Salad Table, Day 31: Growing Challenge

Well, the first of the transplants for the salad table are doing very, very well. I think it's looking quite likely that I will be able to harvest a small Valentine's Day salad for my sweetie and me.

I changed the setup I had planned (again) by recycling some foam peanuts into a draining medium and water reservoir for the grow bags I actually planted the salad greens in. I was trying to keep it on the cheap by using stuff I already had on hand, especially stuff that might otherwise need to be thrown out. So I snugged each growbag bottom into an about four inch layer of peanuts, making sure that some of the drainage holes on the side were kept free and clear and above the intended water line.

Here is a picture of one of the lettuces, close up! I can't wait to have our first home grown salad of the year!

Salad Sprouts, Day 7

Things are moving along pretty well with the (hopefully) future salad patch. Nearly all the seeds have sprouted, and most are getting their first true leaves. Some of the sprouts were getting a bit tall, so I took the cover off both seedling starters and moved the lights down to just about 2 inches above the tops of the leaves. I also set up some simple reflectors with aluminum foil to make sure the seedlings get all the light they can. I'm not too worried about the longer stems - I'll just bury them up to their leaves when I transplant, and all will be well.

This weekend I decided to finish getting my freezers cleaned out. We had a really busy summer this year and although I managed to keep up with some of the fruit processing, a lot of it just got cleaned, de-seeded and put into freezer bags. As a result, our freezer was starting to run out of room! So I hauled out bags and bags of frozen fruits and made purees, jams, syrups and canned whole fruits over the weekend. We now have about 100 jars of various fruit things on the counter. It was worth it, though, if only for the fact that I found four one-gallon bags of Idaho Huckleberries we hadn't eaten yet from the last time we went pickin'. Huckleberries look like blueberries, but the flavor is many times more intense. Think of the most luscious blueberries you've ever had, and add to that the flavor of the very best, sun ripened blackberries, and you'll come close. If you've never had Huckleberries (REAL huckleberries, not the so-called "garden huckleberries" you can buy seeds for in the catalogs) then you are seriously missing out. Take my word for it - you must fix this - and the sooner the better. Huckleberries are one of the very best things about living in this part of the country.

With what I canned this weekend, plus all the jarred fruit stuffs we already have in the storage room, I think we probably now have enough jam to last us about three or four years. I'm going to have to seriously find new things to do with some of our fruit this summer, or we'll soon have a jam backlog that no amount of biscuits can fix.

Wow, that was fast!

It's been just three days since I started some cold-season greens for the salad table I"m working on, and already sprouts are poking up out of the seed starting cells! The lettuces and the chinese cabbage seem to be the first out of the gate, followed closely by the Bright Lights Chard. For onions, I dug through our very last of the shallots from Fall 2006, and found many that were still firm and sproutable. So I took a couple of dozen of them and pressed them lightly into some moist potting soil so they could begin to take root while I finish putting the main planting boxes together. I checked today and found they are almost all sprouting new white roots - I can't believe these things are over a year old. I'm beginning to think this project just might work out after all!

I've been doing some research, and have decided to modify my setup a bit. I'm going to put a couple of shallow storage tubs on the plastic table, and inside those tubs, set four rows of cut pvc pipe with drain holes. That's to form a water and air reservoir for the grow bags I'm planning to set on top. Each bag will straddle a pipe, with the perforated ends of each bag sagging/dipping down over the perf pipe into the water. The tubs I'm planning to use are clear, which might cause an algae problem after a while, but will also make seeing which tubs need refilling a bit easier. I'm using grow bags because I can swap them in and out of the table and light setup as needed, as plants become too tired to produce or try to go to seed on me - that way what is under the lamps is always fresh and at its peak. If I planted directly in the tubs, I'd have to dump the whole thing and replant, and that's harder to do, messier, and lowers overall productivity.

I have four kinds of spinach, 8 kinds of lettuce, some Red Russian Kale, Bright Lights Chard, and Tah Tsai chinese greens in the seed starting units. As soon as these are out, I'll likely start some herbs. The salad greens should be ready to transplant in a couple more weeks. By then, I should have the table, watering reservoirs and lights all set up and ready to receive them. I figure with luck, a month after that I'll be eating home grown salads again. Crossing my fingers, and I'll be sure to post pictures and updates as things progress!

The Iron Gardener

Our garden this past season was a mess. Every adult in the house was suffering from a serious lack of free time this year, so we didn't do a lot of the gardening things we normally do. One of those gardening things was to plant winter salad and braising greens under a cloche in the back yard in early fall. When we do that, despite our seriously cold and long Idaho winters, we generally have so much produce we are begging the neighbors to take some so it won't go to seed. But we didn't do that this year, and dang, I miss it!

So I'm seeing what can be done this late in the season to remedy the lack of home-grown greens. I'm going to go out the next day it's above freezing and see if I can clear out the cloche area and put up a new plastic cover. I'm starting some salad and cooking greens indoors under fluorescent lights to transplant out when I have the cloche ready. I'm also thinking about doing something new - trying to grow a salad table indoors in our sunroom. We have a bank of fluorescent lights and a plastic table that are currently not being used, plus compost and potting soil and enough garden seeds to supply a half dozen families. Instead of building a very shallow wooden planting box to put soil into, I am going to grab a few shallow unused rubbermaid tubs from the garage and set them on top of the table, with wicking material hanging into a five gallon bucket of water underneath. All the components I need to do this project are here at hand; the task will be seeing if they can be combined into a system that can relieve my craving for local fresh produce in the absolute dead of an Idaho winter! I figure this will be an acid test - an Iron Gardener challenge.

Stay tuned!