Spontaneous Cactii

 I picked up a packet of cactus and succulent seeds walking through Fleet Farm thinking that might be fun for dish gardens.  Cactus are so pricey and last year we had record drought and heat.  All that global warning don't you know.  Using the coffee filter germination technique (or magic) I had pretty good results. 

 

Of course, this year central Wisconsin has been magically transported to the Arctic Circle,  hence whistling tundra swans and Arctic snow owls.  (What next polar bears?)  After raining buckets today and Thursday's forecast. I'm not sure cactii are a good choice, but seeds don't know there is 5 inches of snow forecast for Thursday.  (Nor do the plants in my grow rooms!)

My high tech labeling system shows the estimated 30 days germination time to be fairly accurate.  The date is 2/28.  

Easy for me to read it here, but a bit shiny for my camera.

Now I just have to find a little unfrozen soil for them under my lights.

FLASH WEATHER UPDATE:  We will now have vicious thunder and lightning for a couple hours before we return you to your regularly scheduled winter weather.

Bakers Creek Seed

As 'Celebrity' took the first place spot (and second), I would be remiss not to grow it as everyone had such good luck with it in the area.


I pretty much know what I'm going to plant this year and what varieties. I have been moving away from the tempting and to those things that grow good for me. To keep things interesting though, I do spend my time with lots of seed catalogs.

Looking for the "new-to-me" veggies is a form of plant hunting of which I have been letting my fingers do the digital hunting.

One of my favorite hunting grounds?

Baker Creek. (Check out this cool melon!)

Baker Creek boasts a huge assortment of seed, including just oodles of heirlooms (1,400) and seed savings types. I want to grow what grows good for me so looking at seed saved by someone's grannie from the Ukraine or which an aunt smuggled out of Russia, completely fills the bill for the growing conditions here in central Wisconsin. I also am perusing my pictures of the vegetables entered in the county fair and hunting down those varieties, too.

Baker Creek hasn't paid me a dime to say any of this, just to get that out of the way; but at $2.00 to $4.00, it'll be fun to mix it up a bit with some of their unusual offerings!

Variety is the spice of life. Hopefully, mine will be populated with this African horned cucumber, beautiful orangey-pink eggplants that like it cool, a short 70-day yellow-rind salmon-fleshed water melon, and a couple others I have been eyeing up.

I'll keep you up to date on my finds and how they do.

Happy hunting all!

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.

April 22, 2011: Today in a Zone 4 Garden, Central Wisconsin

This afternoon, the sun is beginning to peek out. It seems like forever since we've had that much light! It is not supposed to freeze for at least the next several days, although we are supposed to have some wind today. It is pretty wet to work in the garden.

I did move three flats filled with kale, cabbage, and onions out of the cold frame and under a storm door screen. I have found the screen provides just enough sun, wind, and torrential rain protection to serve as the perfect cover when hardening off plantlings. One edge of the screen is on the cold frame the other two corners are supported by a stack of bricks. I tucked three flats under one edge next to the thermal mass of the cold frame.

This frees up space for three more flats in the cold frame. At this point with temps in the mid-30s at night, I don't want to bring out peppers, eggplant, coleus, or tomatoes; but dino kale seedlings, radicchio and head lettuce starts may do well in the cold frame.

I started some peas indoors and after they have germinated and grown true leaves, they will be candidate to bring out to harden off. There's still no sign of those I planted in the ground. I also planted some yellow onion sets before our major spring snow storm. Onions are pretty cold hardy and even wet, cold ground should not deter them.

This activity has also freed up space on the grow racks. The average last frost date is about 4 weeks out. I am thinking of getting some more spinach started, including a climbing spinach.

After May 1, I will start some heat lovers, like melons and pumpkins. These won't go into the garden until almost June 1 here, well after any chance of frost.

Snow! and Carrots: April 16, 2011 Update

Change that rain to trackable snow. One snow day down and two to go, according to the local Snow Witch.

