What Selection?

Caged peony.


I started a lot of my own transplants this year with some fair success. I attribute the success germinating my seed to covered trays, my heat mat and regular shop lights. The nasty, cold, wet, spring weather has hindered my getting the plantlings hardened off and into the garden. I have a good number of celery to transplant, enough basil, parsley, bok choy, lettuce, chard. I have a pointed cabbage and a Savoy type.

I have at least a half dozen tomatoes including Siberian, Roma, Olpaka, Big Boy, Super Beefsteak, Bloody Butcher. I have Jalapeno, Carmen, an OP Sweet red pepper, and Cayenne peppers.

I have 150 transplants of broccoli, three different types.

Likewise, I have started some more difficult to transplant curcurbita species, too. They look great, but with the weather, I have not started to harden them off.

So last night I am picking up some fencing to cutting in section a foot tall to make peony cages. After I got done making my purchase of the fencing and the cheapest landscape fabric to lay down as a weed stop in my family veggie garden, I thought I would take a look at the veggie transplants.

One word? Bor-ing!

No broccoli, but lots of kolhrabi (people eat lots of kolhrabi? A couple type of cabbage, none of them Savoy. They had no sweet red pepper, no jalapenos...they had a lot of a bell pepper named 'California Wonder'. My wonderment is selling a pepper named 'California Wonder' in Wisconsin... Aren't the California Cows bad enough?

I'm so glad I started my own seeds this year.

What to do in the garden, today, March 28?

Nothing.

Still over a foot of snow covers anything that remotely looks like a garden here in the Central Sands region of Wisconsin, zone 4. My Dad says we are 20 degrees below average temperature. He's a farmer. He should know; he's been growing things a tad longer than I have.

So today, my garden activities center around my seedlings in my growing racks in my extra space in my loft. I thought I would include some pictures of this growing rack, dimensions, and building tips.








Although I do quite a bit of hammering, sawing, nailing, etc.; I am far from a pro. I have built a deck ("cobble"might be a good word there), built a couple fences, and remodeled more than one or two bathrooms, and have developed some skills. I am far from a finish/trim carpenter, but this light rack was easy to build.

It measures about 20" deep, about 5 feet high, and 44" wide. I built it using (4) 2" x 2 x 8' pieces. I cut 36" off each of the 8' pieces and then cut the 36" pieces in half again. Having those (8) 18" piece is key to getting the right dimensions as I use 4 standard 10" by 20" flats without drain holes to keep everything nice and dry.

As this light rack holds four trays across (the width part), I purchased (4) 1" by 4" board and cut each in half. If I was doing it over I would go with 6 though. With six, each shelf would have three of these as tray supports.

I assembled this rack with screws, pre-drilling my holes and "L-brackets". These L-brackets on the corners with the 18" pieces top and bottom and two equi-distant spaces between form the sides of my rack. The brackets are key. Pre-drilling is important. Don't skip that step, and it helps to have a helper to hold things together during assembly.

I had the screws in my cast-offs bucket. I purchased the wood and brackets (8 in all, one at each corner.) I think the rack itself cost me just about $20.

I had a couple shop lights to start. I hang these with chain. I prefer to use 2 per shelf. If you use one only put 2 trays on the shelf and put them parallel with the width. The chains are important to keep the lights within 4" of the growing seedlings. I use regular florescent light bulbs with about 3,500 lumens. I don't use special light bulbs. The lumen thing is important, though. The higher the lumen the better. I think the minimum you should attempt to grow with is 3,200. A couple years back I bought a light meter and it really helped me nail down the issues I had with whether there was enough light or not.



I plug all my lights into a circuit panel things with a switch so I can flip one switch to turn a whole rack on or off. That plugs into a GFI-wired outlet. This space is planned to eventually be a bathroom, so the GFI-circuit makes sense for now, watering plants and using lights are not a good combo; and in the future for the bathroom. I have tripped the circuit more than once with dripping water.

The second plug in the outlet is where I plug in my one heat mat. This allows me to use the heat mat even at night to encourage those seed to sprout, rather than plug it into the light panel and turn it off. I also use two screws to attach/stabilize it to the wall.

