The Cheap Vegetable Gardener

Vegetable gardening may not be "financially" profitable during your first season

cheapvegetablegardener — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 17:07:00 +0000

I was thinking back to my first vegetable gardening experience in suburbia a few years ago. After many trips to the local home and garden store I accumulated the following:

Soil amendments (compost/peat moss/perlite)	$ 33.00
Garden tools (rake/fork)	$ 16.00
Organic fertilizer	$ 3.00
Seeds and seed starter kit	$ 24.00
Kid garden tools (shovel/watering can)	$ 5.00
Miscellaneous	$ 10.00

Total	$ 91.00

In the end of the season we probably grew about $5 worth of tomatoes and fresh flowers but doesn't even compare to the quality time spent with my daughter watering and as she would say "picking food" which made that season especially profitable.

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Saving money by saving seeds

cheapvegetablegardener — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 15:11:00 +0000

Many people do not know that given the right care you can save a package of seeds for 3 years and depending on the variety possibly even longer. When you want seeds to germinate you provide heat, moisture, and light. To prevent them from germinating you want to do the opposite by storing them in a cool, dry, and dark environment.

I happen to live in the humid Pacific Northwest so finding a dry location can be difficult, but I happen to have the perfect environment in my kitchen in my refrigerator. Just thoroughly clean and dry a glass jar and drop in your seed packets and close the lid. If you happen to one or two of those silica packets lying around (those things you find in the toe when you put on new pair of sneakers) drop that in the bottom it will help soak up any moisture that may exist in the jar. If moisture seems to appear inside your jar simply open the top and the dry environment will suck all the moisture out.

Empty glass jar	$ 0.00
Silica packet	$ 0.00
Packets of seeds	$ 15.00

Total	$ 15.00

Savings over 3 years	$ 30.00

Cheap PC case grow box for less than $20

cheapvegetablegardener — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 05:19:00 +0000

I enjoy when I can be rewarded by overcoming mother nature, so when my 6 year old mentioned she wanted to figure out why strawberries will not grow in the winter for her science project I couldn't have been prouder. Once she determined the reason was because it was colder and the sun wasn't up as much, she suggested using lights to help them get more light and warmth.

The next obvious step was to create a grow box, now if this wasn't cheap vegetable gardener I would just buy a commercial grow box, but by now you should know better than that :)

Looking through my garage I found my first victim, an old PC case. After a few screws and a few drilled out rivets I had a good structure for the grow box. Next I added some styrofoam insulation which I got at HD on all 4 sides. Also at HD I picked up a cheap extension cord, lamp timer, and a socket plug adapters that allowed me to plug right into the extension cord. Followed by a small hole in the top and about 45 minutes my work is done.

In January we had a strange couple weeks of 20 degree days so I also added an incandescent build for some extra light but more importantly little extra heat. Which I made from a old lamp taking up space in the garage. With all the sides up the box is able to maintain a 70-75 degree temperature even with the chilly conditions in the garage.

After a little over a week we seemed to be getting some good results with our first blossom on the strawberry plant my daughter chose under snow in our garden.

Old PC Case	$ 0.00
Extension Cord	$ 1.25
2 - Socket adapters	$ 5.00
Lamp timer	$ 4.00
2 - compact fluorescent blubs	$ 7.00
Small sheet of insulated Styrofoam	$ 2.50

Total	$ 19.75

Some of our other grow boxes
Fully automated computerized grow box (Project Everbearing) Beta 1
Cheap LED Light and Grow Box

Going on a worm hunt

cheapvegetablegardener — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 21:59:00 +0000

We had a good rainstorm the night before and my wife was returning from a neighbors house and noticed a bunch of worms crossing the street. Since she knows me and our girls so well she grabbed a couple Ziploc bags and we proceeded to have a worm hunt. Our older daughter didn't want to touch them that morning but I was really proud of my wife who procedded to help collect some worms. Lets just say she normally is not a worm person.

Just for some history, last fall my oldest daughter wanted to have pet worms, I opted to suggest making a worm bin instead. Since I am a cheap vegetable gardener I wasn't about to spend $20 for a pound of red wrigglers (Eisenia fetida) we spent a few evening catching our own.

After the worm hunt ground has finally thawed so took my daughters out to help take care of some of the weeding in our front garden beds. My 3 year old even started singing a gardening song. I believe it went something like "We are gardening, we are gardening"

What is a lumen?

cheapvegetablegardener — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 03:32:00 +0000

Lumen is a measurement of the intensity of light; one lumen is equal to the brightness of a candle at 1 foot away. Just to get an idea on a clear summer day by the time the light from the sun hits reaches us on earth it has an intensity of up to 10,000 lumens. If you wanted to simulate sunlight in your house you just need to hook up 6 (100 watt incandescent or 29 watt CFL) light bulbs and stand one foot away.

Fortunately plants only need 100 to 4000 lumens to sustain vegetative growth depending on the variety, so indoor growing can be setup fairly inexpensively. For example, with our strawberry plant in a grow box experiment we can get away with just 2 CFL bulbs and provide enough light to provide the 1500 lumen required to allow vegetation and flowering. All of this for about $1.00 a month of electrical usage, at $5.00 a pint for strawberries maybe I can make this profitable.

Starting my first seeds of the season

cheapvegetablegardener — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 04:17:00 +0000

My two daughters and I could not take it anymore and had to get our hands dirty and start some seeds indoors. Cute to hear my 3 year old say in the dead of winter "Can we garden now?" when it is 20 degrees outside and 4 inches of snow.

Given that our last frost date is March 15th and I don't have a good southern facing window I might regret the early start but I always have my grow box if the steps start to get leggy. I was also thinking that my grow box would be a decent way to start hardening off young seedlings with wind and temperature a little more in my control.

I normally start my seeds with netted peat pellets, but this year for environment concerns and because I am cheap I went with coconut coir. I must say I love this stuff it retains water very well, which is great for those little seedlings. The kids also got a kick out of watching the little brick expand to half fill my 5 gallon bucket after adding the 5 quarts of water. Now one lesson learned is to cut that block up into small pieces especially if you are not doing all of your planting at once.

I was planning on starting some cucumbers, lettuce, and tomatoes but apparently I didn't save any tomato seeds from last year so looks like I am stuck with the local seed selection this year. I didn't have any small pots around so grabbed some of my kids’ water cups and cut a hole in the bottom and filled them full of damp coconut coir and let the excess water drain and put them in a strawberry container which may work as a nice little greenhouse. If you look close enough you can see some little sprouts already starting from the lettuce in just one day. I also cut the top off a 2 liter bottle to top off one of my terra cotta pots which I planted lavender.

Gardening with kids

cheapvegetablegardener — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 17:34:00 +0000

The appeal of working in the garden has always been natural to my daughters. But then again what could be better than going outside playing with dirt and water. I do have a few tips I have picked up that might make it a little extra fun for the young ones:

Let them have their own garden, not only does this give them their own space to play but also protects your own garden from their desire to keep digging. I made a little 2 foot square garden with one 8 foot length of 4X4 and a few long screws. Was the perfect size where she could reach everything from any side.
Buy them their own gardening tools. Otherwise you might be fighting to get your claw and trowel away from them and also that little plastic watering can works great for gently watering those newly planted seedlings.
Pick seed that work well with their little fingers. Some of my favorite seeds are peas, radishes, sunflowers, pumpkins, and cilantro.
Start some seeds indoors. A little Dixie cup and some coconut coir works great and they can keep a close eye on it several times a day.
Go to the nursery and buy some flowers. It is hard to be patient a $0.99 primrose can definitely hold the sprouts over while wait for their own to grow.

Not only can this be fun activity to together but also can be educational. I recall during a preschool planting activity where many parents were very impressed as my daughter teased the roots before she carefully placed her plant in her very well loosened soil.

Strawberries in the PC grow box (UPDATE)

cheapvegetablegardener — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 05:22:00 +0000

Well the strawberry plant seems to be doing great in the $20 PC grow box. Can't wait to try it out on my recently planted seedlings.

My Lettuce seeds have sprouted

cheapvegetablegardener — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 02:58:00 +0000

My lettuce seeds sprouted faster than usual this year, I expected to have some problems since I have saved the seeds for 3 years now. I don't have a heating pad (yeah I'm cheap) so just put them on top of the refrigerator in a makeshift greenhouse out of an old strawberry container. They would have still germinated in my mid-60 degree house, but the extra heat gained from being on top of the refrigerator will allow my cucumbers to sprout about 10 days sooner.

I will have to give coconut coir my two green thumbs up, my only complaint is that it retains water a little too well. I would recommend 1 part perlite to 2 parts coconut coir to let the roots dry out a little more. For now I am just watering from the bottom so guess I am doing some cheap hydroponics. I have also added them to my PC case grow box.

Sow what your actually going to eat

cheapvegetablegardener — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 04:41:00 +0000

It is getting that time a year when we are all getting our seeds in order and start planning what we will be including in your garden. Every year I always tell myself "Take it easy, don't overdo it" but unfortunately I never listen to myself and look at the many seeds in the packet and end up composting at least half of my crop of spinach, carrots, and lettuce. I hope that writing this down will help me to remember to listen to that little voice when I plant my peas and spinach tomorrow.

Harvesting your own seeds

cheapvegetablegardener — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 00:55:00 +0000

This past fall I made my first attempt to harvest my own seeds. If you can’t tell from the picture I chose cilantro (or coriander if you eat the seeds) and seem to be worth the minimal effort. Just as a warning, if the plant you are dealing with happens to be a hybrid (parents of different species) what you get the next year may not be the same as it was the previous year. In the end this could be disappointment or a pleasant surprise so the risk might be worth it. This next year I am planning letting some of my other vegetables finish going to seed to save a couple bucks but also the flowers don’t look half bad.

Harvesting seeds from the grocery store

cheapvegetablegardener — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 05:10:00 +0000

There is more than one way to harvest seeds sure can grow your own but there is also another option. Use seeds someone else grew by buying them at a grocery store or farmers market.

Have you ever have bought potatoes, sweet potatoes or yams and noticed sprouts coming out of them, dig a hole and plant them in the ground and in a few weeks you may have your own potato plant. Not a fan of those, why not try garlic, ginger, onions, peanuts, avocados, dried beans, apples, tomatoes, peppers, or anything else you can imagine.

This year I am going to attempt potatoes and garlic, how about yourself?

Growing Challenge: Planting the seeds

cheapvegetablegardener — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 04:22:00 +0000

I have decided to participate in The Growing Challenge hosted by the people at Elements in Time. The short version is to try growing at least one thing from seed that you have not tried before.

My daughters and I have decided to grow some tomatoes (Sweetie, San Marzano, Siletz) which I normally pick from the limited choice of seedlings that are available at my garden store. While picking seeds my 3 year old insisted on getting corn, don't think we have the space for it to be productive, guess in the end we might have some nice Halloween decorations. We also noticed that some of our potatoes had started to sprout so we have decided to add them to our list.

Stay tuned for updates on our growing challenge.

Make your own homemade newspaper pots

cheapvegetablegardener — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 05:44:00 +0000

As you probably know we shouldn't be using peat pots due to environmental concerns, buying terra cotta pots is too expensive, what is a cheap gardener to do? Make your own homeade pots out of newspaper of course. Muddy Clogs describes how to exactly do this on her blog. My only complaint is that I didn't think of it first.

Cheap organic fertilizer for your lawn and garden

cheapvegetablegardener — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 23:37:00 +0000

We all know if you walk into a grocery store the organic produce is always more expensive than produce grown using non-organic methods. Using deductive reasoning it seems easy to determine that this would mean growing vegetables organically will cost me more than if I used non-organic methods. What is a cheap vegetable gardener to do?

One disadvantage (and advantage) to organic fertilizer is that it is not as potent as chemical fertilizers. So my 2 lbs of organic will not nearly go as far (at least short term) as the same amount of chemical fertilizer. One trick to being cheap is to purchase products that are not being marketed for your planned purpose. So to solve my expensive fertilizer issue I used this same logic to solve the problem of finding a location to buy organic fertilizer that was not marketed as "fertilizer." After some research I determined a source from my local feed store. For $10 I was able to get 25 lbs of alfalfa pellets compared to 2 lbs of alfalfa meal at my local nursery for around the same price.

One great thing about using organic fertilizer is my kids can help spread it around, unlike chemical fertilizers. It also contains triacontanol which is a root growth stimulant along with plenty of organic matter to help boost some extra microbial activity. This not only helps the grass but also improves your soil at the same time. By taking a few cups of alfalfa pellets and mixing with water you can also make alfalfa tea, which I am planning on doing later but will sure to let you know how it works out. One more tip, make sure you distribute the alfalfa pellets before a big rain or watering, currently my lawn looks like some geese are using it as their bathroom.

Hunting for spring at our local nurseries

cheapvegetablegardener — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 15:18:00 +0000

Since nothing is blooming in my yard and my wife convinced me that Northwest Flower & Garden Show would be a little too busy for our young girls (I know she was right, as usual) We decided instead to go on a nursery tour, I normally get my plants from our closest nursery or the local home and garden center but was curious what the other dozen or so nurseries in my area had to offer. We didn't bring anything home (little too early for vegetable seedlings) but did get some pictures that spring was not too far away.

Growing potatoes with kids

cheapvegetablegardener — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 03:42:00 +0000

I was checking out our pantry I noticed some of our potatoes were starting to sprout. I took this as a great opportunity to have a little activity with the my daughters. We started by taking a look at the sprouts and had a little discussion about how potatoes grow underground and this one potato will grow into many more potatoes. We then cut an egg carton in half and set the sprouting potatoes by the window to sprout (chitting) a little more and printed out some activity pages from the Washington State Potato Commission.

After a few days of basking in the sun we planted our potatoes in our garden and hopefully in a couple weeks we will see some plants coming out of the ground.

Releasing ladybugs in your garden

cheapvegetablegardener — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 06:07:00 +0000

When we started my garden at my our current house my daughters and I noticed we didn't have any ladybugs roaming around the leaves. Now I would like to think that aphids and mites feared me so much to dare to step foot in my garden, but the reality is I live in a newer neighborhood with vegetation in its early stages and with the lush forest around me it is hard to compete.

If the ladybugs will not come to your garden your only choice is bring them there yourself. I did this by purchasing some ladybugs at our local home and garden store which ours starts carrying them a little after the local last frost date. Unfortunately, I took my daughters with me when I bought a bag of 1000 lady bugs for $5.00 so no every time we go to Home Depot they need to check to see if the ladybugs are there today, guess this will be a yearly tradition. If you can't find them locally you can always purchase live ladybugs online.

Why would I want these bugs in my garden? Well other my girls get a lot of joy searching in our garden for them they are also an awesome beneficial insect which each one can eat up to 5000 aphids/mites in their lifetime. When you decide to release them be sure to follow the directions on the package and do so at night so they don't all fly off to the neighbor’s yard. If you have kids you might want release a 100 or so during the daytime so you can make sure you get some cute pictures like the one below.

UPDATE:
Shortly after posting this I was taking some pictures of some of my mystery bulbs coming up and noticed the lady bug below, guess my garden can actually attract a few of them on its own.

Fall bulb planting surprises

cheapvegetablegardener — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 14:55:00 +0000

Not sure if it is the long winter, or just me getting older but I have no clue what bulbs we planted last fall. Guess I will find out in a couple weeks.

Make a cheap soil sifter (sieve)

cheapvegetablegardener — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 23:33:00 +0000

Unfortunately I only have one compost bin which I continuously add materials to, so I never have a complete “batch” of compost at one given time. In order to be able to filter out the finished compost from the non-composted material I created a soil sifter (sieve)

I checked out soil sifters online but didn’t find anything that I liked so I decided to make one myself. I went to the home improvement store and picked up a roll of ½ inch wire mesh and a 2”X4”X8’ piece of lumber. I cut two pieces one inch shorter than the width of the wire mesh and cut the remaining piece of lumber in half. Screw all the pieces together and pull wire mesh over the rectangular frame. Staple the mess around on the side of the frame and you are all done.

To use, just lean it against a wall or fence at a 45 degree angle (wire mesh facing down) and just dump your compost on top, the composted material falls through the stuff that needs a little more time stays on top which you can throw back into the compost bin.

SHOWDOWN: PC Grow Box versus The Sun

cheapvegetablegardener — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 05:45:00 +0000

Versus

I am running out of space in my PC grow box now I have added lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers along with the original inhabitant, the strawberry plant. I noticed that the two cucumber plants were approximately the same size and taking up quite a bit of space, so decided to have a little competition and experiment and see which grows better given different environments. I will have one in the PC grow box and the other in its permanent spot in the garden under a miniature greenhouse (2-liter bottle with bottle cut off)

At two weeks after my last frost date (end of March in my area) I will plant the cucumber plant in the PC grow box next to the other plant and report my findings. Anyone have any predictions of the outcome?

Strawberries in the PC Grow box (UPDATE #2)

cheapvegetablegardener — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 16:16:00 +0000

The strawberry plant is doing better than I ever expected, should have some fresh strawberries in a week or two. Hopefully no one tells them it is not June...

Science Fair: Why don't strawberries grow during the wintertime?

cheapvegetablegardener — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 05:55:00 +0000

My 6 year old daughter was the inspiration for the PC grow box for her science fair project to figure out why strawberries don't grow during the wintertime. She started by picking a strawberry plant from our garden (snow still on the ground) and we potted it in a terra cotta pot which she carefully painted ahead of time. We put it in the grow box in our garage with the lights on for 14 hours a day. As she saw significant changes in her strawberry plant we took pictures. After about a month of growing we went through the pictures and she wrote her report explaining the changes.