The seedlings in the cold frame outdoors look great, even after brushing an inch of the slushy stuff off the storm window. When I was telling of the construction I failed to mention I laid down a layer of black landscape fabric to serve as a heat sink.

Today, gardening will be indoors tending to the plants in the grow racks and reading garden blogs.

My latest tray of seedlings on the heat mat is looking good. Planted 3 or 4 days ago with cosmos 'Pimk Pop", carrots 'Danvers', and Celeraic 'Brilliant'; the carrots are already up. Carrots are sometimes difficult to germinate here. You can plant them in cool weather and suddenly the weather spikes up to the 80 and 90 degree mark, making it almost impossible to keep them moist for the lengthy germination period.

These carrots I planted to use as transplants following an Australian gardening model. In Australia, carrots are planted almost the way we plant onion sets. I have been looking at pictures of Australian Community Gardens and I have been impressed at the lushness of their plantings. They look better than the Community Gardens of which pictures are posted here in the States. For this part of Wisconsin, planting carrots as "sets" should possibly be recommended as a "Best Practice". I will continue to follow up on this and post my results.

Additionally, I have planted a very early cropping carrots 'Little Fingers' directly into the garden. The growth habbit of this cultivar reminds me a bit growing some sort of radish.

Torrential Rain, Thunderstorms Today

Heirloom Marigold 'Simba'

Today is a good day to be inside gardening. Torrential rain is pelting the last remnants of the snow outside. I just heard a might crack of thunder. We are decidedly in the "April showers..." phase today.

I just finished watering my transplants on the light racks. This is getting to be a more onerous chore. They need watering cell by cell, pot by pot daily now, not just a mist with a sprayer bottle.

I planted more fennel seed. Although I got a good germination rate the first time around, the pricking out survival rate was very poor. This surprised me because my luck transplanting direct sown seedling in the garden from one spot to another is fairly good. I like fennel for its seed, and good with it a lot, but it can be pricey. My son likes it in biscuits and gravy, and I would cook with it more frequently if I had more of it. Also the type I planted has a nice mild anise flavoured bulbous root I like raw like celery.

I planted a second type of basil, lemon dani, and it is coming up. This variety is good as a garnish and in salads, but although its lemony flavor is quite nice I have a hard time using it for my traditional pastas, pesto, or my basil aioli. For those things I like a good Genovesee.

This week I also started two edible flowers that are good bug chasers, too. They are the heirloom chrysanthemum-type marigold and the frothy marigold Tangerine Gem. I prefer Lemon Gem for its paler yellow color, more workable when blending colors in the garden, but the seed is not always easy to find. The germination rate I got with this one has been great. The heirloom, I generally see marketed under the name Simba because these days it tends to remind one of the Disney "Lion Story" character. I am sure there is a trademarked marketing scheme in there somewhere. Although an heirloom, there tends to be about 25% of the plants that are singles versus the frillier more than double blooms. I am very careful to collect from the phenotype with the type I like and pull out other, but I have a feeling this one is capable of crossing with all the different hybrids growing in my neighbors' yards.

I also decided I did not have enough onions started. I started one named 'Ringmaster'. As I mentioned I have not been impressed with my results planting onion sets in the past so I decided to grow my own this year from seed of varieties I know to be long day types, versus using the generic sets labeled as white, yellow, and red.

Following along on yesterday's theme of garden experimentation, I planted the seed from a poblano-type red pepper I had been given last year that I thought was an incredibly sweet, large pepper. I know the prevailing wisdom is this was probably from a hybrid plant and I will not get the pepper I so enjoyed, but I will let you know. I do know one thing so far-- germination rate is incredible.

I love sweet red peppers; however, I can't bring myself to pay nearly $4.00 a pound for a red bell pepper that has been shipped 3,000 miles. It just goes against the grain for me! Buying pepper plants is not always an option, because I am never sure whether the peppers haven't been exposed to temperature between 40 degrees and 50 degrees. Temperatures below 50 degrees wreck havoc with a pepper's flower setting rhythm and generally drastically reduce how much fruit you get.

Germination rate which seems to be between 35% and 50%, though, for the pricey ($.35 to $.50 PER SEED!) packets is such a rip! I started Jung's 'Carmen' (50% germination), 'Marconi' (nothing so far, but early), and the collected seed (I'm guessing around 90% germination rate). I started some Jung's cayenne type peppers and got 72% germination with a pricking out rate of around 65%. Some of those seedlings were slow to germination and have not really thrived, so I should have probably culled them at the start. I have also started about ten jalapeno seeds, about 50% germination. The cayenne and jalapeno I use in canning, salsa, and dried in cooking. I definitely don't need 72 cayenne, but I am hoping to be able to sell or trade half of them as seedlings or as dried ristas, if I end up growing them out.

The Botanical Interests cauliflower looks to be a winner so far. It is the combo packet with a purple, cheddar, and green variety packed as one. I think I got between 90% and 100% germination. Cauliflowers are acknowledged hard to get a yield here because of pests and weather conditions. I intend to use some sort of row cover with these.

My sister-in-law and I went over our garden preparation schedule last night over supper. The garden we have planned will take up about one acre. This is huge for many people, but our goal is to provide for more than just our immediate households, and also establish some perennial fruiting areas with berries, rhubarb, herbs, and grapes.

Currently, this area has been fallow for a number of years. We want to have a local farmer plow it once and disc it for us a couple times so we can till in composted manure and organic materials. The snag is many of the local farmers have such big tractors and equipment they can not get effectively work a plot even as large as an acre (or for them as small as an acre)! Flip-flopping our intended gardening area with an area previously fenced for my sister-in-laws donkeys might get it for us, in that it that acre lies adjacent to a field typically planted by the neighboring farmer to corn or soybeans, depending on the crop rotation. Regardless, getting everything prepped and ready will undoubtedly be a time crunch for all of us.

Transplants and Berries

One of the ideas in the garden this year is to develop perennial berry patches. My brother is actually going to build raised bed enclosures for blueberries, blackberries, and hazelnuts. The east side of the enclosures I figure will be an excellent place to grow spring peas and then later tie up the tomatoes and some Asian yard-long pole beans.

My brother is also going to build a number of raised beds. The raised beds are going to grow the salad bowl veggies and herbs. These beds are going to be the source of the very intensive garden and hopefully the only spots we will be intensively weeding as well.

My plan is to plant into thin black landscaping fabric tomatoes, zuchinni, squash, melons,and peppers. The garden is going to be laid out so that it can be cultivated with a tractor for the crops of which we will be growing significant amounts of potatoes, corn, cukes, carrots, and parsnips.

The perennial part of the garden is clustered on one side. There will be a Mount Royal plum, rhubarb, June-bearing and ever-bearing strawberry beds, July-bearing and fall-bearing raspberries, blackberies, hazelnuts, Northland and Blueray blueberries, Frontenac and Reliance grapes. I have a Lapin cherry, Honeycrisp apple, and Moorpark apricot in my own yard. My brother has a very old apple orchard he has been attempting to renovate. This is why I will not be spending a lot of time on the orchard part of our "Food Security Plan".

In the herb bed we will have chives, garlic chives, parsley, thyme, oregano, tarragon. I really like dill and the seed and vegetable producing Florence fennel. I already have chives to be moved into the garden, I have Italian flat-leaved parsley and Florence fennel starts growing in my grow light set up.

Transplants! I have Cayenne peppers and sweet red Carmen peppers. Tomatoes: Olpalka, Sweet 100, Super Beefsteak, Roma, Siberian, and Bloody Butcher. I really like Chocolate Cherry tomatoes and as they are an heirloom, I save seed each year. This year, I have not yet found my seed from last year, so I am a little worried I am not going to get those started this year.

I have spinach. I figure I could start them in the garden, but I can start haarvesting earlier if I have some starts. I also have the pointed Wakefield cabbage, Swiss Chard Primo Rossa. I will direct sow the Bright Lights variety. Also I have kale, savoy-type cabbages, Calabrese broccoli, and golden tomatillos.