nature of the bins made it easy for squirrels and raccoons to play around and toss the contents all over the place, plus they tended to dry out very easily in warmer weather and were easily crushed by heavy snows and falling tree limbs. I switched to the plastic bin two years ago and it has worked out fairly well. The bin gets some leaves, plus garden refuse and kitchen scraps, including egg shells, coffee grounds, tea bags, melon rinds, corn husks and cobs, spoiled produce, stems from collards and kale, etc. I fuss at my wife to keep fruit and avocado pits out of the scrap bucket since they do not decompose in anyone’s lifetime and are as obnoxious as rocks in the compost.

My own compost is dark brown in color, crumbly with good tilth. Some partially composted egg shells and pine needles are present but that doesn't bother me. It looks lighter in color than the bagged composts because it was drier when I took it out of the bottom of the bin.