She definitely had a good time standing by her display proudly telling people about her project and answering any questions that the various visitors had. She did take a break to take a look at some of the other kids displays which I took note of the gardening related ones which would be great for a science projects for any of your budding scientists:

• Seed germination (soil or paper towel)
• How plants grow with different color of lights (colored transparent plastic)
• How plants grow when given different liquids (water, soda, milk, vinager, diet soda)
• Effects of being mean or nice to plants
• Effects of music on plant growth
• Hydroponics
• Effects of temperature on plant growth

Vermicomposting - How to make a cheap worm bin

cheapvegetablegardener — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 00:21:00 +0000

Why would I want a worm bin? Well my initial reason was my daughter wanted a pet worm and I decided making a worm bin would be a much better option than having worms escaping in our house. After researching into the world of vermicomposting, harvesting worm poop or castings for the nicer which is basically the best thing you can add to your garden. It is also a great way to compost your garden/kitchen waste if you have limited outdoor space such as a condo or apartment. There are actually many books on the subject but the most well known is Worms Eat My Garbage most likely for the catchy title.

There are many options for creating a worm bin for Vermicomposting. You can take a 5 gallon bucket drill a few holes (1/2 inch) in the bottom and stack multiple or use a single one and put a lid on top also with some hole drilled (1/4 in) in it. If you are really serious and want to make harvesting your castings easier, you can purchase a worm factory or Worm Chalet online.

I obviously like to go the cheap route and I didn't have any extra 5 gallon buckets I wanted to sacrifice, so I opted for another method of using a 14 gallon Rubbermaid container. Using the same premise as the bucket I drilled 3 holes (1/2 in) in the bottom for drainage and about 30-40 around the top 3 inches of the container to allow for sufficeint airflow. As any project my daughter insists she needs to "decorate" which included coloring and labeling our finished product with a permanent marker.

Related Posts:
Vermicomposting - How get your worm bin ready Vermicomposting - How to take care of your worms
Vermicomposting - How to harvest your worm poop (castings)

Vermicomposting - How get your worm bin ready

cheapvegetablegardener — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 03:26:00 +0000

Now you have created your own worm bin now you need to get it ready for your worms. The worms need some bedding, which you can buy some coir worm bedding online or you can make some yourself by taking confidential documents from your shredder and soaking in water until it has the consistency of a wrung out sponge. Now not only shredding your documents but having worms eat them and then spreading their castings in your garden, talk about organic security. Simply add this wet paper with a handful of compost for grit (worm fiber) to your worm bin and you are ready for the worms.

The best worms you can get for vermicomposting are red wriggler (Eisenia Fetida) because they digest nearly their weight per day, creating lots of precious castings. They also enjoy eating close to the surface so they will happily eat food you place at or just under the surface. You can purchase these red wiggler worms online or at your local worm farm. I could not get myself to pay $20 for worms, so I went the cheap route and with my daughters took some worms from our garden. They do not have as big an appetite, if I get a population more than my bin can support (yes they multiply quickly) I can simply add them to my garden without worries of effecting the native worm ecosystem.

Now you should have a happy worm habitat which can provide rich nutrients to your garden.
Related Posts:
Vermicomposting - How to make a cheap worm bin
Vermicomposting - How to take care of your worms
Vermicomposting - How to harvest your worm poop (castings)

Vermicomposting - How to take care of your worms

cheapvegetablegardener — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 20:30:00 +0000

Your worms need 6 things to stay healthy: temperature, food, moisture, airflow, bedding, and darkness.

Temperature: Your worms need to be stored between 55 and 77 degree. During the hot days of summer you should keep your worm bin in the shade and during winter you should keep it indoors or in your garage.

Food: Worms are vegetarians so any garden waste you normally would add to your compost (expired fruits and vegetables, bread, egg shells, cereal, etc) you can give to your worms. There are some tricks to make the fruits/vegetables easier for the worms to eat by putting the food in your freezer for a few days and/or putting it in a blender and make a worm food smoothie.

Moisture: Lack of moisture is the easiest way to kill off your worm population. Like us worms contain a high percentage of water without moisture they will dry out and die. Most of the time the food you add will give your worms enough moisture to be happy but on hot/dry summer days you might need to add a little extra water to your bin.

Airflow: Worms need air to live, make sure your worm bin has air holes. You must also ensure that your bin does not get too soggy which can suffocate your worms. If you find your bin begins to get too wet add some shredded paper and mix in with the existing bedding. If you bin frequently gets waterlogged you may want to add some extra air holes to your bin.

Bedding: Bedding gives worms space to live and also allows area to bury food scraps. This also adds material to store some extra moisture.

Darkness: As long as your bin is created out of a opaque material and you keep a lid on it this one should take care of itself.

Related Posts:
Vermicomposting - How to make a cheap worm bin
Vermicomposting - How get your worm bin ready Vermicomposting - How to harvest your worm poop (castings)

Vermicomposting - How to harvest your worm poop (castings)

cheapvegetablegardener — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 15:20:00 +0000

Now your worms have been working hard eating, pooping, and reproducing so now it is time to harvest the fruits of their labor (worm castings) There are a few methods to harvest worm castings so I will briefly describe a few:

Dump and Sort Much like it sounds you simply dump out your worms and castings onto a plastic sheet. Sort through and catch as many worms as you can and set them aside.

Divide and Harvest Move you compost and worms to one side of your worm bin and fill the other half with new bedding. For the next couple weeks only bury food on the side with the fresh bedding. During these two weeks a majority of the worms will move over to the other side where you can harvest the castings minus the worms.

Moving on Up Create a second bin which you place on top of your existing one (Rubbermaid containers and 5 gallon bucket worm bins work great for this) and fill it with clean bedding and food and after a couple weeks the worms will migrate into to the new bin. Now you simply harvest the lower bin.

Using any of these methods I would suggest using a soil sieve like I showed how to create previously to better separate food/bedding from the castings and either use the remains in your next bin or put them right into your compost bin.

Related Posts:
Vermicomposting - How to make a cheap worm bin
Vermicomposting - How get your worm bin ready Vermicomposting - How to take care of your worms

Strawberries in the PC Grow box (FINAL UPDATE)

cheapvegetablegardener — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 03:22:00 +0000

Okay, I promise this will be the last time I talk about our strawberry plant in the grow box. After a little more than a month in the grow box our plant went from a small lifeless plant to one that looks like will bear about 10 strawberries. We are planning on moving it to the garden with the rest our strawberry plants later this week to make room for the growing tomatoes.

How strawberry plant looked when we started 40 days ago.

Picture of my daughter showing off her strawberry before she ate the first one.

I sampled on the strawberries and must say I do miss "local" strawberries, looking forward to the rest of them in the next couple months.

Tomato seedlings in the PC Grow Box

cheapvegetablegardener — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 03:13:00 +0000

The strawberry plant got too big for the PC grow box so I planted it back outside where it is doing great. Now my tomato plants have more room to grow and have to compete less for the limited light. I have been impressed with my tomato plants in the grow box. I think this is the first year I have grown tomatoes that were not all white and leggy. One the cherry tomato (Sweetie) plants already grew enough my daughter and I had to transplant it to a large pot we will sit on our front porch that has good southern exposure.

The rest of the tomato plants are growing a little slower but should be perfect to move outside after our last frost which in my area is March 22nd.

Planning a butterfly garden

cheapvegetablegardener — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 04:34:00 +0000

I got the word this weekend we had enough vegetables and not enough flowers in our garden beds so got the idea to start a butterfly garden. Upon telling my 6 year old daughter she got very excited and started talking how we can charge admission for people to see our butterfly garden.

There are two ways to get butterflies in your gardens, provide nectar to eat and/or give them a great environment to lay their eggs. If you remember your grade school science classes those eggs turn into caterpillars which depending on what else you have in your vegetable garden this might not be exactly the pest you want to encourage to inhabit your garden. If that is your situation I would recommend only planting the nectar attracters. After carefully investigating what caterpillars eat by reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar from cover to cover I decided my risk should be minimal if we have our butterfly garden on the other side of our yard away from our strawberries.

To attempt to get the butterflies to lay eggs, we bought Snapdragons and Daisies. To provide butterflies with tasty nectar we picked out Black-eyed Susan, purple coneflowers, zinnias, and nasturtiums, Lavender, Daisies (as well), and Mint. We are also planning on creating a butterfly feeder by taking a small jar and drilling a hole in the top. Put some cotton snuggly in the hole and fill with solution of 1 part sugar to 9 parts water and cheap butterfly (or hummingbird) feeder is ready for visitors.

Will keep posted with progress on the butterfly garden and I ancipate the butterfly feeder will have plenty of “decorating” involved. If you want something that might look a little more attractive in your garden you might want to take a look at the Butterfly Beacon.
Read Other Butterfly Garden Posts

Speed Composting

cheapvegetablegardener — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 13:41:00 +0000

Unfortunately I have a small yard so my space to compost is limited so my goal is to make sure the most use out of the limited space I have. I am also impatient and don't want to wait a couple years to finally get some compost. Here are some of my suggestions on how to be a speed composter.

Make stuff smaller: The small the you break up the material the faster it will decompose, instead of putting in those leaves freshly raked run over them with your lawn mower or take a few passes with your weed whacker. If you have kitchen waste chop or blend them to help the bacteria out.

Be selective about what you add: The basic idea if the material was alive at some point in its life it will decompose. That gives you a lot to choose from but if you want to speed compost you need to be a little selective about what you add. Lettuce, fruits, most vegetables (carrots take awhile unless you shred), leaves, grass clippings, shredded newspaper will decompose quickly. Items like small branches, vines though will compost over time I would recommend adding these to your yard waste bin.

Create a good environment: You want to create a healthy environment for microorganisms to be happy and reproduce. To thrive they need moisture and air so if you bin it should have the consistency of a wrung out sponge. If you find your bin is lacking moisture just add some while you mix it. This is definitely one of those situations where more is not better too much moisture and you will suffocate the microorganisms due to lack of oxygen. If you find your bin is too wet (usually will start to smell) simply mix (aerate) with an compost mixer or a pitch fork. If it is more of a muddy mess spread it out for a couple days and you should be back to having a microbial breading ground again.

Provide a good diet You want to provide your bin with a proper balance of nitrogen and carbon. The documented best ration is 30 to 1 (carbon to nitrogen) but I wouldn’t get too concerned about exact numbers just keep in mind a compost with just leaves or grass clippings will not be the most efficient way to get some compost into your garden. During certain parts of the season you will find that some nitrogen or carbon materials are harder to come by. For example in the fall you will have all kinds of leaves but your lawn and garden will be baron with greens, while being just the opposite in the summer where you will have a lot of nitrogen rich materials and no carbon. This is an opportunity to supplements your compost by adding nitrogen (alfalfa pellets, blood meal) during the fall/winter and adding carbon (newspaper, sawdust) during the spring/summer time.

Follow these tips and you should have great compost at record speeds.

Spring Rainbow

cheapvegetablegardener — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 02:36:00 +0000

Happy first day of spring, well this picture was not taken this spring but still a good reminder of days to come.

Planting our butterfly garden

cheapvegetablegardener — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 15:29:00 +0000

Yesterday with the weather almost getting to 60 seemed like a good day to try sow some of our vegetable seeds outside for our butterfly garden. I tried to make things organized by grouping the Black-eyed Susan, purple coneflowers, zinnias, and nasturtiums, but my daughter decided to distribute the seeds a little more random. I am sure the butterflies won't mind and guess it should look a little closer to how nature would do it.

I have learned from my years of gardening I normally am too optimistic about when seeds can be planted outside so as a backup plan we also planted some of the same seeds indoors which are currently trying to push their way closer to the PC grow box.

Read Other Butterfly Garden Posts

Average last frost dates are only right 50% of the time

cheapvegetablegardener — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 03:34:00 +0000

Our last frost date in my area should have been March 24th but given the frosty mornings this past week and the fact we had snow coming down most of today it looks like this year our last frost date will fall on the other side of the bell curve. Unfortunately, I was optimistic with some of the great weather we were having earlier and planted my tomoato seeds for a much earlier move outside. The poor tomatoes are still growing in my PC grow box but starting to not look so good. As you can see from the picture below my tomato plants are in some dire need of some non-artificial light. I am afraid I might end up buying my tomato plants at my local nursery (yet again) this year. Vegetable gardening is definitely one of those hobbies which it does not pay to be a too optimistic.

Oh the carnage...

cheapvegetablegardener — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 22:03:00 +0000

I am sorry to inform you that we have had a death in the garden. By entering this world a just a little sprout started from a packet of seeds just a couple of months ago. They spent most of their life being nurtured in the comfortable surroundings of the PC grow box our poor tomoto plants did not survive the harshness freakish winter storm we which occurred weeks after our supposed last frost date. On the positive side all of our cold season crops (garlic, onions, cilantro, lettuce, peas) as well as the corn and butterfly garden flowers have endured and enjoyed cozying up with the snow and are doing just fine.

How to grow garlic in your garden

cheapvegetablegardener — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 23:53:00 +0000

My experiment of planting organic garlic which I bought from my local produce section of my grocery store seems to be working well. If you want to try this yourself here are some hopefully easy to follow steps:

Buy some good looking garlic at your grocery store (I chose organic since I made an assumption there was a decreased chance that it was treated to prevent growth)
When you are ready to plant, carefully break open the garlic and separate the tear shaped cloves.
Take the largest cloves and plant in well cultivated soil 2 inches deep and 4 inches apart with pointed end up, these will be for your full garlic bulbs.
Take the smaller cloves and either use in some spaghetti sauce or plant them in your garden 1-2 inches apart to harvest as baby garlic (think green onions, but strong garlic flavor)
Fertilize with a balanced fertilizer (or bone meal) during planting but avoid fertilizing after that point since you don't want to encourage too much foliage growth by having an abundance of nitrogen in the soil and allow the plant to use its energy to grow a big bulb.
When the foliage on the "scapes" began to completely uncurl you can cut them off and use them on salads, scrambled eggs, or even garlic scape pesto. I would recommend leaving a couple of your garlic plants with scape attached since it also works a natural indicator of when your garlic is ready to harvest. When the lower third of the scape is light brown (the color your expect for garlic) it is ready to dig out.
Take any cracked bulbs and use them immediately, take the remaining bulbs and wash off any dirt and let them dry for 2-3 weeks depending on how dry your climate is.
Once cured hang in a mesh bag or braid the garlic and given proper airflow and temperature (50-70 degrees) your garlic should last for 6 months (if not eaten by then)

As you can see growing garlic is pretty low maintenance and I am definitely looking forward to using it to my salsa this fall.

Planting seeds outside

cheapvegetablegardener — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 21:50:00 +0000

I always enjoy any seeds I required to start outdoors since they normally thrive with little effort from myself other than the occasional watering and given I live in the rainy Seattle area that does start until mid-June. Even if you have started many of your seeds indoors to extend your growing season some seeds should always start outdoors since they are sensitive to transplant shock. If you have been to a garden center or nursery lately you can get an idea by what types of plants can be transplanted easily. If you are now looking at your seed packets wondering if you should plant these indoors or outdoors here are my suggestions:
Plants that can be started indoors: Broccoli, Cabbage, Cauliflower, Celery, Cucumbers, Cukes, Eggplant, Herbs, Kale, Leeks, Lettuce, Muskmelons, Onions (seed), Parsley, Peppers, Swiss Chard, Summer squash, Tomatoes, Zucchini

Plants that should be started outdoors: Beans, Beets, Carrots, Cilantro, Corn, Cucumbers, Garlic, Muskmelons, Onions (sets), Peas, Potatoes, Radishes, Scallions, Spinach, Turnips, and Winter/Summer squash

You can see from the list there are some plants on both lists which shows that it is definitely possible to transplant some of these sensitive plants, but if you want to avoid the hassle and avoid killing a few plants without requiring surgical precision I would recommend opting for the direct seed planting approach.

Hopefully now you have an idea what you can plant so now comes how to actually do it. Your seed package which will normally give instructions something along the lines of planting the whole package of seeds in a row and thin out to the appropriate spacing. This has been the basic method that many gardeners have been doing for years. This normally leads to thinning 70% of the seedlings or so of the row, which is time consuming and since you can save seeds over a few years this method will definitely be more costly. To avoid this, I plant 1-2 seeds at the proper spacing, if the seeds have been saved for a couple years I add a couple extra seeds since even with proper seed storage the germination rates can decrease over time. After a week or two I simply thin the weakest of the seedlings by chopping them off with a small pair of scissors being careful to not disturb the seedling next to it. If you want to give your larger seeds a little head start, try soaking them in lukewarm water (add inoculants if they are in legume family) overnight before planting them.

Following these steps you should have some great activity in your garden with minimal maintenance and cost.

Fall bulb planting surprise revealed

cheapvegetablegardener — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 19:46:00 +0000

Well turns out the bulbs I planted last fall were tulips which came up this week, hopefully the snow we got yesterday/today (not supposed to happen here) does not kill them off.