My son, who was then probably 14 and had never built anything before, helped hold pieces of this together when I built it a couple years back. Yesterday, he and I were out shopping for a couple of new bulbs for the rack. We walked by a really fancy, metal, pre-made rack priced at a couple hundred dollars, and he commented, "Wow, Mom! Ours is really nice, and it holds twice as many trays as this one and only cost us a few bucks!"

Yes. I thought. Yes, it did.

One of Those Gray Sundays Wisconsin Does So Well

(The pretty yellow euphorbia above? Don't plan on it for your yard! FORBIDDEN by DNR NR-40!)

It is one of those gray Sundays that Wisconsin weather seems to provide so often. My son is off milking cows with my father-- yes, there are still some dairy farmers here California, you with all your damn happy cows... I'm looking through the blogs I follow and happened to notice one for today's date February 28, 2011. She has a clock on her blog, "Gardens of a Golden Afternoon". Her blog is written in the UK, so it is almost always a sunlit afternoon there.

Jimmy Buffet Parrotheads move over!

A bunch of things from her blog for today jumped out at me all at once. First, almost all the blogs I follow are of gardeners in much more hospitable climes, second, paging down there is a post from the 2011 Chelsea Flower Show featuring a plant that has been banned by Wisconsin DNR's NR-40, and last, there is a recipe for what looks to be a delightful vegetable curry.

Wisconsin is getting to be a much more repressive place, it seems. First, our weather--never particularly hospitable in the central sands part of Wisconsin anyway.
Secondly, our Governor, who after bankrupting Milwaukee County, has moved on to bigger and better things defying the Peter Principle and achieving a level on the employment ladder one higher than his proven level of incompetency. And, thirdly, and maybe more insidiously that someone died, or just went on vacation, and made the DNR king.

The DNR, (the Wisconsin Department of Resources) has been quietly getting a number of rules and bills passed giving them more and more authority over Wisconsinites' land ownership in the guise of protecting our waterways and other natural resources.

I'll put up the disclaimer right now; a lot of what the DNR does is a pretty good idea.

There are people from large metropolitan areas that buy property in less developed parts of Wisconsin where the zoning, or what have you, are not quite what they should be, or not quite so well thought out and the DNR will literally save the butts of those governing bodies with their rules for river or lake developments. Many time their rules simply bring state code up to federal NCRS standards. All good.

So getting back to the Chelsea Flower Show. The euphorbia pictured is illegal in Wisconsin according to the NR-40.

Reading the rule in its entirety is a bid daunting and scary; all the definitions and verbiage in the beginning can certainly weigh on one, especially in the gray of a Wisconsin day. In addition to listing a couple plants I've seen on display at the Olbrich Botanical Gardens and plants I have in my own yard. It also lists two species of cattail, the root of which is food for a number of different wetlands critters. It goes on to list things which no person in their right mind wants, nor are easy to control: Asian Longhorn Beetles, oak wilt, gypsy moths, wooly adelid, and emerald ash borer; putting the onus for control on the property owner.

It includes the parent stock of a newly hybrid bittersweet just patented and introduced this last year. I'm not sure what the legality of that patented plant would be.

It also includes Dame's Rocket, which has been a understory feature along some of Wisconsin's road ways all my life.

The rule also gives the DNR to the ability to declare any any plant noxious WITHOUT having to prove its invasiveness. That's not the only underlying, subtle phrasing included in this rule. The rule give the DNR the ability to get a warrant to enter a property if they simply suspect the forbidden plant may be present. They don't have to prove it and they get reimbursement for any costs associated with any of their actions.

Wow. There is a lot here to be worried about. A couple of the big plant suppliers that ship to Wisconsin are not aware of this rule. Nurseries and growers who have any of these plants in stock must destroy them.

A nice picture chart so Wisconsinites and report sightings of these bad, bad plants is provided.

So, property owners, get out your herbicides and insecticides and get spraying! You don't want to be fined by the DNR! Just be careful that none of your nasty chemicals get into our waterways and destroy the aquatic life the DNR obviously wants to protect.