Dale Poole

Honestly, permies is the ecceletically wierdest community I've ever encountered...

Nynke Muller wrote:

I will evaluate the pots on the following aspects.
How easy to make / how much work to clean up (for the plastic pots)
Storage until use
How well do they hold up until transplanting time
Transplanting itself
How fast will they disappear after transplanting?
How well do the plants grow in them and out of them.

What do you think? Anything I forgot? Anything to add to the experiment or evaluation? Please feel free to suggest more to take into consideration.

Well, this a brilliant idea. For my own interest I'd like to hear about how much shock is involved when they get transplanted. Because roots are less/not at all disturbed, when transplant time comes, I'm hoping it will alllow me to bypass the hardening off phase, at which I am dismally poor.

Will you be hardening off your transplants? If so, would it be possible to *not* do that for a few of them? I understand that might not be best practise for your location, but that's all I can think to add to your quite extensive list of evaluations. A general gauge of how well they fare after transplanting would be sufficient.

I think i'm a bit inspired and might try just that part of the experiment - comparing direct seeding of tomatoes, beside paper pot transplants without a hardening off period.

Thanks for your ambition Nynke!

Jay Angler wrote: I hope it all works out. What sort of an ecosystem are you in?

Hi Jay! I'm in Atlantic Canada, 5a/b, Prince Edward Island. My last frost date is around the end of the 3rd week of May. I have a grow tent setup in the house because the house is 2x4 construction and window sills barely hold a pill bottle, they're so narrow. So I usually start in the tent, around the start of April. In previous attempts I started hardening off in that last week of May and transplanted from small pots to the beds at the start of June.

The raised beds get full sunlight all day. The last attempt, the leaves of the seedlings turned white and didn't recover for a couple of weeks. None of them died and they grew well when they recovered, but it doesn't seem ideal to me. I'm thinking some wind mediation might be required - the breeze never stops here, and the beds have no wind break.

I've grown rutabaga, radish, carrot, potato, beets, lettuce, spinach, swiss chard, peas, cucumbers, pumpkin, acorn squash, zuccini, paste tomatoes, beefsteak tomatoes. Over the years, the beds have had a bit of cow and chicken manure, that gets processed through a cold compost pile before getting applied to the beds 2-3 weeks before seeding. The compost pile gets fed year round, even when it's buried in the snow. The beds are at the edge of a hayfield that hasn't been used in 18 years. I mow that part of the yard regularly, adding the clippings to the compost. I've never applied fertilizer to the beds and the only pests I've encounter in numbers is potato beetle when I do potatoes (roughly every 5 years) and that darned cabbage moth.

This year I was thinking I might try some of the so-called green gold, the liquid amendment you make with grass clippings by soaking them in water in a closed bucket for a few weeks.

lol is that what you meant when you asked what eco-system? To be honest, I feel blessed that my only continuing problem is getting the tomatoes started each year. I hear so many problems that other gardeners have with pests, blights, mildew etc. and I understand why a lot of folks give up.

Cheers for now!

I have had very little success starting seeds early and then trying to harden them off. So I mostly direct seed everything I plant. All the usual plants. However, this means at the very end of the season I am hustling to get tomatoes into the house and about a third of time they get hit with frost, or there is a large proportion of green tomatoes.

About a month ago while looking for something do with my 3D printer, I came across a model (there are many of them) and printed myself a paper pot maker. It's 1 7/8 inches across, and 2 3/4 inches tall. In about two weeks I hope to start start making paper pots to start my tomatoes. I have read that they transfer to the garden in a well behaved manner, because they are not being disturbed by being transplanted. I'm hoping that will give them some sort of edge when they have to be hardened off, although I expect that to be a complete failure as it has been in previous attempts.

As a side note, I plant in raised beds. Last year I noticed the walls of my very first bed are becoming well rotted, so this year I'm converting it to an open hugelkulture bed in which I'll plant winter squash, pumpkin and maybe something new like melons. The bed is already half Hugel. All four of my beds have excess wood in the bottom 10 inches and soil in the top 10 inches. This being the oldest of the beds, I expect it to be very fertile and the hugel-layer to be soft and water holding.

The snow is disappearing very fast this spring, so maybe I'll get a long enough season that direct seeded tomatoes will get along a bit faster than usual. That would be nice. Good gardening to you all.

This is going to sound mean, even though I don't mean it (ha ha) that way.

Stop striving for perfection! All the nonsense I hear about baking being a science that requires impeccable measurements, just stop it! And stop using the weird French method of making sour dough with measuring combining and then discarding most of the result in the garbage each day for 7 days! Not to mention having to put the dough in an equally weird basket to proof ...and on and on and on.

Instead get yourself an "old fashioned style" cookbook from the deep south or Appalachia and follow that recipe. When I left home at 17, the first thing I taught myself to cook was bread. I got a copy of the Deaf Smith County Cookbook from my local 'health food store', which has been my cooking bible for 50 years! A nice, simple, no-worry recipe made in regular loaf pans. The real secret is having patience with the overnight timing of making starter and proofing the loaf. If you've ever made bread, then you know that's were most of the taste and texture comes from, which is common to almost all breads.

If you want to do fancy designs with razor blades and what not, or if you're terribly afraid of not getting it exactly right the first time, ignore all I have said.

We're making food, not fashion, although it occasionally *does* turn out quite artsy at times.

As for broken starters, I sometimes go months without using my starter. It sits in the door of my refrigerator long enough for the liquid to rise to the top of starter. It's very dark, almost black colour which will surely give you the willies. You can pour it off or just mix it back in without harm. It has never failed.

Not a hugel bed per se, but 4, 20 inch tall raised beds with hugel in the bottom half.

A simple Google search looking for sources of Comfrey in Canada. Still looking.