Make your Garden/Lawn into a gigantic worm bin

cheapvegetablegardener — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 21:14:00 +0000

My soil is consisted of a high percentage of clay, as a result I am required to aerate my lawn twice a year to avoid my soil getting too compacted. I am cheap so I purchased a $10 aerator from Home Depot which I walk around the lawn giving it a nice look of a goose bathroom until the next good rain or mowing. Of course nature has an answer which is the garden earthworm. As a finished limping behind my aerator I thought how can I get more earthworms to do some of this work for me, which brought me to the conclusion to turn my lawn and garden to a gigantic worm bin.

As worms wiggle through the ground they break up the soil and provide pathways for water and air to flow and while they are at it drop their nutrient castings along their way. Now looking at my tips on how to care for a worm bin, the same principles apply to doing the same on a larger scale. Our course my wife and HOA would appreciate me just throwing our kitchen waste out in our front yard so I have to be a little more creative. For organic matter to feed the worms (and the lawn) I will be using alfalfa pellets and grass clippings (mulch) As for moisture, given I live in the Seattle, WA area our frequent rains take care of this until mid summer where short frequent watering will keep the grass and the worms happy. I will avoid chemical fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides using organic options to control weeds and pests and occasional application of alfalfa pellets to fertilize the lawn.

At this time the results look good the lawn looks great and I have definitely seen an increased number of worms in my garden and yard. The birds have also noticed and are taking advantage of my increased population and taking care of some of the excess in my lawn (guess it is better than them eating my seeds planted in the garden)

Just as a warning like everything in life too much of anything is normally not a good idea which can apply to worms as well. Worms can move enough soil and leave piles of castings on the surface which can create a lumpy lawn, which as long as you don't have a putting green for a lawn this will probably not be unsightly and on the next rain will give some extra nutrients to your soil/lawn. Given the current state of my soil I have quite a while until I am burdened with having too loamy soil and need to be concerned on how to drive the worms away.

Ladybugs in the garden

cheapvegetablegardener — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 02:55:00 +0000

The girls finally noticed the ladybugs had arrived at Home Depot, so today we had our second annual garden ladybug release. I did a bit of research and followed some advice of commenters on my previous post by spraying the garden with sugar water to give them a little extra reason to stick around after being released.

The conditions today were perfect for the release, cool, overcast evening with some light rain. Would have been advisable to wait until the sun went down for better results, but kids would probably be upset if I released them without them and pictures are worth a few escapees.

How to deal with SLUGS in the garden

cheapvegetablegardener — Sun, 11 May 2008 00:10:00 +0000

Living in the Pacific Northwest there is no way to get away from these slimy creatures. Last year I only saw a few of these creatures but apparently my veggie plot must have been identified and they told all their friends since I am currently planting my second set of cilantro and lettuce seeds since they ate up my little seedlings.

Now how do I deal with these creatures? The first thing you should do is take care of your plants remove any dead/dying/diseased leaves to not give those slugs a tempting meal and a place to hide. In late spring make sure you turn/rake your soil this will disturb hibernating slugs and expose eggs which should be picked up by birds and/or killed by the first fall frost, which should start your garden to a better start the following season. Until then, here are a few methods to help free your garden from slugs this season:

Copper: Not going into the science but when a slug touches a path covered by copper they will get a tiny electrostatic shock which will deter them to go elsewhere. Now given my garden is surrounded by cinder blocks so attaching copper tape around my garden would be very difficult. The copper strips also can have sharp edges with is bad for slugs but also for me and my little one’s fingers. I have seen copper rings that attach to the underside of pots to prevent them from climbing up, which seems like a viable option if slugs find the contents particular appealing. It may very well be cheaper to throw a few handfuls of shiny pennies around but probably not the most attractive mulch.

Abrasive surfaces: Slugs have very sensitive undersides so laying and abrasive material blocking their path can kill or annoy them enough to head off to another direction. Some choices are broken egg shells, Epsom salts, ashes, coarse sand, and diatomaceous earth marketed for this specific purpose.

Slug traps: There are many methods to bait and kill slugs. Probably the most well known is the beer trap where you poor some beer in a shallow container at ground level where the slugs come in for a drink and drown. Couple others to try is corn meal and grapefruit, apparently they love them but after ingesting it will kill them.

Poison (Snail/Slug bait): Now in many cases this is the most effective method but definitely not the best option for the environment. Most “Snail/Slug bait” contains an ingredient called metaldehyde which a small dosage (around 200 mg per kg) can kill neighborhood cats or dogs as well as birds which are a very effective means of controlling slugs.

Slug deterrents: There are many baits that contain iron phosphate instead of metaldehyde which can also be very effective and actually sweeten your soil at the same time, so be sure to check your labels. One product that has worked for me is "Worry Free Slug and Snail Bait" (similar product to “Sluggo” or “Escar-Go”) the stuff does not kill the slugs directly and is safe for your vegetables and your neighborhood animals. You simply spread the granules around areas your slugs are visiting and after the slugs have a taste they lose their appetite and leave your garden or dies of starvation.

Become a slug exterminator:Though pretty gruesome you can simply hand pick and destroy the slugs yourself. Now this is very effective method but definitely not advisable for the squeamish. Some methods are impaling, bisecting, throwing in boiling water, stomping, salting, spraying with ammonia, or use your imagination. If you have problems finding them try going for a late walk in your garden with a flashlight or lay some carpet in a portion of your garden and check under it every few days.

Harvesting seeds from the grocery store - Update

cheapvegetablegardener — Sun, 18 May 2008 18:45:00 +0000

I definitely can't complain about the current results of the garlic and potatoes I planted from my original post Harvesting seeds from the grocery store Every clove of garlic I planted has come up and seems to compliment the onions well and is supposed to keep the slugs away which I can always use help on. The potatoes have finished developing above ground just hope my soil is not too nitrogen rich and they keep growing foliage and forget to complete work below ground making some actual potatoes.

Free 9-in-1 multipurpose gardening tool

cheapvegetablegardener — Sun, 25 May 2008 01:40:00 +0000

I must admit now I am getting into my 30's I am looking more into more garden tools with nice long handles to avoid frequent bending, but for anyone who says "gardening is too expensive to get into" just remember you were born with the basic tools which are demonstrated above and the others are optional. There is nothing better than actually getting your hands dirty in your garden using the same tools our distant ancestors did before us.

Baby Potato

cheapvegetablegardener — Sun, 25 May 2008 16:16:00 +0000

I was digging a little too close to my potato plants and accidentally knocked off this little guy. My daughter suggested we cook and eat it but decided taking a picture would be more appropriate.

Attracting birds in your garden/yard

cheapvegetablegardener — Sat, 31 May 2008 23:40:00 +0000

There are many benefits of having birds in your garden. The most obvious being the songs they sing in the morning and throughout the day. Now if you are not a morning person this may be a negative, but there are definitely more obtrusive ways to be woken up.

Birds can directly help your garden by eating weed seeds they find throughout your lawn and garden. Like singing, this can be a blessing and a frustration due to the fact they have not learned the difference between those peas you carefully planted and the weed seeds that you really want them to be consuming. Given that I take care of my weeds organically I can definitely appreciate the help of the birds.

Birds also like to snack on insects, like seeds the birds are not indifferent to the pests and the beneficial insects, so they may gobble up some of your spiders, ants, beetles, and worms (ok not an insect) but they are also are nice enough to eat aphids, grubs, Japanese beetles. Some birds such as swallows can eat 100s of bugs in a morning snack.

If you have decided that you want to attract more birds to your garden, what are your options? Like most creatures they have three simple necessities: food, water, and shelter.

Food: Feeding your birds is pretty easy, above I mentioned some of the benefits of the insects and weed seeds that your birds can feast from. There is the obvious bird feeder and given the seeds/food you choose can help determine the species birds you will have visiting. For example most songbirds prefer black oil sunflower seeds, while white millet is preferred by most ground feeding birds. Now of course the more food your birds are eating from your feeders the less pests and weed seeds they are eating from your lawn and garden, but the feeder should attract more birds to your lawn/garden so best to keep those feeders full.

Water: Birds need water to drink but also bathe in, now you can invest in something aesthetically pleasing like this one (click below):

If you are on a budget you can always make your own, basic requirements is needs to be less than 3 inches deep and have a comfortable surface for the birds to perch on. Some ideas are metal garbage can lid, circular planter, or even larger pot drip pan. Simply place on the ground of on top of some shrubbery, rough up the bottom of the surface with some steel wool and water. You will want to clean your bird bath about once a week with a diluted bleach solution (3/4 cup bleach to 1 gal water) since unfortunately the birds may use their bath occasionally as a bathroom.

Shelter: Shelters give animals a place to nest and/or hide from predators. Now there are two types of shelters natural and man-made. If you have some well established trees and/or shrubbery you probably have some birds already living with (whether you know it or not) Like many people I live in a relatively new development (< 5 years old) so most of the trees in my neighborhood are still developing so I opted to supplement with an man-made solution, the classic birdhouse. I couldn’t find the instructions I actually used but here are some free instructions to create a similar birdhouse from a single cedar fence picket. Not sure if you can tell from the picture but everything did not line up exactly as it should but it should keep some birds dry and safe and the girls had a great time “decorating” it.

Whether you just want to attract more birds to hear singing in your backyard or you want to put them to work getting rid of pests and weeds in your lawn and garden doing the steps above should give you plenty of both.

Planting mint in your garden

cheapvegetablegardener — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 04:09:00 +0000

If you happen to have a couple of brown thumbs and kill any plant you touch you may want to consider planting mint in your garden. These members of the mint family is so hardy that it can practically be planted anywhere and in many cases it can take over your garden without taking some precautions during your planting. Couple of low impact options is to grow it in a pot on your patio or even grow in a hanging basket and harvest the leaves as they grow over the side. If you wish to grow your mint at ground level you will need to create a root barrier to keep it from spreading over your whole garden. You start by digging a 12-18 inch hole and place your mint in a large plastic pot or lay down a plastic liner with drainage holes. One other option is to use an old 5 gallon bucket and give your mint a little more room to grow but you will need to dig a little deeper hole.

Now for picking your plant(s), if you want some peppermint for tea or that mojito in the middle of summer you will need to buy your plant from a nursery (unless you have a nice friend or neighbor to get a start from them) since peppermint is sterile so you will be unable to grow it from seed. Other mints such as spearmint can be started from seed but it will take a couple months until you can begin harvesting. I would definitely recommend buying as plants since they are usually inexpensive and a modest plant can become pretty established in just a few weeks. The one exception is if you want a species you may not be able to find in your area nursery, so seeds might be your only option.

So why grow mint in the first place. It has a great fragrance and many uses including refreshing your breath, deterring pests (mosquitoes, slugs, wasps, and ants), garnishes or major ingredient to your cold drinks. For me the primary reason was peppermint tea.

If you don’t think you like peppermint tea make sure you try the fresh version before you sign it off. Tea leaves are dried so they last longer if you want the best flavor best to use it fresh. There is no part of peppermint that can harm you so can break off a piece of mint (stem and all) and let it seep for 5 to 10 minutes. Not only is it a refreshing beverage that leaves your mouth with a nice clean taste but also can help with any stomach discomfort. If you want something with a little more flavor try this recipe:

Straight from the garden peppermint tea recipe

Ingredients:

3 peppermint leaves
3 spearmint leaves
3 lemon balm leaves

Directions:
Add leaves to one cup of boiling hot water. Let leaves seep for 10 minutes. Add honey or sugar if desired.

Slugs eating my garlic

cheapvegetablegardener — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 14:33:00 +0000

The word is slugs are supposed to hate garlic, guess no one told this guy. The reality is they do not like the bulb underground apparently the garlic leaves are delicious. Appears that I need to step up my war with the slugs.

Where did the tomatoes go?

cheapvegetablegardener — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 01:08:00 +0000

I have to admit I am not that great about keeping up with my current events, so if it is not in Engadget or my various gardening RSS feeds I haven't heard about it. So after the second day I noticing the lack of tomatoes in the cafeteria at work I had to investigate. For anyone who watches the news or reads a newspaper apparently there was a widespread outbreak of salmonella in raw red plum, red Roma and round red tomatoes with reports in almost every state in the US according to the FDA.

If you have been thinking about growing your own tomatoes (or any other produce) and the thought of having a constant supply of fresh produce in your backyard, better taste, more selection, and increased prices for produce was not enough for you to start. Now you can add safety can be added to the list with the reassurance that you know exactly what has gone into the soil of the food you are eating.

Blog for the not so beautiful things out there

cheapvegetablegardener — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 23:45:00 +0000

I see many blogs showing pictures of pretty flowers and cute little animals, when I was going on a nature hike today with my youngest daughter I came across some things that were interesting but not exactly beautiful which deserved some recognition.

If I saw this guy in my garden I probably wouldn't be an inclined to stop and take his picture.

Uh, just a fly on a leaf...

Well potatoes are not that pretty so guess I wouldn't expect the flowers to look much better

Make your own cheap butterfly feeder

cheapvegetablegardener — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 15:40:00 +0000

As the days are getting longer (happy first day of summer) it is actually starting to get a little warmer even here in the Pacific Northwest so decided it would be a good time to add our homemade butterfly feeder to our butterfly garden, but first we actually had to make it.

If you want to make your own here is all you need:

• Plastic/glass container (baby jar, water bottle, etc)
• Nail
• Pliers
• Lighter (not pictured)
• Cotton or sponge

Steps to have your own buttery feeder in your garden:
1. Heat up nail with lighter (or candle) using pliers to avoid pain on your fingers.

2. Use hot nail to burn a hole through the plastic.

3. Stuff some cotton (swab, ball, shirt) or a piece of sponge in the hole and tight as possible.

4. Decorate with markers (make sure to have some red) plastic flowers etc (Optional but funnier for the kids)
5. Fill with some butterfly nectar (recipe below) and hang by some of your colorful flowers

Butterfly/Hummingbird Nectar
Ingredients:
¼ cup of sugar
1 cup of water
3 drops of red food coloring [optional]

Directions:
Add sugar and water to water bottle and shake. If you are using raw organic sugar bring water to boil and mix in sugar. Butterfly nectar is good for 2-3 weeks and water in feeder should be replaced a 3-4 days.

Does this all seem like too much work? Well you can also simply place over ripened fruit (bananas, apples, peaches, orange slices, etc) on a plate and your butterflies will love it.
Read Other Butterfly Garden Posts

Strawberries in the garden

cheapvegetablegardener — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 22:44:00 +0000

Strawberries thrive here in the Pacific Northwest but this year the June bearers almost missed their month this year with some of the erratic weather we have had during the past couple months. Last year I planted about a half dozen June bearing plants in the holes of the cinder blocks that surround my raised bed. We got enough strawberries to keep our oldest daughter satisfied for an occasional snack but still had to supplement from the grocery store to satisfy her strawberry habit and with the rising produce prices I let the let some of the runners spread to their neighboring cinder block holes and some cases transplanting the start to a more appropriate location. A couple months ago I also planted some different varieties of Everbearing strawberries to provide fruit throughout more of the summer.

The normal life cycle of a strawberry plant is 3 years. The first year will consist of plant growth where you should see a decent number of strawberries but not as much as the second year. My second year plants are about a foot tall and have dozens of large strawberries growing on them. I have been cutting any runners that shoot out to allow the plant to spend its energy on those delicious berries. The third year the plant’s production will be less and will be spending more of its energy on its runners which is a good time to let those runners turn into new plants and let the cycle repeat. After the plants have finished producing this is the time to fertilize with a balanced fertilizer (10-10-10) otherwise this can lead to excessive leaf growth and less production. Fertilizing at this time will also give the plants the chance to store some much needed energy over the cold winter and have a good head start for the following spring.

Now this morning my oldest daughter was tired of picking strawberries sure it had nothing to do with her picking two and a half pounds of strawberries at Harvold Berry Farm the day before.

Garden teriyaki sauce recipe

cheapvegetablegardener — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 19:48:00 +0000

This is the first year I have grown garlic inspired by the Growing Challenge so now I want to find some good uses for this new addition. For Independence Day we are having a typical BBQ (teriyaki chicken burgers) and we ran out of teriyaki sauce seemed like a logical thing to attempt. Must say the improvised recipe was really easy and tasted much better than the stuff we got from the store (much less salty) I have kids so I only used a small pinch of red pepper flakes but with those with a taste for extra spice recommend adding at least a half a teaspoon.

Garden teriyaki sauce recipe

1 tsp olive oil
1 tsp of chopped or pressed garlic
1 tsp of fresh grated ginger (1/2 tsp powdered ginger)
1/2 cup soy sauce
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup honey
1 cup water
red pepper flakes (to taste)

Directions: Warm oil is sauce pan at medium heat and add garlic and ginger to oil. Stir for 2 minutes and add remaining ingredients. Reduce heat and stir until sugar dissolves. Make 12 ounces of teriyaki sauce.

Attack of the giant onions

cheapvegetablegardener — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 22:25:00 +0000

Looks like I may have added a little too much nitrogen (alfalfa pellets) to my garden this year since they all are getting huge above ground but not much below ground. Currently they measure around 3 and a half feet and here in the Pacific Northwest summer doesn't even start until July 5th. I am sure the extra sporatic weather we have been having the past month doesn't help much either.

Harvesting onion seeds from the garden

cheapvegetablegardener — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 23:42:00 +0000

In the past I have harvested seeds for cilantro which worked so well I have decided to try more this year. Now my gigantic onions are producing seed stalks and umbels are beginning to open seems like a good time to try harvesting my own onion seeds.

