Anne Fletcher

❤️❤️❤️

I get around everywhere by bicycle, and can always find the chipper trucks easily.  When you're on a bike, you can hear them from a long way away!  Then I follow the sound, meet the guys, make friends and get the business cards.  Now I've got tons of buddies who are happy to bring chips.

My uncle, who lives in a more rural area, does the same thing, but in a truck.  He's been on his property for about 20 years now, and I think is on a first-name basis with every tree crew in his county.  They know they can always drop chips at his property - he keeps a spot open for them!

Yes!!

We do the same thing, minus the dolly though, because we have to take the mulch up stairs -- No other access to the yard!  Garbage cans all the way!

Jay Angler wrote:For those of you who get chips, I'll offer a little tip:
I use the Rubbermaid garbage cans to move them. I put the can on it's side to start and use a garden fork to push chips from the edge of the pile into the can, tipping it up periodically to get more room at the opening.  

I like to use a recipe that's approximately:

- 1/3 fine-textured moisture retentive filler, without nutrition.  You can use your leaf mold for this. Also coconut coir.  Peat is the traditional ingredient used for this purpose in seed-starting mixes, but is SUPER unsustainable.  I avoid peat completely.

- 1/3 something with nutrition and microbes like compost.  Because my native soil is so heavy, and also has lots of unwanted seeds in it, I just use a small amount -- enough to inoculate the mix with native microbes, but not so much as to affect the texture.  If your "nutrition" element is concentrated, like manure or worm castings, reduce the amount relative to the low-nutrient filler.  Homemade compost has both nutrition and fibrous filler.  I like to sieve my homemade compost so I only have the fine-textured good stuff.

- 1/3 drainage, like sand, pumice, perlite, etc. to make sure the mix doesn't get water-logged.

Seeds carry their own nutrition for the first couple pairs of leaves.  Giving them lots of fertilizers is unnecessary, at least at first.  

They DO absolutely need moisture (but not too much!) and air (but not too much!) and fine textures so that the baby plants and new roots can easily find their way.

I let some carrots go to seed last year because the pollinators LOVED the flowers, and then the birds LOVED the seed.  I saved some seed also for this year's carrots.  When it was finally time to clear the bed, I carried the old carrot stalks and seed heads across the yard, dropping seed all the way.   Now I have carrots everywhere!   I'm not sure yet if I like it . . .

When I saw Little Gems in the grocery store for $13 / lb last year, I was like what !  I was already growing most of my own salad greens at that point, but that helped me double down on my resolve!

I take a pretty traditional approach to lettuce and salad greens:  I grow my own healthy starts using my Orta self-watering pots, then plant them out to sunny raised beds with amended soil, 8" - 10" spacing, and watering every 2-3 days when it's not the rainy season.  Because it doesn't get too cold here in Northern CA, my lettuces don't ever freeze.  But because of the low light levels, they don't really grow either between mid-November and mid-January.  For summer, I love the variety Brown Goldring because it bolts the slowest for me.

My Orta pots are admittedly more than the $10 set-up cost, but they make it so that I can actually grow from seed and save money in the long run.  Otherwise I get the watering wrong and lose my starts.  And buying starts can be almost as much as buying the lettuce itself!  (I can tell that many of you on this list are better at seedling tending than I am!).

Now that it's mid-January and the sun is coming back out, I'm going to start myself some Little Gems!

+1 @Andy!

Also a note: within the profession, event programming is widely recognized as a big part of the future. Many a librarian spends their day scouring the web for free presenters. Check with your municipality's public library, no matter how big or small. They might like to host some permaculture classes.

I've given two talks at my local library, both about seed saving. The reception was very warm and welcoming -- super fun to meet lots of interested gardeners!  The library also has a seed library, hosts seed swaps, and even has seed starting pots to borrow.  I highly recommend getting involved with the library!

My daughter (7 years old) and I LOVE to explore plants to figure out where the seeds are.  It's an activity where she gets very calm and focused, and carefully opens seed heads to explore what's inside.  Often we use a magnifying glass to examine all the beautiful shapes!  She's also a great buddy when it comes time to strip seeds from pods to save seed for next year.  It's tedious, but nice, and very satisfying, at the same time.

A few years ago I wrote a blog post inspired by my seed-searching adventures with my daughter.  It explains the basics of seed saving for beginners.  You can see it here: https://ortakitchengarden.com/blogs/news/seed-saving

I'd second Matt's suggestion to start with a clean potting mix to eliminate variables.

As far as the dying overnight, that usually happens to me with damping off, when the environment is too moist and fungus causes the seedlings to pinch at the base of the stem and tip over.  The solution for damping off is air circulation and more free-draining potting media.

Hey all!  I'm adding an update to my post above.

Last week we had one of the hottest weeks ever here in California.  It was HOT!  We went to the mountains overnight to escape the worst of the heat and I expected to find totally dead lettuce when we returned.  But the lettuces I had planted around the new ollas (pictured above in the first post) were totally fine, perky even!

It also helps that these are heat tolerant varieties, Australian yellow (https://ortakitchengarden.com/products/australian-yellow-lettuce-seeds) and Brown goldring (https://www.wildgardenseed.com/product_info.php?products_id=84).

Here are pictures of my lettuce (watered by ollas) after 2 really, really hot days: