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.

Intoxicating Artwork on Seed Packets

I have oodles of tiny seeds that have sprouted and are growing under lights. Tomatoes, celery, peppers, leeks, onions, cabbage, broccoli, kale, and coleus clippings all busy doing their photosynthesis thing.

But, I walked into a garden center selling seed. I thought I would just look...

Yeah, right!

Like I said, the artwork was intoxicating. They say you should never grocery shop when you're hungry. Seed shopping. These drawing on the seed packet put out by Botanical Interests are good enough to eat.

So what did I pick up?

A couple combo packs (more than one cultivar in the same packet): Artichoke 'Green Globe' and 'Purple of Romanga', Onion 'Ringmaster', Melon 'Charentais', Kale Italian Lacinato 'Nero Toscana'. I also picked up okra 'Red Burgundy', acorn squash, sweet red pepper 'Marconi', marigold 'Tangerine Gem', a dwarf sunflower 'Incredible', and the pumpkin 'Big Max'.

The kale is one I saw growing at Allen Gardens last fall. The marigold is a bushy, frothy one with a different growth habit than most marigold typically sold as transplants. The pumpkin 'Big Max' I thought would be incredible fun for my brother's now 1 1/2 year old sons who live where my garden will be.

It's THAT Time of Year AGAIN!

Well, this time of year I can literally see the pendulum swinging back and forth. It seems each swing brings an extra three minutes or so of daylight to central Wisconsin. That's big...almost an extra half hour of sunlight every week! I can't help but pick-up seed catalogues and make a stop at Jung's in Stevens Point "just because I'm going by..."

Last year, my vegetable garden planting had its ups and downs. A lot of people were again cursed by late blight. I think late blight might actually be spreading across the area not only on the wind, but on the very transplants gardeners bring into their own gardens. I am encouraging everyone to attempt to grow their own tomato transplants and be extra vigilant of disposing any infected foliage.

Tomatoes

This year I have decided on four different tomatoe varieties: Olpalka, an heirloom paste tomato; Chocolate Cherry tomatoes, another heirloom; Superior, a super early tomato; and Supersteak. Last year, I grew a Mountain hybrid. I like the Mountain breeding: very uniform tomatoes and good resistance to blights and other diseases, but a bit on the small side, and about 7-10 later than a lot of people start picking tomatoes. With the sometimes short season, I'm not getting the number of tomatoes I'd like.

I do a lot of sauces and salsas. I need a lot of tomatoes!

I have a small yard, so I can't plant more, I need them to ripen all at once and early!

I also grew some Legend and Rutgers a neighbor gave me. They were beautiful plants and grew well. I did see some disease and I did get some decent tomatoes, but just not the number of smooth shouldered, nice beauties I wanted.

Peppers

The peppers transplants I purchased grew well. Serrano did well. I tried Serrano rather than a typical jalapeno last year. Serrano is fine for someone who wants a bit of the hot pepper kick, but can't take the heat. The Hungarian Banana peppers did well, too, as did the Cayenne peppers. The Cayenne peppers were not quite as prolific as I would have liked. The bell peppers I grew, I think it was Arthur, did not pump out the nice sized peppers I desired.

The real pepper winner in this area, were some peppers a neighbor gave me. They were a corno di toro pepper, which has to have been either Planet Hybrid or Carmen. They were given to me fully red and ripe. They were some of the sweetest red peppers I have has, no hint of hot. They were picked out of some commercially grown peppers grown by her family; they sell the green, but no one wants the red, thinking they are not sweet, but hot. Their lost was my gain. I cut and froze strips, I dried some, and canned the rest as a sweet red pepper spread.

This year I am going to start seed for the pepper Carmen. Hopefully, I can duplicate her family's commercial effort in my own garden. I am looking for some prolific cayennes like Andy (but it was sold out where I tried to get some). I like to use the cayenne in gherkins and other pickled vegetables.

Favorite Seed Companies

I'm going to plug my favorite two catalogues and online seed sources here, Jung's and Johnny's Select Seed. ( www.jungseed.com and www.johnnyseed.com )Jung's has this incredible, free, online garden planner and is a local Wisconsin company. The planner is easy to use.

Johnny's is an employee-owned company and has a great online catalogue (I like the page turning sound effects!) Pages load very quickly, considering my connection speed. Johnny's also lets you pick out your wish list, so you don't have to decide and purchase everything in one online session.

Other vegetables that were winners for me in 2010

My favorite potoato is Yukon Gold. It really is as buttery as they say. The tubers were all very uniform and well-worth growing for a special treat. I live in the middle of potato-growing country so potatoes are generally cheap for the commercially grown varieties, so checking out some of the red ones to eat fresh, fingerlings, or Yukon Golds is really the only efficient way to go.

Cucumbers had a pretty wet August. I grew Alibi, which were tasty and sweet and filled my canning needs. The Straight 8 was a nice slicer for fresh salads. I didn't get the late season yield because of over-watering right before a major rainy period.

Flat leaved parsley was a winner. I didn't care for basil "'Dani', not enough basil taste for me, although the lemony flavor was nice on the early leaves.

The long day length onions I grew did not do it for me. I am going to try and grow my own sets for leeks, onions, and scallions this year. I'll try to remember to post how that turns out.

Collecting Seed

I have spent quite a bit of time collecting seed this fall from a variety of my more unusual plants. These include plants I want a lot more of, plants I wish to sell or give to friends, or plants that I see a particular specimen has looked a bit more interesting than its cohorts of its species in my garden.

Last year I grew a cleome from seed. One of the plants seem to be bulkier, the first to germinate, yet never grew as tall. I collected seed from it and planted them this year. In turn its offspring yielded some plants with these same characteristics.

Cleomes like it hot and dry. The weather in central Wisconsin was far from cleome weather. We had the coldest June on record, the second coldest July, the wettest September, the driest October. You get the idea. The results with my cleome were far from ideal, yet I could tell this plant was quick to branch and never grew ungainly tall. Although it did flower and set seed, its flower show wasn't the specacular one for which I had hoped. I will collect seed again this year and hope for the best.

The other seed I have collected this year includes rattlesnake master, chelone glabra, liatris, ligularia 'Desdemona', heuchera 'Palace Purple', ligularia 'The Rocket', gaillardia 'Arizona Sun', an incredible peach Japanese tree peony, nicotiana 'Tinkerbelle', seed from some of my nicer open pollinated daylilies, a particularly well-branched and bushy hyssop, and a echiacea 'Magnus' with a flower which was easily 6" wide and very open and flat among others.

Many of these I will winter sow. This is a great method to grow plants from seed without obsessing over temperatures, moisture, and fungicides. For those of you unfamiliar with winter sowing, I incourage you to check out winter sowing in your particular zone at http://www.wintersow.com/.

And as for success with my seed sowing, I'll let you know. It can be exciting as these pictures of daylilies my son hybridized by crossing daylily 'Stella di Oro' with another daylily grown from a packet of daylily seed purchased from Jung's a number of years ago show.