To save these seeds it is pretty simple, when the umbels have dried out and begin to open. At this time carefully cut them off (making sure that seeds do not fall) and place in a them in a cool dry location for 2-3 weeks. I prefer to put my harvest seeds in the refrigerator in a paper bag. It is a good idea for onions to cross pollinate so I will plan on buying some other onion seeds to mix with the ones I am harvesting to allow for cross pollination.
Onions take 100-120 days from seed to maturity, if you start from sets which you grow from the previous year can shave 3-4 weeks off that time. I could make my own onion sets by planting 30-40 seeds in a square foot area during late summer. After two months rake over the tops and let them turn brown and dry out then store them in a dry place until next spring.

My PC grow box will be empty 10 weeks before my last frost date so planning on starting my onion seeds in there moving them outside 4 weeks before the last frost.

If you want to learn more about saving seeds for onions or other vegetables be sure to check out International Seed Saving Institute which has great advice about saving seeds from dozens of different plants.

Corn knee-high by the Fourth of July

cheapvegetablegardener — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 01:10:00 +0000

In Wisconsin (and other states I presume) they say corn should be "knee-high by the Fourth of July" Given today is July 4th, I really hope who ever came up with that phrase was pretty short since in my garden in Washington it is barely up to my ankle.

My greenberry bushes

cheapvegetablegardener — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 02:51:00 +0000

Well hopefully in a another week I will have some nice blueberries. Blueberries need to cross polinate so early this spring I bought a Berkeley and a Toro, being a first year plant I should have pinched off the blossoms and let the plant use its energy for growth versus fruiting. Being impatent and wanting to harvest the two dozen berries I should get this year (unless the birds beat me to them) I let nature take its course. I helped them out by adding some organic fertilizer specific for blueberries with provides nutrients but also help increase the acidicy of the soil which blueberries thrive in. I was also careful to water frequently but not enough the drown their shallow roots but at the same time not letting them dry out.

How to water your garden

cheapvegetablegardener — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 00:01:00 +0000

Many people may look at the topic of this post and think how basic a topic this is. The reality is proper watering is the most difficult part of growing a garden. The challenge ensures in the fact that roots need to stay moist, but not too moist since roots do not grow in the soil but in the space (air) between it so with too much water your can actually drown your plants. What makes this even more complicated is the visual signs of overwatering are the exact same as under watering with wilted leaves and yellowish color. Your immediate reaction is, "I am not watering enough" so you water more drowning the plants even more and eventually leading to their demise. Even if your plants look ok you still could be affecting your harvest. For example, if you overwater your tomatoes they will be green enjoying the perfect environment and never get around to creating some blossoms which will result delicious fruit. At the same time under watering your leafy plants can result in bitter tasting lettuce or even worse make them go right to seed and get very little or no harvest in plants like cilantro and spinach.

How do I know how much I need to water? Unfortunately the answer to this questions is "It depends" first you need to determine the structure of your soil (sandy, loam, or clay) If you do not know the structure of your soil you can to a simple glass jar soil test Sandy soils allow water to drain very quickly so you will need to water about three times as often as clay soil and about twice as much as loamy soil. If you live in a dry climate or just have a couple really hot weeks in your not so dry climate you will probably need to water at least every day to keep your plants healthy regardless of your soil structure.

The next factor is how deep do you want the water? It is important to make sure water actually gets to where the roots are, which has been the demise of my first years of tomato plants. Where I watered the surface but the soil was bone dry a several inches below the surface which I realized once I pulled out the dead plants. So first know your plants root system if you are growing deep root plants such as tomatoes, corn, cucumbers, peppers, beans, squash, eggplant, or melons you will need to water longer to ensure that the water makes it down to their deep root system but you can water less often since you will not lose as much to evaporation. If you are growing lettuce, spinach, carrots, radishes, peas, garlic, onions, cabbage, cilantro, or broccoli you need to water less but more frequent to ensure the soil stays most.

Now hopefully you have a better idea when and how much to water, here are some tips from Mel Bartholomew from "Square Foot Gardening" books/videos/PBS series. His first tip is "Don't water from overhead" since first you waste water due to evaporation but you also get you leaves wet which can lead to disease and frying your plants. If you must water from above if you have a very large garden or if you are away from your garden and need to automate the process, he insists this is done first thing in the morning. If you are like me and enjoy sleeping at dawn you may want to look into his cup and bucket watering method where you fill up a couple of 5 gallon buckets and let them sit out in a sunny spot. You get the benefit of the sun warming the water to prevent shocking the plants with cold tap water especially on a streak of hot summer days. Another benefit is gives time for the tap water to purify itself a little before applying to plants. Once you have your bucket of water the concept is pretty simply just find a nice container (I normally raid my recycling bin) and scoop water out of the bucket and pour it directly under the leaves of the plant with little water waste and the delicate leaves remaining completely dry. This is also helps you measure exactly how much water you are giving to each plant which you can adjust as needed. You can also get some of the same benefits by using a trickler hose of a bubbler attachment if your back can not take the weight of packing around 5 gallon buckets full of water.

Now if after all of this explanation I haven't scared you too much in fear of not watering too little or too much here are a couple more tips to make your watering more successful.

Order on a consistent schedule: It is easy to forget the last time you water and watering a few days late or early can have significant effects on your harvest.
Have a test hole: Normally there is somewhere in your garden where something is not currently growing after doing you normal watering dig into that hole and see how deep your watering is actually getting.
Finger test: By sticking your finger into your soil if it comes back dry you probably need to water
Get a water meter: If you want something a little more scientific you can always pick up a cheap water meter for less than $10 which can give you a measurement several inches underground

Butterfly Garden Update (Nasturtiums and Marigolds)

cheapvegetablegardener — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 16:42:00 +0000

My black-eyed susans and purple cone flowers didn't survive being transplanted after being moved from the PC Grow Box, but the Nasturtiums and Marigolds are doing just fine. Even have had some sightings of a few butterflies unfortunately none have stuck around long enough to get a photo, guess there is still lots of summer left this year.
Read Other Butterfly Garden Posts

Onion flowers

cheapvegetablegardener — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 19:52:00 +0000

First tomato of the season

cheapvegetablegardener — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 23:57:00 +0000

Well it is official I have my first official red tomato of the season this morning while watering. It was from a hanging basket my dad gave to me for Father's day called "Tom's Tumbler" which should cascade over providing lots of cherry tomatoes.

I also noticed some of my "Early Girls" were also starting to produce so fresh garden salsa should be coming soon.

Youngest gardening blogger

cheapvegetablegardener — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 14:27:00 +0000

Well not 100% sure there is not a younger garden blogger out there but at the ripe age of 6 pretty sure Megan is in close competition. You can check out "Megan's Garden" at http://www.megansgarden.com. Now I must warn you that this blog is written by a 6 year old that does not use a spell checker so if you may need to read phonetically which can be a fun challenge to see garden blogging from a child's perspective.

If you have any serious issues translating feel free to post in the comments and I can translate.

Something is coming out of my compost bin!!

cheapvegetablegardener — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 15:03:00 +0000

Noticed this plant before thinking it was a weed growing next to my compost bin, but today I noticed it was actually growing out of a small slat in my compost bin. After a little more inspection I realized the distrinct tomato plant look and smell. Guess I was wrong to think those green tomatoes I threw in last fall were too immature to have viable seeds...

Preventing tomato blossom end rot

cheapvegetablegardener — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 00:32:00 +0000

If you are lucky you may have never seen this gross looking anomaly on the bottom but if you are like the rest of us you probably have seen this disorder especially on your first fruits of the season. Fortunately with some precautionary measures you should be able to minimize the effect of this on your harvest.

There are three primary causes for tomato blossom end rot; inconsistent watering, calcium deficiency, or abundance of nitrogen in your soil.

Calcium Deficiency: In most cases calcium deficiency is not the culprit but with minimal effort you can be proactive to eliminate it as a possibility. If you remembered to through in some egg shells and some Epsom salt when you planted your tomatoes you should be good, if you are like me and was too excited and forgot it is time to supplement. There are a few remedies out there including powdered milk, egg shells, Tums, or even some bone meal tea. I personally go the egg shell tea method, which simply requires taking some egg shells soaking them in water overnight and applying to my tomato plants. If you do this method you will want to prevent spread of salmonella make sure you bake them in the oven for 10 minutes at 200 degrees. One bonus is this also makes the egg shells break up much easier. The best time to apply this egg shell tea is when you baby tomatoes are just starting to form since this is the time your little fruits are sucking up as much calcium as it can find

Inconsistent watering: I have an entire post on watering your garden but the basic idea is to not to drown your roots but watering too often, but not wait until they become completely dry either. Without water your plants have no means to get needed nutrients including the calcium mentioned above. For me this is the most common cause of of my blossom end rot usually after going on a week vacation with no plan for watering my garden while I was gone.

Too much nitrogen: From my experience if I have too much nitrogen I normally get tall plants with no blossoms until the nutrients in the soil balance out. Where you can get into trouble is side dressing (supplemental fertilizing during the growing season) your plants if you do this make sure you provide a balanced fertilizer such as compost tea or commercial brand that is specifically for tomato plant and follow the directions on the box. Plants much like ourselves can only absorb so much nutrients from the soil so we need to make sure we are providing what the plants need at that time in their growth cycle and remember when it comes to fertilizer more is not better in most all cases it will be worse.

Ok, so now where did the the cilantro go?

cheapvegetablegardener — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 01:15:00 +0000

Well I wrote a couple weeks about my surprise of the missing tomoatos, last week I went back to my favorite Mexican restaurant at work and noticed cilantro has also been removed as a choice of condiments. Going back to my desk I discovered that cilantro and peppers have been added to the list of produce that has been reported tainted with salmonella. With the whole law of supply and demand maybe I should start selling my cilantro and tomotoes at the local farmers market.

Propagating peppermint and lemon verbena

cheapvegetablegardener — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 19:17:00 +0000

Starting next week I will have an office at work with a window so of course I have to start thinking about what sort of vegetation I can put on that ledge. The first thing that came to mind was peppermint and lemon verbena seemed like a good choice since they provide an excellent fragrance and I can eat/drink them if I have to stay late and get tired of free soda. They can also be neglected for a weekend or brief vacation without relying on someone else to take care of them.

Unless this is the first post of mine you have never read or didn't look at the title of this blog, I am cheap. I could have easily just payed $4-5 for a couple plants but I wanted to do this for free. First I prepared two terracotta pots with a mixture of potting soil and perlite and got the mixture about as wet as possible and set them aside.

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For the peppermint, the process to propagate is pretty simple. The stuff is tough and most talented people can not successfully kill the stuff if they try, so dig around in your existing peppermint until you find a good bunch of roots. Now the tricky part pull/cut/tear/scream whatever it takes to separate that clump of peppermint from the rest. Very obvious why this stuff can take over a bed. Take that clump of roots with hopefully some of the peppermint plant still surviving the extraction ordeal and place in a pre-dug hole and cover up with potting mix.

The lemon verbena is a little calmer process, to propagate this you use a process of taking a softwood cutting, which includes simply cutting a stem in which shows some decent life (green) in it. You want to make sure that your cut does not crush the stem so a sharp knife my work better than shears/scissors but that depends completely on the quality and sharpness of your equipment. Cut off any leaves on the bottom one third of the plant and place in potting mix leafing the remaining two thirds above the soil line.

Both of these plants currently have a pretty fragile root system at the moment so keeping their roots (or soon to be generated roots) moist is very important. To help with this I have covered both plants with plastic, if all goes well I will not kill these things and will have a nice addition to my new office come Monday.

More Onion Flowers

cheapvegetablegardener — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 04:06:00 +0000

The bees are loving these guess I should be seeing some great onion seeds soon.

Propagation of strawberry plants

cheapvegetablegardener — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 04:30:00 +0000

My strawberries have stopped producing berries and now have started send runners all over the place. During the berry growing season I would pinch them off to let the plants use their energy creating delicious berries. Now those runners are not really doing any harm I have decided to let some of them live and propagate them into some small plant trays.

I grow my strawberries in the open end of cinder blocks and the rest of my vegetable garden is surrounded by gravel so not really any place for them to go, with the exception of taking over my vegetable garden. Given they will not grow in gravel and I like vegetables in my vegetable garden I have redirected them into some plant trays (ironically the same ones I brought the plants parents home in) filled with potting mix. All you do is simply put the end of the runner in the soil and it will do the rest. To keep the runner from popping out of the soil, the normal convention is to create a U-shape with a paperclip to hold the runner in place underground, for whatever strange reason I couldn't find any of these anywhere in my house I opted for bent bamboo skewers. After about a week you should have your very own baby strawberry plants at this time you can cut the "umbilical" cord from the mother plant. Now the next question is where I am going to put these new plants...guess I need to make a new garden bed or find some friends that want some strawberries next year.

Getting kids to eat vegetables from the garden

cheapvegetablegardener — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 02:11:00 +0000

One of the original ideas when starting my first garden was a way to hopefully to get my kids to actually eat some vegetables if they helped growing. Other than a couple bites of carrots this has not been very successful until recently. I was able to convince my four year old to actually eat some potatoes from the garden...well okay potatoes are not technically scientifically classified as a vegetable, sure I had to slice them up coat them with oil and salt to get her to eat them. Guess it doesn't really matter since we had fun digging up the potatoes and preparing the fries.

Baked French Fries

2-3 large potatoes
Vegetable spray
1 tsp salt

Description: Preheat oven to 450F. Peal potatoes and slice to desired thickness. Soak in water with 1/2 tsp salt for 10 minutes. Strain out water and pat potatoes dry on paper towels. Spray cookie sheet with vegetable spray and then lay out potatoes on single layer and spray with another coat of vegetable spray. Sprinkle remaining salt on top of fries. Cook until fries are golden brown (about 10-15 minutes) flip them over and cook until the other side is golden.

Picking orange tomatoes

cheapvegetablegardener — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 15:10:00 +0000

My youngest daughter has been very excited waiting to pick our tomatoes. She picked a green one a couple weeks back which I informed her that she needs to wait until they turn red, guess I needed to be more clear about "dark" red, since yesterday when we went out to our garden the first thing I heard was "I picked a matoe" which she is proudly displaying below.

Hey, those cucumbers look like pickles

cheapvegetablegardener — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 15:46:00 +0000

That was a statement my oldest daughter (6 years old) made which I must admit I am pretty sure I was much older before I had that thought. Seemed like a good opportunity for teaching the kids were pickles come from and a great excuse to make some sweet summer pickles. While heading out the door to get some spices we were lacking my wife told me, "these better not be $20 pickles." I have some history here, taking that advice I only came back with just mustard seed and decided to improvise the rest, here is what I came up with.

Cheap Vegetable Gardener's Sweet Summer Pickle recipe

1 cucumber
1 clove garlic
1/2 cup apple cider vinegar
1 cup water
3 T sugar
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp pepper flakes
1/4 tsp cloves
1/8 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp coriander (mine were still a little green from garden)
1/4 tsp mustard seed
1/4 tsp black pepper

Directions: Pretty easy, just cut the cucumber into slices 1/4 in thick and add all ingredients to sealable container, shake well, and place in refrigerator. Wait at least 3 days and eat. Once empty just add more sliced cucumbers and repeat.

Something is coming out of my compost bin!! - Update

cheapvegetablegardener — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 21:22:00 +0000

The volunteer tomato plant that has been growing out of my compost bin definitely looks healthy but given its rapid foliage growth and no fruit I guess I don’t need to do any soil tests to confirm my compost is high in nitrogen. Note to self, don’t grow tomatoes in pure compost.

Easter Lilies Blooming

cheapvegetablegardener — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 21:23:00 +0000

Nope, this is not a mix up in the date in this post. Last Easter we received as a gift from a friend, after the foliage had died off I planted I planted the bulb and what was left of the foliage in one of my garden beds. Given how the plant is forced to bloom in March/April I was pessimistic that it would even bloom at all, let alone this season. Well guess I will take it as a late summer surprise.

Picking wild blackberries (Blackberry pie recipe)

cheapvegetablegardener — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 00:02:00 +0000

Given the price of produce these days and how blackberries cannot be killed here in the Pacific Northwest there are not too many trails that don’t have these bushes attempting to overtake them I decided to take my 4-year old with me blackberry picking. In just about 15 minutes (also length of time 4-year old has for blackberry picking) we were able to pick exactly 4 cups of blackberries. Since my 4-year old wants to "grow up to be baker like daddy" (obviously has no idea what I do for a living) we decided to use our fresh berries to make a blackberry pie.

Blackberry pie recipe

4 cups fresh blackberries
1/2 cup white sugar
1/2 cup flour
2 frozen pie crusts
1 tsp lemon juice
Egg wash (1 egg + 1 tsp water)

Directions: Take 3-1/2 cups of blackberries and add with 1/2 cup of sugar, 1/2 cup flour, and 1/2 tsp of lemon juice and mix. Pour contents of bowl into pie crust and top with remaining 1/2 cup of blackberries.

Cover with top crust and pinch edges closed. Brush the top with egg wash and sprinkle with a few pinches of white sugar. Bake at 425 degrees F for 15 minutes, then at 375 degrees F for 20 minutes or until crust is golden brown.

How to harvest sunflower seeds

cheapvegetablegardener — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 15:35:00 +0000

The trickiest part of harvesting sunflower seeds is timing. If you wait too long, the birds will let you know when you wake up to the head of the flower on the ground with seeds devoured. There are a couple of ways to get around this when the backs of your sunflowers begin to get yellow cover them with a paper bag or cheesecloth to inhibit the birds from stealing them. Given I probably would get a letter from my HOA if I did this in my backyard I opted to cut off the heads a few inches down and hang them upside down in my garage with a paper bag below to catch any loosening seeds. Every few days I run my hands across them if seeds start falling easily it is time to harvest. The best method I have found is using a painter’s roller screen used for 5 gallon buckets. I couple passes over this and the head is clean.

I am too lazy to roast and eat the seeds so I normally save a handful for next year’s planting and give the rest back to the birds over the fall/winter.

Where do cucumbers come from?

cheapvegetablegardener — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 23:04:00 +0000

Cucumbers seem to have a similar property of peas that they seem to just appear out of nowhere. One day you see a little flower and seem to grow 10 inches overnight. I know this probably has more to the whole green camouflage and my eyes being bad but this year I kept a close eye on them and documented their growth.

Baby cucumbers (Day 1)

Cucumbers (Day 2....ok maybe a week)

Picking wild blackberries - the sequel

cheapvegetablegardener — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 15:07:00 +0000

I enjoyed the blackberry pie so much I decided we needed some blackberry jam as well. I picked so sparsely at my first public berry picking location that I could have gone back and easily found enough berries to make jam, but it was a nice day and decided to take a walk in the woods with my youngest daughter. After exploring (getting lost for two hours) and picking various species of blackberries, I finally found civilization and called my wife to pick us, since walking along a busy road with no shoulder with a jogging stroller didn't seem like a good idea (and I was tired).

I picked enough berries during our adventure for my wife to make 8 jars of jam (7 put in jars, 1 put in Tupperware for immediate consumption) I would provide our secret jam recipe but the nice people already put it on the package of SURE-JELL pectin.

7 cups of sugar	$ 1.50
8 pints of blackberries	$ 0.00
Pectin	$ 2.00
Cost per jar	$ 0.44

When to pick sweet corn

cheapvegetablegardener — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 16:02:00 +0000

I had to look up this answer myself since this is the first year I have grown sweet corn (Growing Challenge), here is the advice I found online:

When the tassels turn dark brown
When the juice from kernels are milky white and soft
From GardenDesk, corn is ready when the raccoons eat it.

From my personal experience, use tassel color to determine if you should even bother checking if it is ready. Use the kernel color to determine if should actually pick it, since when I previous tried just by tassel color it definitely needed another week of growth.

Does anyone else have any proven techniques to pick that perfect ear of corn?

Planting your second (fall) cold season crop

cheapvegetablegardener — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 15:36:00 +0000

With my tomatoes changing colors and having a consistent harvest of cucumbers it is now time to start thinking about a second season crop of cold season vegetables. If you were less than successful with your spring cold season crop as I was, definitely consider giving a fall crop a try. There are many advantages since pests are less active and temperatures decrease and will lower temperatures and more rain it is a pretty low labor harvest. The cool weather can also help pull the sugar out and give you much sweeter veggies compared to your spring crop

If I have already convinced you to start a fall crop the important thing is timing, though many of the cold season plants can survive a couple light frosts you should start your planting 6-8 weeks before you first fall frost. You can extend your growing season (or take it through the whole winter) by providing some plastic covering for a little added protection. If you want more information of having fresh vegetables all winter long I recommend checking out Four-Season Harvest: Organic Vegetables from Your Home Garden All Year Long

Your choices for what to plant are basically the same as what you may have planted early last spring. Some of my favorites are lettuce, spinach, Swiss chard, beets, carrots, broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, scallions, and radishes.

With a little planning and minimal effort you can continue to harvest inexpensive produce with minimal effort.

Goose cucumber

cheapvegetablegardener — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 14:36:00 +0000

My 4 year old called this our goose cucumber, I think I see it.

Brown spots on tomatoes

cheapvegetablegardener — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 15:12:00 +0000

Looks like our recent weekly rainy weather may have taken my tomatoes as a victim of blight. Living in the Pacific Northwest I should have known better and protected them with some plastic during our frequent waves of rainy weather. Being an optimist can anyone overturn my diagnosis? Any hopes of saving this fruit?

Compost bin tomato bears fruit

cheapvegetablegardener — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 17:13:00 +0000

For anyone that has been following the success (or maybe lack of success) of my compost bin volunteer tomato plant, it has nearly taken over the compost bin and finally did bear fruit. What is interesting is that it seems to look like an ugly tomato, which I have grown from seed nor purchased from the grocery store or farmer's market. I guess the plot thickens, could just be caused by the ill effects of the adverse growing conditions.

Protector of the garden trellis

cheapvegetablegardener — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 15:32:00 +0000

Happy Halloween

cheapvegetablegardener — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 04:29:00 +0000

Getting the garden ready for winter

cheapvegetablegardener — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 16:53:00 +0000

The leaves are changing and falling the days are getting colder and I am personally coming to the end of my vegetable growing season. I do have a few post season activities before I completely call it a year.

Remove plants: Now my plants have lived a good life but now need to be removed. I mulch my lawn so I am always lacking greens for my compost bin so this is a good time to get some new materials. Most of my remaining plants are tomato, pumpkin, and cucumber plants which have some tough skins so I will chop them up with my lawnmower prior to add them to my modest bin. While you have your mower running this is a good time to let it keep running until it runs out of gas to avoid gumming up the engine when you fire it up next spring. This is also a good time to inspect and sharpen or replace the blade since if you are like me you will completely forget about this when you finally get around to mowing next spring.

Fertilize: If you only can fertilize one time throughout the year now is the time because turf grasses have the ability to store food during the winter months to allow a very quick rebound after the winter months. My primary concern is for my lawn which I am applying alfalfa pellets, since we have had some intense rains these past weeks they should break down quickly and not have the appearance of goose poo for too long. While applying I also allowed some to fall into by beds to help microbial activity and give my empty beds a head start for next spring. Be sure to avoid beds with and vegetation since you want to avoid any new growth with first hard freeze coming up.

Turning the soil: This can be a controversial activity since messing with the soil can inhibit microbial activity though turning the soil now can give you a head start next spring. My motivation is more on the lines if killing baby slugs (I know I am cruel) The slug activity in my garden was pretty minimal but I have concerns the few visitors may have decided to raise a family in my bed for next year. If I simply turn the first few inches of the soil I can expose the tiny slug eggs which birds will eat as a snack and any remaining will be destroyed during our first good frost. As an added benefit this will be a good time to catch up on my slacking in weeding during the last few weeks.

Taking care of your tools: Now is a good time to find those missing tools that may be hiding in your yard and garden. I have no idea why manufacturers choose to make these things green; almost like they want us to lose them to buy more  If you find any of your tools it is a good idea to put a light coating of oil on metal parts of your tools. You can also apply some Linseed oil to the wood portion of your tools.

Frosting on the top: At this point my garden is looking pretty good….even tempted to start planting though I will resist the urge. I have a plan to hold me over this winter but that will require its own post. After I have had a couple good frosts to kill off any slug eggs I will break open a couple of my bags of leaves and spread on a solid layer on top of my beds. Not only will this provide some food and temperature protection for the worms in my garden but whatever remains will be a great addition of organic matter for my garden.

Now with all this work I should be ready to start gardening way earlier than I should next spring…will I ever learn.

Halloween Berries

cheapvegetablegardener — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 22:32:00 +0000

My oldest daughter coined the name "Halloween Berries" this name a couple years back as the leaves fall off exposing the hidden berries right at Halloween every year.

Fall Strawberries

cheapvegetablegardener — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 22:38:00 +0000

I really like the color of these strawberries I propagated last this summer. I still have to figure out what I am actually going to do with these.

About

cheapvegetablegardener — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 05:17:16 +0000

This is an example of a WordPress page, you could edit this to put information about yourself or your site so readers know where you are coming from. You can create as many pages like this one or sub-pages as you like and manage all of your content inside of WordPress.

Propagating peppermint and lemon verbena - UPDATE

cheapvegetablegardener — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 06:40:00 +0000

As you can see from the picture, my peppermint and lemon verbena propagation has come a long quite well. I did have a little aphid infestation on the peppermint plant which I attempted to take care of with manual pinching, but eventually I gave up and chopped off the top off the plant. I then followed up with a hefty dose of insecticidal soap to the soil and the remaining stem. I would have preferred an even more natural method such as ladybugs but sure my officemates would prefer I didn't.

The lemon verbena did pretty well on its own with one exception I think I mistakenly broke or cut the top off the plant so there was no vertical growth and just crazy shoots horizontally so I cut most of these off and replanted to 3 new starts which have taken off as well as their parent.

Create a cheap PC thermometer with PS2/Gamepad Controller

cheapvegetablegardener — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 06:22:00 +0000

You might be thinking what does this post have to do with vegetable gardening? Bear with me, I don't have time to do a complete write up on it right now but let’s just say this is a component for "Project Everbearing" I gave my 7-year-old the honors of coming up with the codename, since he is my faithful assistant and cheerleader.

For my current project I need the ability to measure temperature with my PC. Now there are plenty of gadgets out there I could have simply purchased a commercial product for around $40+ and saved myself a lot of time but I really wanted to brush some dust off my soldering iron and try to save some cash, this is the CHEAP vegetable gardener after all.

After a little searching online seemed like a good place to start was to pick up a few thermoresistors which is a special type of resistor which increases resistance as the temperature increases. With no luck at my local RadioShack I picked up a few on EBay for less than $1 a piece.

Now comes the hard part of actually using them, since the computer I was using was old enough it still have an old 15-pin game port I went that route first. This would have been my easiest method of implementation by simply connecting the resistor to pin 1 and pin 3, since analog joysticks work with variable resistance as well. They use what is called a potentiometer which as the user moved the stick to left/right it raises/lowers the resistance. If this would have worked all that I would have needed to do is get the measurement and start calibration. Unfortinately this port was no longer responsive so I have to go with another option

Fortunately I never throw anything electrical out and pulled an old PS2 controller with an USB adapter out of my junk box. Knowing that the analog controllers also work with potentiometers, I found my victim. After removing the screws in the back I started warming up the old soldering iron to completely void the long gone warrantee on the controller. Now all I needed to do was attach two wires connected to the thermoresistors, solder the wires to the point connected to the potentiometer and that is pretty much did it. Given there are two sticks with X and Y axises for both you could have up to 4 temperature sensors (I chose to go with 2) The controller did does have one feature where it automatically turns off the analog control after no use for a couple minutes. After thinking about some more complicated solutions, I went low tech by forcing the L2 button to the on position by applying a piece of electrical tape over it.

I won't go into the gritty details of the software to actually get the numbers from the joystick since M Harris has already done that so well on his CodeProject writeup.

Last comes calibration, when I purchased the thermoresistors they also included detailed specifications on the tested resistance values at various temperatures, which with a little bit of physics and some fun math, in theory I could have avoided the whole calibration but given the length of wire and/or my sloppy soldering could skew the accuracy of the temperatures I opted for a more manual approach. I put my "thermometer" in a plastic bag along with my trusty $5 digital thermometer and dropped it in an ice cold water bath, while recording the temperature changes as the temperature increased to room temperature. I followed this by doing the same with hot water bath until it lowered to room temperature, recording values as the temperature decreased.

With this data I entered it into Microsoft Excel and got a nice graph (see below) which gave my nice magic formula of:
Temperature = 0.0059(joystick X Axis position) - 138.57

By simply doing the math I now can capture values on my PC.

Control two 120v electrical outlets with your computer

cheapvegetablegardener — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 05:50:00 +0000

Here is one more component for "Project Everbearing" which requires the ability to toggle a 120V power source using my PC. Now there are a few interesting applications for this, home automation, music synced Christmas display, or just the nerd factor of being able to say I can turn on my coffee maker from your web enabled phone. Whatever your need, hopefully with these instructions you can do this yourself.

If we had lawyers, they probably would want us to say this:
WARNING: I am not an electrician and do not pretend to be one. I do not know the specific building electrical codes of your area, so please be sure your wiring is completed under the proper safety code for your area. As always, using high voltage electricity can result in self-electrocution or burn down your house if not done safely so if you are not comfortable doing this wiring please contact a qualified professional.

Materials:

2 - 20 amp solid state relays (got off eBay for $4.00 each)
1 - Outlet box (Home Depot for $2.00)
2 - 20 amp outlets (Home Depot for $1.25 each)
1 - 2 outlet switch plate (Home Depot for $0.50 each)
1 - PC power cable
2 - LEDs (optional)

The outlet I am plugging this into is 15 amps, though my use for this project will be considerable under this but best to place for worst case scenario and I would rather trip a circuit breaker than who knows what happens when solid state relays or outlet exceeds their limits. I could have saved a couple dollars and gone with cheaper mechanical relays but solid state will last much longer even with frequent toggling on/off.

Now for the build, this was actually surprisingly easy and took less than an hour from start to finish. I first fed the power cable through and three stands of low voltage wire through access in back. I cut about 6 inches of wire off the end of the power cable. Using the continuity feature of my voltmeter I verified the hot, neutral, and ground, then checked one more time. I attached the neutral and ground in parallel to both outlets. I then connected the hot from the power cord to left side of both SSRs. I then used the 6 inches of wire I cut off to connect from left side of SSR on both and connected a wire from the left side to the corresponding outlet.

Now to add the ability to turn the things off/on using low voltage. I hooked up the wires fed through the back (which will later be hooked up to computer's parallel port) green to positive SSR #1, red to SSR #2, and black to both grounds. Now with 3-12 volts of power to these connections will activate the SSR and provide power to the outlet. For a little added effect and easy confirmation everything is working (even with the unit unplugged) I also attached corresponding red/green LEDs that match the wires (I am getting old color coding helps) I was doing this hack indoors though first thought was to use my soldering iron to burn a nice little hole into the outlet plate but didn't want to stink up the house, so risked using a drill instead. As you can see from the pictures I should have gone outside. With a little solder and hot glue everything seemed to be staying together.

With all the wiring completed, I carefully packed everything into the outlet box. The SSR were already pretty snug but I added little but of hot glue in case they feel like shifting around after everything was put back together. Being careful that wires are staying secure and no shorts are being created carefully screw the outlets to the outlet box. Finish it up with a (cracked) outlet plate and the assembly is complete.

Now the scariest part still remains, which is testing, first part is plugging this monster in. If you plug it into the wall and no sparks occur you are in pretty good shape but not in the clear yet. Plug something like a nightlight into your switchable outlet box, should be off now. Using a 9-volt battery connect black to (-) and red to (+) if you didn't cross your wires anywhere the red LED should come on and appliance plugged in should get power. Now switching to the other side do the same with the green wire and appliance comes on with sparks or fires looks like a successful build.

Broto Domestic Greenhouse grows plants through aeroponics

cheapvegetablegardener — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 22:11:00 +0000

If you want something that is a little more aesthetically pleasing than the $20 PC Grow box and don't have the counter space for an AeroGarden then the Broto Domestic Greenhouse might be the right option for you. Information such as price and if it will actually be commercially available seem to be missing, but seems to be a completely self contained aeroponics solution and given the use of LEDs for lighting I would imagine it would be a fairly low power consumer.

Plants reveal your gardening shortcomings through Twitter

cheapvegetablegardener — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 23:50:00 +0000

Botanicalls DIY Plant Twitter Kit is an electronic device you insert into your houseplants and by giving them access to the Internet via Ethernet jack, they kindly praise you when water them and scold you when you are slacking via Twitter for all the world to see. At $99 per unit and require assembly (soldering) might be more cost effective to just let your plants die or at least get watering back into your winter routine. Though I imagine with a PS2 Controller, handful of galvanized nails, some wire, and a little coding someone could put together a cheaper solution. Guess who grew up watching every episode of MacGyver, this sounds like possibly one more project to add to my long list...

Create your own PC moisture sensor via PS2/Gamepad Controller

cheapvegetablegardener — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 03:35:00 +0000

Yet another component for "Project Everbearing" where I need the ability to monitor the moisture level of my soil. There are a couple options on how to do this; the classic method is to take two galvanized nails at a fixed distance apart in the soil. If you run electricity through one of the nails, some of the electricity will pass through the other nail depending on the amount of moisture, in much the same way as a variable resistor works. If the soil is completely dry it will have no conductivity (infinite resistance) since low voltage electricity does not pass through dry soil, as water is added the resistance is decreased and with completely drenched soil almost having complete conductivity.

Unfortunately, I did not have any galvanized nails and with our current snow storm I wasn't going to venture out to the local Home Depot. I did fortunately have something even better, a handheld soil moisture sensor, which I bought when I started gardening before I learned I can see if I need to water by putting my finger in the soil.

With a little manhandling I got the cover off the back and realized that this tool works with the same principle as the galvanized nails with just two wires with provide variable resistance depending on the water content.

[And I thought my soldering was bad]

Now all that is needed was to solder these wires to a couple open points on my PS2 Controller which I am already using as a cheap temperature sensor The great thing about this implementation is the "resistor" has a broad range from no conductivity to nearly zero. Which is great since it gives a very accurate representation of the soil's water saturation. For the calibration I was a little lazier this time and only took two points "Dry" and "Really Wet" With these measurements I then calculated the water saturation percentage. So now I can see my plants are at a 43% water saturation level, which I have no idea what exactly that means, but I do know I don't need to water for a few more days.

One warning though since electrical conductivity can be affected by application of fertilizer (especially synthetic fertilizer which may contain sodium) and temperature so accuracy may be around 70-85% but for higher accuracy there are other expensive ($1500) alternatives out there but I can live with this for my application.

Are Poinsettias poisonous?

cheapvegetablegardener — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 15:30:00 +0000

Sorry this one is busted, if you really want to you can eat a Poinsettia this Christmas though I have heard it tastes really bad and may give you a stomachache. Apparently this myth started over 100 years ago when sadly a child was found dead next to a Poinsettia plant and was a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time for the plant and it got the rap. If you still are not convinced you can check out the National Capital Poison Center's site.

Another way for your plants to talk to you

cheapvegetablegardener — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 19:44:00 +0000

If the Botanicalls DIY Plant Twitter Kit is out of your technical expertise (or just too ashamed to have your plants tell on you) There is another product out there called Thirsty Light which you place in your plants and when the light blinks when you have neglected your watering duties. At only $10 this is not a bad investment for gardening nerds like me. You also have the option of pulling it out and checking the moisture in all of your plants to see who else you have neglected.

Effects of color spectrums on plant growth

cheapvegetablegardener — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 02:30:00 +0000

I have written about the importance of lumens when growing indoors but the intensity of the light at specific wavelengths can be over even more important. NASA has done some significant research on the subject to determine the possibility of growing leafy vegetables on a trip to Mars using as little electricity as possible to get the most benefit out of every watt. In space any wasted energy (heat or light not used by plant growth needs to be severely limited.

It should not be a surprise that using LEDs is part of the solution they came up with since they use 20-30% of the energy of a comparable HPS (High Pressure Sodium) bulb which is considered very efficient given the lumen output per watt. The most interesting part of their findings was how specific red and blue wavelengths were imperative to the growth of plants and actually could sustain growth with just these limited wavelengths. Given the freezing temperatures and masses of snow on the ground the best use of this information for indoor gardening and specifically my $20 PC Grow Box. Understanding the wavelengths that your artificial lights creates can help you have increased plant growth and save on your electricity bill at the same time.

When evaluating which light you must consider wavelength and also the intensity of the light at that wavelength. A tool to do exactly this is a spectrograph, which you can purchase, make your own (this was a fun project with the kids), or just trust other peoples readings. I chose made my own, but am displaying results (led museum) since I would have to estimate the intensity based on the brightness of the spectrum created which would lack some accuracy.

Just to get some perspective, this is what how various light sources appear to a spectrograph:

Sunlight
Florescent Bulb
Incandescent bulb
Low power blue LED (5mm)
Low power red LED (5mm)
Low power white LED

As you can see incandescent appears to be the closest to matching the wavelengths and intensities of sunlight though it we need to remember that the orange/yellow/green wavelengths provide essentially are wasted from the plant’s perspective due to natural reflection of these colors. So if a light looks bright to you, there is a good chance you are wasting electricity, as humans our eyes respond well to these wavelengths why we will find these bulbs to be much “brighter” from our perspective. The fluorescent bulb is a good example where we see this light as bright for plants other than the small slices spectrum much of the light is unusable. I have had good luck growing indoors with CFLs along with incandescent, but from the information above I my results cold have less spectacular if hadn’t included the incandescent bulb. At the time the only reason I used it was to generate a little extra heat on some of the cold nights.

The key point is I could easily have much better results using significantly less power. According to NASA’s research the most efficient configuration is to only have red/blue LEDs consisting primarily of red (80-85%) with the remaining (15-20%) being blue LEDs. I would recommend replacing the some of the of the blue LEDs with white LEDs to provide a full spectrum including a pretty intensive blue spectrum in itself. As an added bonus this will provide some “human” light in orange/yellow/green spectrum to allow us humans to view plants with less strain.

By replacing the two 24 watt CFL and one 80 watt incandescent bulb with a few hundred LEDs I could drop at least 124 watts with my new configuration. Assuming I am running my grow box every day for 14 hours a day this could save me over $45 a year as well as just being the more environmentally conscious thing to do.

So during these cold winter months if you grow indoors whether just for seedlings or vegetables all year round be sure to remember that not all indoor lights are created equal.

Healthy Choice Cafe Steamers for seed starting/hydroponics

cheapvegetablegardener — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 21:54:00 +0000

Many times I see some packaging and eventually get an idea how I can reuse it with some minor modifications for starting seeds or some other purpose in the garden. I had one of these moment as soon as I opened my Healthy Choice General Tso's Spicy Chicken Café Steamer In case anyone is wondering what the purpose of this new packaging is, I could try to explain it but I will allow their marketing department do it for me:

“Our innovative product line utilizes a new and unique microwave Steam Cooker™—so you can lock in all the naturally fresh flavors of restaurant-inspired meals by steaming them yourself. With new Healthy Choice Café Steamers, vegetables stay bright and crisp, meat and seafood are juicy and tender, rice is moist and fluffy, and pasta is firm.”

After being delighted in the science of their frozen food steaming technology, I discovered I could easily repurpose the packaging completely as-is.

My first initial thought was to use this for starting seeds since it is the perfect size and depth for seeds starts before requiring their first transplant. As an added bonus they already have great drainage holes and even a reservoir in case of excess watering or allowing for wicking if I am going to be away from my seedlings a couple days.

My second thought was hydroponics, which is the process of growing vegetables without using soil. The basic idea is the plant gets all it needs from the nutrient solution which is applied always keeping the roots wet in the preferred growing medium. By adding a growing medium such as coconut fiber or Rockwool, adding some nutrient solution and an air bubbler to the bottom portion of this tray you have a cheap hydroponic system. It is even big enough to support at least three small plants.

With either option the removal tray is also easily removable incase of overwatering or to change nutrient solution with very little disturbance to the plant(s).

One other benefit use is actually consuming the contents (preferable before used for gardening) which I did try and though the packaging has some interesting uses after you eat it, the meal tastes just about as bad as any other TV dinner I have eaten.

How to collect and save onion seeds from your garden

cheapvegetablegardener — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 22:45:00 +0000

Last year I collected cilantro seeds and they were a great success in my garden that this past Spring I made a commitment to myself that I would try to collect more seeds this season. Though I wanted to get more I was able to collect seeds from my onions, jalapenos, and cilantro. The jalapeno seeds were pretty easy I set some seeds aside on a paper towel while making some salsa. After they appeared to be dry I threw them in a brown paper lunch bag.

For the onions once the florets (flower balls you see above) got real ugly and dry and I could see the black seeds emerging I placed them in a paper bag before the birds got to them. I then put the bag on top of our kitchen cabinets and forgot about them for couple months. Today I pulled the bag down and confirmed they definitely were dry. To separate the seeds from the pods I broke apart (which happens easily) and placed the contents into a metal strainer. I gently broken open any remaining pods and agitate the strainer. This causes the small black seeds to move to the bottom, allowing the pods to float to the top and forcing many of the stems to fall through.

I then skimmed off as many of the stems/pods as possible leaving and putting the seeds into a brown paper bag until I can get into town to buy some more manageably sized brown envelopes (recovering from Seattle snowstorm)

After a few minutes of work I now have hundreds of onions seeds which I probably only have use for couple dozen. Seed exchange anyone?

Make your own paper seed packets (origami)

cheapvegetablegardener — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 22:02:00 +0000

When I posted about my adventures in saving onion seeds I mentioned the desire to purchase some small envelopes to hold the seeds. jimmycrackedcorn promptly responded with a comment scolding me for my lack of cheapness. Which I shamefully have to agree completely and took his advice and decided to make some of my own.

I followed the directions from the ICPS Seed Bank though I did do a little improvising to make the packets a little smaller and I got lazy on my folding so I have provided the cheap/lazy directions below.

Step #1: Start with a sheet of paper and fold down the middle, this will allow two seed packets per sheet of paper:

Step #2: Use scissors to cut out the individual triangles which will be come your seed packets

Step #3: Fold one corner one third of the way across the paper

Step #4: Insert the other corner inside the fold and fold flat

Step #5: Open top and pour in seeds, add a label, and fold over top

I like this design since it is easy enough that even I can do it, it naturally has a funnel to pour in/out seeds, and is fairly compact which is good since my pickle jar seed holder in my refrigerator is getting pretty full.

The most profitable plants in your vegetable garden

cheapvegetablegardener — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 07:03:00 +0000

It may be impossible to put a price on the satisfaction of bringing in a basket of produce fresh from your garden. As well as the enhanced flavors from having truly fresh produce from your garden compared to that of your local supermarket. Though when I was harvesting my potatoes this summer with my daughter I did have the thought, “Would it have been smarter for me to grow something else in this space?” I estimate out of the 4-5 square feet I used for these plants I probably got about $4-5 worth of potatoes.

I did a little research first to determine yields of various plants per square foot and secondly what the value (organic supermarket prices USD) of the yielded produce at harvest. Given I am a city dweller with a fairly small footprint for my vegetable garden (about 30-35 square feet) making decisions on what to buy at the supermarket and what to grow in the garden may be a huge money saver.

Now from the results below you can see the winners for the most produce value per square foot are many of the leafy green vegetables/herbs (cilantro, lettuce, chives, dill, Swiss chard) next comes many of the larger vine plants (tomatoes, squash, pumpkins, peas) with many of the root plants taking up the rear. Now much of this makes sense where many of the vine plants grow on trellises and are allowed to spread, which I guess is sort of cheating the square foot rule but I will let it slide. Compared to the root plants whose production is entirely dependent on the space allowed in square footage they have to grow as well as these are normally inexpensive produce items to begin with.

Vegetable	USD Value/SF
Cilantro	$ 21.20
Arugula-Roquette	$ 20.92
Green Salad Mix	$ 17.55
Chives	$ 16.40
Dill	$ 16.40
Lettuce	$ 16.20
Tomato, Cherry, small & medium	$ 15.57
Turnip	$ 9.90
Tomato, large	$ 9.50
Squash, Winter	$ 8.40
Tomatillo	$ 8.00
Cucumber	$ 7.74
Basil	$ 6.63
Radish, Red	$ 6.22
Pumpkin	$ 6.20
Chard, Swiss	$ 6.14
Celery	$ 6.00
Squash, Summer	$ 5.96
Choi	$ 5.70
Peas, Snow	$ 4.50
Pepper, Jalapeño	$ 4.50
Squash, Summer, Zucchini	$ 4.17
Onion, Bunching	$ 4.14
Pepper, Bell	$ 3.60
Brussels Sprouts	$ 3.59
Carrots	$ 3.56
Rhubarb	$ 3.25
Squash, Winter, Butternut	$ 3.20
Kale	$ 3.07
Grass, Lemon	$ 3.00
Peas, English	$ 3.00
Onion, Bulb	$ 2.63
Radish, White	$ 2.60
Bean, Bush	$ 2.51
Peas, Edible Pod	$ 2.50
Artichoke, Globe	$ 2.40
Cabbage, Chinese Napa	$ 2.24
Squash, Winter, Delicata	$ 2.10
Spinach, Spring/Fall	$ 1.80
Leeks	$ 1.75
Potatoes	$ 1.50
Parsnips	$ 1.50
Garlic	$ 1.37
Squash, Summer, Yellow	$ 1.34
Parsley	$ 1.31
Corn	$ 1.25
Squash, Winter, Acorn	$ 1.20
Squash, Winter, Hubbard	$ 1.20
Eggplant	$ 1.10
Greens, Mustard	$ 1.10
Rutabaga	$ 1.00
Beet	$ 0.89
Cabbage, Savoy	$ 0.80
Broccoli	$ 0.80
Kohlrabi	$ 0.75
Cauliflower	$ 0.60
Broccoli, Chinese	$ 0.60
Cabbage	$ 0.50

Sources: http://www.mcgoodwin.net/pages/ppatch.html for plant yield information, http://shop.safeway.com for current produce prices

Now even with this information I will still plan on growing some onions and garlic since I more than likely would be forced to use dehydrated alternatives due to being too lazy to drive to the supermarket to buy fresh varieties. Though I may be adding some more herbs/greens to my garden this year.

One important thing to remember is you still have to eat the vegetables, throwing $20 worth or arugula or cilantro into the compost bin is not exactly a sound investment.

Cheap LED Light and Grow Box

cheapvegetablegardener — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 00:57:00 +0000

I have one major problem last year with growing seedlings, running out of space. I grow many different types of plants with various germination/growth rates and varied start dates. This forces me to make sacrifices for placement of my movable light and eventually forced to move some plants outside earlier than I should. The light needs to be close to the newly emerging seedlings, but can’t be burning the more mature plants growing into it. My solution to this problem is a LED storage container grow box. With this I will have a portable seeding area and since LEDs practically emit no heat the plants can literally touch the lights without problems. At that time I move them to a larger grow box where it can continue to grow and start more seedlings. I thought about creating my own LED matrix and buy individual LEDs and solder them together, but that sounded like a lot of tedious work and soldering, which I most likely would mess up. Given it was after Christmas and LED lights were really cheap, this seemed like a good possible solution.

Materials for build:

3 gallon Rubbermaid tub
1 string white or blue LED Christmas lights (50% off after Christmas)
Drill with (1/4 in drill bit)
Hot glue gun (may be optional)

Take a look at the number of lights on your string (mine had 60) then by measuring your tub figure out how you want to create your matrix. Best to double check your measurements as you can see below I miscounted and only planned out 55 holes which I improvised and added 5 more after the fact. You can also combine multiple strings if you want, given the low wattage you can string dozens of these together if you really wanted.

Drill holes that will provide tight friction fit to the tub, for my lights this was 1/4 inch drill bit but for yours this may be more or less, I would recommend starting smaller and increase until you find just the right fit. Once you have all your holes drilled fit each of the LEDs into the holes you drilled some of the connections between the bulbs will have a solid section in between (resistor) so depending on the spacing might be best to make this one diagonal of the previous light to make it not as tight a fit. If you have some lights that just won’t stay in, apply a small dab of hot glue between the bulb and the lid. This may diffuse the light a little but very little intensity at the base so light loss should be minimal.

Last plug it in and check out your cheap LED light. You may want to shake it upside a couple times and find any loose lights while your glue gun is still hot.

Now some of your might be thinking (including myself) are these lights intense enough to allow adequate vegetative growth? I did take a look at the LED matrix with my homemade spectrograph and it did show a high intensity of blue wavelength with minimal on red and orange/yellow/green so for this small space it may just work. I am going to test it out on some guinea pig plants now and if I start seeing tall spindly growth I can easily switch out the current while LEDs with some ultra bright blue LEDs by simply pulling out the socket, swap out old LED (save some other project), replace with new LED, trim excess terminal wire, and push back into the socket. Below is my proof of concept for this as long as the voltage/amperage is the same the circuit will continue to work, below is my proof of concept.

I also purchased a couple of red LED Christmas lights for plant flowering stage but have a couple months before I need to pull those out.

For build cost, this small storage container costs less then $2.00 and with the 50% off sale on Christmas lights at $3.00 I have a full LED growing system for just $5.00 and about 15 minutes of assembly.

UPDATES:

Christmas light LED grow box - Update #1
Christmas light LED grow box - Update #2

Fully automated computerized grow box (Project Everbearing) Beta 1

cheapvegetablegardener — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 14:05:00 +0000

The Idea and Design

My PC Grow box was very effective though it did have some shortcomings along with my desire for tinkering caused me to create a new version code named "Project Everbearing" after the test subjects for the project, several Everbearing strawberry plants I propagated from my garden last Summer/Fall. The specific shortcomings I wanted to overcome were temperature control and limited size. My grow box has to live in my garage so on cold nights the temperatures can fall low enough to kill my summer seedlings (tomatoes/cucumbers) Size is an easy fix just make it bigger though it is more difficult to keep a larger grow box warm and still well lit.

My solution to both of these problems was the addition of a computer to the system. First computers generate heat, using this along with computer controlled fans and incandescent lights (heater) allow me to regulate the heat to my desired levels. This is the point a normal person may have just stopped, but I am far from normal and decided a few more features, which I will explain more below.

The Structure and Insulation

First comes the structure, upon inheriting a set of shelves from my sister, we ran out of room for some of our existing storage shelves (see above), though we used the buckets to store loose toys on our new shelves we had the structure of the old one sitting in the garage for some time. After many passes by in the garage not knowing what do do with this shell, it finally came to me that this would be perfect for my new grow box, (Reduce/Reuse/Recycle) in action. The only customization required was the removal of a couple of the wooden dowels and I was ready to add some hardware. Of course you could do the same thing with an old bookshelf, cabinet or just with construct your own frame with a 12”X1”X8’ foot board cut in two along with two 1”X1”X8’ pieces of lumber cut into two. Screw one 1”X1” in each corner and should should have a pretty solid frame. For the top I used pegboard mainly because I bought a 4’ by 8’ sheet when I only needed half of it but worked really good to use zip-ties to secure various components and provides decent airflow between the computer and growing areas.

Second comes insulation, after some not so careful calculations and measurements I determined I could cover the 3 exposed areas with 2 sheets of 2’ by 4’ sheets of insulating Styrofoam. I glued and taped (duct tape of course) the Styrofoam which was cut using a utility knife and straightedge to cut to size making sure I made the top straight and flush. I then created an exactly copy of the other side and one more piece for the top. Using a long strip of duct tape I created a hinge for the top and glued side of the box. The last piece I simply fit into place using a tool box to ensure a tight fit but also allows easy access to plants when needed.

The Lighting

I went cheap on the lighting taking from the success of the PC grow box I decided to go with a similar setup using $2.00 home depot wired sockets hooked up to an couple old computer power cords. I went with two 24 watt CFL bulbs and one incandescent bulb. Though the incandescent is not as efficient and the CLFs it does provide a full spectrum of light and a little extra heat which the box can use in the many times cold garage where it lives. The CFLs and incandescent exist on two separate circuits so they can be controlled independently by the software.

The Software – Grow box brains

Now I know all of this could be done with a Basic Stamp or Arduino pretty easy, but I wanted the ability to track history and have a decent user interface to look at, so I wrote a windows form application using C#. To cover the basic functionality of temperature control I used the parallel port outputs hooked up to the computer’s parallel port to give the software the ability to turn the lights on and off. By configuring a “sunset” and “sunrise” time which I am in complete control over the lights will turn on and off as appropriate. I added some logic to ensure the plants stay at a comfortable temperature (thresholds configurable) by turning on the incandescent bulb when it is too cold and an exhaust fan when it gets too hot. In order to allow the computer to know these temperatures I used a PS2 controller to create two temperature sensors one for the area the plants are growing and another for the top area where the CPU resides (computer was too old to have onboard temperature sensor)

My daughter thought it would be cool if we have some sort of automatic watering system. I agreed, so I added a moisture sensor and created an algorithm to periodically check the moisture level and activate a water pump to add water until it reaches the specified moisture level. I still need to buy and hookup the pump but coding portion is complete and tested.

I live in the Pacific Northwest it rains a lot and can get cold in the evenings and I don’t want to trek out to check on my plants. solved this by adding the computer to my Wi-Fi network now I can take look at them by connecting to the machine wirelessly and see how they are doing through it’s webcam. I also take periodic pictures of the plants so I can create cool time-lapse videos of progress like the one below. I also have the ability to browse through pictures taken at specific time periods.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UiHH4F_FxK4&hl=en&fs=1]

Finally to store all of this data I installed SQL Server 2005 Express (free) which allows me to track historical data of the conditions and images over time. If you have data, you definitely need some graphs. Being too lazy to do this graphic work I leveraged ZedGraph (free) to allow some visual tracking of temperatures and moisture content.

Features for future versions (Beta 2?)

Finish automated watering
Add automated red LED lights for flowering stage
Install LCD Panel
Make box look better (real door which does not require tape to open/close)
Create single USB controller for lights/sensors
Better/additional camera

Video of grow box “booting” up, personally I like the flashing lights when the computer sends signal through the parrallel port. If you are old enough to ever have a printer that used a parallel port this is when it would make its annoying sound letting you know it was alive.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tnfcTAoggI&hl=en&fs=1]

Updates:
Computerized Grow Box Update #1

Using WonderSoil for seed starting

cheapvegetablegardener — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 02:25:00 +0000

I had great results using coconut coir last growing season it was great to work with, retained water great for young seedlings, and was economically priced. The only challenge was actually finding some to use this year. No luck in local stores, last year I only could find a single block in one hardware store. Online there are plenty of locations that sell them, but unless you have a need for a couple metric tons, the cost of shipping can be more than the the product itself.

Finally, I found a solution to my problem WonderSoil. Their main product line consists primarily of the same core component but they sell it in many different convenient sizes for various uses. One great feature of the product is it expands up to 12 times its original size. For someone like myself that does not have the space to store bags of peat/potting mix around my already full garage this is a great feature. You can check out all of their products but the ones that felt matched my growing needs were the following:

Shake, Water, and Plant – 1/2 inch mini wafers that can be added to any of your pots. In my case I underestimated the expansion of these little things and made a little mess and it overflowed on my table (apparently 3 was the magic number not 4)
The Tube – There are larger wafers made specifically for 4 inch pots, in my case this would be newspaper pots
Reground Wafers – This is basically a loose version available in 2 or 5 lb bags. This is a more economical option which I will plan on using when doing larger seed trays.

For Christmas I got indoor seed starting kit which came with pots/seeds/peat pellets. I decided this would be a great opportunity to do a little side by side comparison. From the start I was WonderSoil seemed like the obvious winner. After adding a little water, it fully expanded in just a few seconds and was fluffy and ready for me to drop a seed in, the peat was a swampy mess.

Peat pellets Left, WonderSoil Right

After a few minutes and fluffing with a fork the peat was ready to planting. I put cucumber seeds in both peat and WonderSoil pots and I will provide some updates on how things progress on my little experiment.

After the WonderSoil had some time to settle in my cheap LED grow box I did see some strange formations appear in the soil.

I little concerned I went back to their product and I believe this is their “water saving polymers” in action which I would assume is some sort of gel crystal which is supposed to save up to 50% water. They also boast about use of worm castings which I am definitely a fan of as well as addition of a balance of various micronutrients.

I will have to wait and see if the product produces as well as it claims, but I must say I am definitely impressed at this point and have high hopes for WonderSoil for this years seedlings.

UPDATES:

Christmas light LED grow box - Update #1 (WonderSoil)

Christmas light LED grow box - Update #1

cheapvegetablegardener — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 05:48:00 +0000

I have been pretty impressed with the results of the Christmas lights LED grow box so far. I did have some preconceptions that I may need to double the lights or upgrade the LEDs, but so far the plants look healthy without white leggy stems, though still need to wait until the true leaves come in. As you can see in the picture above I have quite a selection of pots reused from previous years. The one exception are the newspaper pots which I discovered last year and am definitely a fan of. You can also see from the gross white stuff that my grow box probably could use a fan or at least prop a corner open.

Here is a picture of one of the cucumber plants up close.

My experiment is being conducted in the LED grow box so for its update, looks like is in the lead but hard to say with just germination occurring.

UPDATES:
Christmas light LED grow box - Update #2

Using used coffee grounds in your garden/compost

cheapvegetablegardener — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 01:37:00 +0000

I have wanted to leverage used coffee grounds in my garden/compost but not being a coffee drinker myself I never seemed to be able to have the right timing to find any at local coffee shops. Recently a colleague taunted me with a picture from his cell phone of a few bags in the coffee shop in our cafeteria at work and my quest began.

After just two days I have accumulated 40 lbs of coffee grounds, now how can I use this stuff in my garden?

Throw it in your compost: Coffee grounds are 1.45% nitrogen and contain calcium and magnesium to add some trace minerals you may not get from your other organic material. Coffee grounds are a green material (I know coffee is brown, but same idea as grass clippings) so you should add with at least equal amounts of brown material (leaves) but if you are like me my browns are way to high already.
Add it directly to your garden: I have seen some arguments that coffee grounds are acidic, but others claim it loses most (or all) of its acidity during the brewing process. Due to my natural curiosity I need to know the answer. So the answer is, it has an average pH of 6.9 so for all intensive purposes, it is neutral. Though if you are really tired and forget to brew it, it will be somewhat acidic.
Fertilizer: Sometimes your plants need a little boost in the morning as well. Simply add a couple cups of coffee grounds to a bucket of water and let it seep for 24 hours and apply to plant in the same way you would compost tea. Using gardener terms I can’t think of any better name for this as “coffee tea” If you are busy/lazy you also can use it as a side dressing on top of your soil and let the rain seep it for you.
Annoy your pests to stay out of your garden: It has been said that coffee grounds can deter cats from using your garden as their own personal commode. There are also reports that it can deter slugs as well. I am not sure if it is the abrasive soil effect on their sensitive underside or just the cruel reality that with their slow pace they can’t do anything with the caffeine rush they get. Coffee grounds may annoy ants to convince them to move their home elsewhere.
Feed your worms: To worms this stuff is like ice cream, if you listen carefully you may hear them cheer your name when you add a handful to your worm bin when your greens from the kitchen may be a little lacking.

According to Starbucks brochure I picked up on my last visit, you should use the coffee grounds within 3 weeks to get the most nutrient value, though if you are composting I am sure you can start out the process in the bag if you really want to. Given that 16.34 billion pounds of coffee is produced each year there is plenty for you to save from ending up in a landfill. This is a great way to help the environment while also adding value to your garden without affecting your pocketbook.

Cheap solar ebb and flow hydroponic system

cheapvegetablegardener — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 06:47:00 +0000

This is a really interesting hydroponic solution using change in temperature caused by the sun to force nutrient solution to the upper chamber. This is done using 1 and 2 liter bottles, superglue, plastic tubing, and some perlite. If you want to see the whole write-up here is a link.

Garden with superhuman strength with a Japanese power suit

cheapvegetablegardener — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 03:32:00 +0000

Don’t want your back aching after working in your garden? Our friends at the Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology have got your covered. With 3 years for only $10K you can have your very own power suit to complete your gardening choirs. At a current weight of 55 pounds it will support your joints as you squat and reach. Though for that much money might be a better idea to outsource your gardening tasks, or in my case work out a little more.

LED Christmas light grow box – Update #2

cheapvegetablegardener — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 00:59:00 +0000

I noticed some of my daisies were getting a little leggy so added 60 more LEDs (red) to my LED grow box. This time I was a little less calculated about positioning but still fee like I got a decent pattern going. I also decreased the drill size and didn’t even need to use the hot glue gun.

As you can see from the pictures below the plants (cucumbers, onions, cilantro, purple coneflowers) have a dark green complexion and are less leggy compared to the results I would get from my window sill. The cucumber plants after two weeks have grown up enough to move into the LEDs grow box’s big brother.

A little help in the computerized grow box

cheapvegetablegardener — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 03:11:00 +0000

My wife was the first to identify the little helper and today I was able to capture him on camera. Looks like it is more than just the breeze helping pollinate those strawberries in the automated computerized grow box. Yet another benefit of having my grow box in my garage.

Why should you have a grow box?

cheapvegetablegardener — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 03:55:00 +0000

View Full Album

Other than the “Do you really grow strawberries in your grow box?” question. The most common question I have gotten is why exactly do I have a grow box. Hopefully I will be able to answer this question below, as for the first question the answer is yes (without the fingerquotes)

Necessity: I am cheap and don’t want to buy all my plants from local nursery or garden center, but do not have a good location inside my house to grow seedlings with a normal table/shelf light setup. I definitely do not have the space to setup a greenhouse in the backyard. This unfortunately forces me to do my growing in my cold windowless garage. Using a grow box allows me to maintain a safe temperature for my plants no matter what the conditions are outside.

Control: I have nearly complete control of the conditions inside the grow box. I can provide my plants with the perfect temperature, humidity, lights (intensity and wavelength as well as day/night simulation) and even can simulate a slight breeze using a small fan if desired. This gives me many advantages which I would not have even if I could grow indoors. One example of this is growing peppers, which can be fairly difficult in our climate but with some modifications settings in the grow box can create the perfect conditions for it.

Saving Money: Given my options such as the $20 PC Grow Box and my $6 Christmas Light LED Grow Box the cost of entry is pretty low. You do have the expense of lighting the thing but given the 48 watts required for the PC Grow Box and 10 watts of the Christmas Light LED Grow Box even those maintenance costs are reasonable.

Portability: All three of my grow boxes (PC Grow Box, LED Grow Box, Computerized Grow Box) all have a single plug that goes into the outlet and can literally be picked up and moved to another location if needed (try doing that with your greenhouse)

Scalability: Need more space in your grow box? As little as $6 can get you a new one, or $10 worth of lumber can double the size of your existing one (assuming your old lighting can support the space) You are limited to what your creativity can imagine.

Fun: Call me crazy, but I like the idea of tricking my strawberries that it is a nice spring day and get them to start blooming and producing fruit. If all goes well I can move the plants outside during the real spring and get even more harvest while freeing up some space for more plants.

Why you should check on your grow box (especially if it is computerized)

cheapvegetablegardener — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 06:51:00 +0000

My day job is in software development, so of course it came to mind that software/hardware can fail while I was making my computerized grow box. During its inception, I would check on it daily physically or remotely to make sure all was well. After a couple weeks of this it was so stable that I started to not check quite as often. Though in my mind there was never any question of if it would crash, it was when. Well that answer came tonight when I decided to check on my strawberries, cucumbers, and blueberry plant (trying to propagate a blueberry plant damaged in recent snow storm)

I noticed the lights were out and turned on the LCD display to see "Unable to find operating system." Before anyone screams “you should have used Linux”, the problem was completely hardware related caused by a failed hard drive (not even the one with the operating system). Unfortunately this was the drive that had the SQL database, so hopefully I will be able to savage some of the data. Once I got the machine to boot up I saw the temperature was down to 38 degrees (poor little cucumber plants) but fortunately in the time it took to write this post it warmed up to ~~47.3F~~ 57.7F, so hopefully the cucumbers will feel better in the morning.

Tonight I am adding one more item to my software to do list, a Vista Gadget to monitor the health of the grow box to ensure it is up and running. This was also a good time to ask the mental question, “When was the last time I backed up my code?” Code now backed up and am wondering why I am breaking my cardinal rule of always having source control even with a single developer.

Updated time-lapse video of strawberries growing in growbox

cheapvegetablegardener — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 17:14:00 +0000

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-o32SKdb880&hl=en&fs=1]
Here is the strawberries growing after 2 weeks in the grow box. Looks like I may need to get some Q-tips out and do some manual pollination if I want to see berries. I feel so dirty...

1st Blog-Iversary

cheapvegetablegardener — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 08:01:00 +0000

Exactly one year ago I wrote the first post for The Cheap Vegetable Gardener. Over this short time I have had a tremendous response, more than I ever had ever imagined. I wish the January spike (below) would continue into 2009 but much of this was traffic was significantly elevated my the following honorable mentions:

Hack-a-day (PS2 controller thermometer)
Hack-a-day (Automated plant growing)
Top listing on reddit.com/frugal for a few days
MAKE: Blog: LED light grow box

Thank you to everyone who has read the blog this past year and actively participated with your kind comments. Without your feedback I probably would have gotten bored and stopped writing many months ago.

Thanks,
The Cheap Vegetable Gardener

Make a worm bin out of a bath tub

cheapvegetablegardener — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 01:24:00 +0000

Over at LifeBoat Farm they have created this great DIY Worm Farm out of an old bathtub. What I like about this build is they could have easily taken the bathtub propped it up on some cinder blocks and have been done with it. They took the extra effort with the wood enclosure (with bonus storage shelf) and proper drainage making use of the actual drain it almost appears that this is the true use for this bath tub.

Gardening products I would buy if I wasn’t so cheap

cheapvegetablegardener — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 05:12:00 +0000

Today I got my Gardener's Supply Companycatalog, this particular catalog is dedicated to items to assist you with your gardening habit. You should be able to guess from this site I do my best to resist buying anything for the garden I absolutely need, otherwise I make a cheaper alternative. Well the point of this post is to show what I would like to get if I wasn’t as disciplined.

	They sell these Accelerated Propagation System (APS) seed starting kits which have all the basics you expect from a seed starting kits you would find at your local garden store. They include 6 to 40 cells to plant seedlings and a clear plastic dome to help raise the humidity to provide extra moisture for the tender seedlings. The bonus in this setup is it also contains a reservoir which holds enough water to keep them moist for up to a week. With the help of an elevated platform and capillary matting provides just the right amount of water to your plants. At just $19.95 for the 40 and 24 cells sizes this is one purchase I am still considering, since I never have finished my automatic watering system on my computerized grow box and this makes much better use of space than my plastic tub, newspaper pots, and daily watering method I am doing now.
	Eco-Friendly Cowpots basically planting pots made as a byproduct of processing cow poo. The poo is dried, composted and mixed with natural fibers creating a completely biodegradable pot which holds up well during growth and transplanting but biodegrades in the soil after several weeks. I watched an episode of Dirty Jobs which went through the whole process and it was very interesting and environmentally conscience but, unfortunately due to the price tag (about $1 a pot) these are a little over my budget since my newspaper pots are free.
	Gardener’s Revolution Planter - You have probably seen something similar advertised between gardening shows on HGTV (Topsy Turvy) , I know my daughter has and has been talking about growing tomatoes upside down for some time now. She even on her own came up with a ingenious design to do this (not 5 gallon bucket) which I will write-up when we get around to that project. In case you were wondering the improvement this year (or compared to the TV advertisement) it is the addition of a 1 gallon water reservoir which slowly releases water to the plant as needed Self watering must be a big seller this year since there are also many other variances of self watering pots in many shapes and sizes with designs similar to the original (to my knowledge) the EarthBox.
	Now definitely in the gadget department the Push-Button Kitchen Scrap Composter can take your everyday kitchen scraps and turn them into compost in less than 11 days. The concept on this one is pretty simple: Food + Heat + Spinning = Compost Of course it crossed my mind of creating something similar myself, but probably would end up burning down the house or if I was lucky just launch partially composted food across the living room at 50 miles per hour. Given the $299 price tag seems like I will be stuck to waiting 3-6 months for my compost to be created. Though it would be much more convenient than walking through the snow to add kitchen scraps to the compost.

$3 LED light bulbs coming soon…

cheapvegetablegardener — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 03:50:00 +0000

Researchers at Cambridge University have come up with a method to significantly reduce the cost of creating LED light bulbs. LEDs use gallium nitride and requires being grown on sapphire wafers. The new technique allows growth on silicon wafer reducing the cost significantly from $28 to $3 per bulb. The big news for the bulbs is they use 12 times less energy that incandescent bulbs, last for 60 years, and they are far enough in their research that they could come to market in just a two years. Just imagine, in just a couple years you could be buying your last light bulb(s) of your life, unless you physically break them of course.

This this so exciting for indoor growing, my cheap LED grow box works great for the small space for seedlings. When I start thinking of expanding my growing area, the current LED prices make the start-up cost to illuminate a large space is considerable. Because of this I am forced to resort to CFLs as the more economical solution. With these innovations we could definately see indoor gardening much more accessible to a greater audience with this financial barrier lifted. via Gizmodo

Hydroponics 101 – Introduction to Hydroponics

cheapvegetablegardener — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 02:59:00 +0000

By definition hydroponics is a technique of growing plants (without soil) with water containing dissolved nutrients. No soil is used but in most cases a growing medium is used to support the plant’s root system. A few examples of popular mediums are perlite, vermiculite, Rockwool, coconut coir, clay pellets, peat moss, sand, and even small pebbles. The basic idea behind the medium is to allow water to flow but also allow oxygen to be available to the roots. Even if you are not planning on growing hydroponically, I would definitely recommend learning some about the subject since many of the concepts can help you get a different perspective to have a better understanding about plants needs in various states of growth even with conventional soil growing. If you really think about it if you have ever added water soluble plant food while watering your indoors plants, you technically have already done some hydroponic gardening.

Advantages:
The primary advantage if hydroponics is the increased speed of growth in you plants. This is possible because you are making life really easy for your plants, they just relax and just keep getting bigger. Even with a small root system they are getting exactly what they need to thrive thus spending more energy upstairs instead of expanding their root system. This is possible by careful control of nutrients in the water solution which the plant is completely dependent since the growing medium does not provide any nutritional support. Another benefit is automation, though some work is required to monitor nutrient levels and pH of the solution once everything is setup you can walk away knowing that your plants will be happy. Given the in most cases the systems are basically closed very little water is lost to evaporation so that means less wasted water (and less times you have to add water)

Disadvantages:
To create a large scale setup, there can be a significant cost to get started in hydroponics. Purchasing water/air pumps various nutrient solutions during various growth stages, monitoring equipment, pH balancing, etc. No worries though, there is a cheap solution to all of this which is my current project which I will write on shortly. When automation fails, a simple pump failure can kill off your plants in hours depending in your medium since they plants require short and frequent watering since they have no way of maintaining the moisture over a long period of time.

How it works:
The great thing about hydroponics is essentially anything that holds water can be used to create a hydroponic system. Even commercial solutions use your regular old Rubbermaid storage totes and 5 gallon buckets. The uniqueness begins with the method in which you get the solution to your plants which I will explain some of the popular methods in detail below:

Wicking – This is one of the simplest and cheapest methods of hydroponics. The basic concept is you take a material such as cotton (shredded sock/T-shirt) and surround it with growing medium and place one end in the nutrient solution. This is where the name implies, the solution is wicked to the roots of the plant. You can make this even simpler by using a medium that has some wicking properties itself (perlite/vermiculite are good examples) and suspend the medium directly in the solution. Mediums such as peat moss, Rockwool, and coconut coir should not be placed directly in the solution since they may absorb too much solution and suffocate the plant.
Bubbler – This is also a simple and inexpensive solution where you suspend the roots directly in the nutrient solution and by leveraging a powerful air pump and air stone you create enough oxygen around the roots to prevent suffocation. This can also work as flavor of aeroponics (which I will explain more below) where the force of the rising bubbles create a light spray to keep the roots moist which are suspended in air. One benefit of this method is limited points of failure air pumps are normally pretty reliable and even if you neglect keeping your solution up the bubbling can create enough moisture to keep your plant alive for quite awhile.
Ebb and Flow – A simpler way of thinking about this is flood and drain, using a water pump at a specified interval you flood the growing area with nutrient solution allowing it to slowly drain back into the reservoir. You then repeat this process keeping the roots/medium at the desired wetness. This method is a little more expensive than the previous methods since it requires a pump and timer that can turn off/on several times a day at short intervals. Just to give you an idea how to build a system like this, find a Rubbermaid tub with a pretty deep lid. Flip the lid over and place a small hole in the bottom (idea it will drain but slower than pump can fill) add some plants with medium, hook up a timer and you have a system. A major advantage to this method is that it gives you more control over the watering which can be very important especially if you are growing plants that are accustomed to slight drying out periods.
Drip – This method uses a timer (slow constant drip is also an option) and a water pump to provide nutrient solution to all of your plants using rubber tubing. This does have an advantage over Ebb Flow were you can control specific watering needs of plants at different stage and the ability to spread out your plants with a little extra tubing.
Aeroponics – Aeroponics is the process of growing plants in an air or mist environment without the use of soil or an aggregate medium. Now there are some schools of thought one what exactly is considered a “mist” which separates aeroponics from “pure aeroponics” but for this discussion we will define it as directly watering roots just hanging in the air. If you have heard of the AeroGarden this is a commercialized version of this technique, so this can definitely be an easy means of entry into aeroponics. There are two typical ways to get nutrients to the exposed roots: fog and spray nozzles both of which providing a fine mist to the tender roots. Both of these methods due have some drawbacks though. Ultrasonic foggers can accumulate sediments from the nutrient solution on their discs but can be periodically cleaned and occasionally need replacement of their ceramic/Teflon discs. Nussle on the other hand can get clogged due to the same sediments so though these methods are close to “Set it and forget it” you do need to check on them periodically for maintenance. Though these techniques sound really complicated and expensive they really are not too bad. You can use Pond Foggers which run $10-100+ depending on the number of discs they hold which directly to the volume of fog they will produce. If you are doing a small experimental setup a one disc is a good place to start. If you do go the larger setup route I definitely would advise spending a little extra for Teflon coded discs since they will hold up considerable better to the nutrient solution. As for sprayers most of the materials for this can be found in the sprinkler aisle of you local Home Depot. You can also create your own by drilling some small holes into a sealed (one open end for water input) PVC tubing, though cleaning a setup like this could be troublesome.

Hydroponics is obviously much different than conventional soil growing, but it definitely can be fun and rewarding to grow effectively in an unconventional way.

Cool way to collect rain water - Rain Drops

cheapvegetablegardener — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 16:19:00 +0000

I came across this great new design and thought I would share. The inspiration is to provide a cheap way of capturing rainwater for developing countries. This would be a great way to prevent some water bottles from going into landfills but also a space saving way to capture some rainwater without requiring the large footprint or cost that rain barrel(s) can take up. No word on these going on sale yet, seems to be in the design stage but great idea.

"The RainDrops system simply allows people to adapt standard plastic bottles to an existing gutter system to collect rain water. This changes water storage from the most to the least expensive part of the system. These are much easier to clean and replace than larger storage units. The repurposing of these plastic bottles will also give value to many bottles that are otherwise headed for landfills. Corruption in the water sector is a real problem in many developing countries. The scalability of this system helps to give more power to the communities in need.
Another large benefit to using plastic bottles as a water collection system is that it fits in nicely with the process called SODIS, which uses a combination of the suns UV rays and heat to remove pathogenic microorganisms that cause disease. This process is spreading across many developing countries due to its effectiveness and low cost. "

Cheap DIY fogger aeroponic system

cheapvegetablegardener — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 02:10:00 +0000

In my post about basic the basics of hydroponics I mentioned the potential high cost of entry but with a little creativity this can be avoided. I went through this exercise and here is a pretty inexpensive way to try out hydroponics without having to spend hundreds on a prebuilt system. The solution I came up with cost me $1.00 to setup though I did have many of the items on hand, if I had to purchase everything cost would be in the $10-15 range.

Supplies

Small shoebox sized plastic tub /w lid – (I purchased a clear generic one from Home Depot for $1.00)
2 inch hole saw and drill
6 – Empty Trix yogurt cups (can be any brand as long top is approx 2 in diameter)
Duct tape (no one should be without this)
Pond fogger - single disc (can be found on eBay for less than $10, I had one from humidifier)
Perlite
Water (tap water is fine, fancy bottles work as well)

Assembly
From looking at the supplies this might be able to guess the construction steps, but I will list them out anyway.

Take lid and add drill six 2-inch holes using hole saw. If the tub is not made of rubbery material be sure to take your time to slowly create the holes to prevent cracking/shattering. You can also do this with a utility knife but for non-rubber lids I highly suggest against it if you like your fingers.
Test fit your cups and ensure they fit snuggly, if they do not quite fit you can use some sandpaper to expand the holes slightly
Remove cups and cut (utility knife) or burn (soldering iron) 1/4 in lines in a pattern similar to the figure to the right to ensure extra support and prevent the medium (perlite) from falling through. WARNING: Burning plastic emits toxic fumes and should be done (if at all in a well ventilated area) Knifes are sharp and can cut fingers so if you not careful. I would recommend buying 2 inch hydroponic net pots which can be purchased for about $0.25 each online, which I would have done if I wasn’t so impatient.
Given that nutrients+water+light=algae, be sure that your box is as light tight as possible. If you container is not clear like mine you should be in good shape, otherwise cover your box with duct tape or spray paint the box using plastic adhering paint. I would recommend keeping a small vertical line exposed so you can get a quick look at water condition and level without having to disturbing the plants.
Fill cups with perlite 4/5 full (some expansion may occur)
Pour water into cups until reservoir is full
Dump water out water
Repeat steps 4-6 until water appears clear
Cut small hole in the corner of the lid and feed power line to fogger through
Put fogger in tub and fill with water until it is about 1/2 inch above fogger
Replace lid and plug in fogger and enjoy the mysterious fog

What can I grow with this?
The short answer is anything. Self regulation wicking properties of perlite it should keep most plants happy for some time. The major limitation you may see is some types of plants will outgrow this setup and will require transplant outside in soil or in a larger hydroponic setup (coming soon). Though with careful selection of plants and frequent harvesting you can grow many plants to maturity in this small system. It did not occur to me until after I completed the project but the size and spacing is pretty close to that of an AeroGarden so plants like greens, herbs, strawberries, cherry tomatoes, peppers would do well in this system. For starting plants you can simply drop a few seeds, cover with some perlite and a clear plastic container (I used empty applesauce cups, but bottom of water bottles also would work well) You may also add seedlings by carefully placing in them in the damp perlite.

What about nutrients?
Keeping the project cheap I opted to use some balanced liquid plant fertilizer I use for my seedling/indoor plants. I mixed it at the recommendation it stated for indoor watering (2 pumps per gallon) I noticed it did not contain any Magnesium I also added a half a teaspoon of Epsom salt. After a couple weeks empty contents and replace with water let run for about an hour to allow sediments to clear up and then empty contents. This is good for your plants but also can help keep the disc on your fogger clean. Refill with water and nutrient mix and repeat. This will work for most plants in vegetative state of growth though if you want your plants to move to a flowering state (peppers, tomatoes, etc) I would recommend purchasing specific hydroponic solution for flowering plants.

For a very small investment you can have your own hydroponic system and experience the benefits of growing without soil.

Chemistry of Gardening – What nutrients do plants need?

cheapvegetablegardener — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 22:53:00 +0000

If I ask my four year old what it takes for a plant to grow she can quickly respond with response, “Sun, water, air, and soil” This is a great answer for photosynthesis since plants need energy from the sun. They leverage the carbon dioxide (CO₂) from the air and water (H₂O) to create starches and sugar. Now the soil part of this answer is where things get a little more complicated. Soil gives plants the ability for roots to expand and grow but also provides many nutrients to help them as well.

Similar to humans, plants need various minerals to live healthy lives. The primary macronutrients Nitrogen (N), Phosphorus (P), Potassium (K) are required to sustain life. These are the nutrients that plants consume significant amounts which is why these are advertised in big letters on the outside of packages of fertilizer.

MACRONUTRIENTS - PRIMARY

Nutrients	Benefits	Signs of Deficiency	Sources (N-P-K)
Nitrogen (N)	Provides energy to allow vegetative growth. Leafy plants can’t get enough, root plants need very little, fruiting plants need plenty in beginning but too much later in growth cycle will result in big/tall fruitless plants.	Light green to yellow leaves; growth stunted	Bloodmeal (14-0-0) Alfalfa meal (7-3-4) Soybean meal (6-1-2) Cottonseed meal (6-2-2) Fish emulsion (5-2-2) Chicken Manure (3-4-3) Compost (1-1-1) Cow Manure (.2-.2-.2)
Phosphorus (P)	Makes plants more stress resistant, allows for fast growth, encourages bloom and root growth.	Red or Purple leaves; cell division slowed	Bonemeal (4-12-0) Chicken Manure (3-4-3) Alfalfa meal (7-3-4) Compost (1-1-1)
Potassium (K)	Helps with photosynthesis process, immunities to disease, and increased quality of fruit.	Vigor reduced; susceptible to disease; thin skin; small fruits	Alfalfa meal (7-3-4) Greensand (0-0-3) Wood ash (0-1-3) Chicken Manure (3-4-3) Compost (1-1-1)

We could live off a simple food like gummy bears for quite a while, but our quality life will decrease once we picked up scurvy and exhibit significant bone and muscle loss. The same idea goes for plants, they can live simply on the primary macronutrients but they will live poor and possibly fruitless (literally) lives. This is where the secondary nutrients come in. With the exception of Calcium, these are not consumed in nearly the volumes as the primary macronutrients though supplementation may be required.

MACRONUTRIENTS - SECONDARY

Nutrients	Benefits	Signs of Deficiency	Sources
Calcium (Ca)	Helps with cell wall structure imperative for strength of plants	Growing points of plants damaged	Dolomitic limestone, gypsum, egg shells, antacids
Magnesium (Mg)	Required as part of the chlorophyll required for photosynthesis	Yield down; old leaves white or yellow	Epsom salt, Dolomitic limestone, organic material
Sulfur (S)	Required for to allow plants to create protein, enzymes, and vitamins. Helps with seed, root growth, and resistance to cold.	Light green to yellow leaves; growth stunted	Rainwater, gypsum

Finally are the macronutrients, these are the nutrients that most of the time, as long as you are not growing with hydroponics. should exist in your soil and rarely need to be supplemented due to the small amounts that are consumed by plants, nevertheless are still very important for plant growth.

MICRONUTRIENTS

Nutrients	Benefits	Signs of Deficiency	Sources
Boron (B)	Helps in production of sugar and carbohydrates. Essential for seed and fruit development.	Small leaves; heart rot (corkiness); multiple buds	Organic Matter and borax
Copper (Cu)	Helps in plant reproduction	Multiple buds; gum pockets	Copper sulfate, neutral copper
Chloride (Cl)	Helps with plant metabolism	None known	Tap water
Iron (Fe)	Helps in formation of chlorophyll	Yellow leaves; veins remain green	Iron sulfate, iron chelate
Manganese (Mn)	Helps in breakdown of carbohydrates and nitrogen	Leaves mottled with yellow and white; growth stunted	Manganese sulfate, compost
Molybdenum (Mo)	Helps in breakdown of nitrogen	Varied symptoms	Sodium molybdate, compost
Zinc (Zn)	Regulates growth and consumption of sugars by the plant	Small, thin, and yellow leaves, low yield	zinc oxide, zinc sulfate, zinc chelate

Nutrient Deficiency Information from “The Vegetable Gardener’s Bible”

Now you are armed with plenty of information, though unfortunately you can not act on any of this without knowing the chemical composition of your soil. If you simply went by the signs of deficiency (for example yellow leaves) could be caused by one or many nutrient deficiencies. Fortunately you can get this information to act on by running a soil test on your soil. There are a couple options for this if you are simply concerned about primary macronutrients there are cheap DIY home tests, electronic testers, or you can send a sample to a soil lab to give primary/secondary macronutrient and micronutrient levels and recommendations to get your soil back on track. You may also want to check with your local municipal office they may have a cheaper/free option available to you.

Just remember, your perceived lack of a green thumb my have nothing to do with your ability but the chemistry of soil you are working with.

LED Plant Grow Spikes

cheapvegetablegardener — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 03:25:00 +0000

Not sure how effective these would be with so few LEDs but they do look pretty cool. In their defense they do label these as supplemental lights. If you want one, unfortunately you have to make it yourself with full DIY instructions below.

via Gizmodo via PopSci via Lifehacker

Grocery store Vegetables are not as nutritious as they used to be?

cheapvegetablegardener — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 01:23:00 +0000

“University of Texas, Austin. Davis claims the average vegetable found in today's supermarket is anywhere from 5% to 40% lower in minerals (including magnesium, iron, calcium and zinc) than those harvested just 50 years ago.”

Not only are those vegetables you been eating at the grocery store less tasty, but may be getting marginal nutritional value. They discuss some of the potential factors in this including use for synthetic fertilizer and the desire to achieve higher yield during a shorter timetable, unfortunately the poor plants do not have time to absorb the beneficial minerals (as do we)

This article is timely with my Chemistry of Gardening – What nutrients do plants need? post. If you have sufficient primary macronutrients (NPK) which is the primary contents on synthetic fertilizer you can still have great yields and fast growing plants but quality of plants are reduced. What the problem appears to me, is the secondary macronutrients are not being supplemented (magnesium, iron, calcium and zinc) which is causing the nutrient/taste deficiency. Organic methods natural provide these nutrients by the addition of organic matter to the soil.

I am cheap and organic vegetables are expensive, this is definitely a case of you get what you pay for. Hope is still here you can easily grow your own organic vegetables at home. If you still think growing your own vegetables is a bad idea here are a list of benefits from buying at the grocery store:

Continue to rise in cost so you won’t have to worry what to do with your extra money
No confusion with the small variety available (transport well)
They don’t taste as good, so no guilt in enjoying eating your veggies
Less of those pesky minerals for your body to absorb
Opportunity of getting a trip to the ER after picking up salmonella

In all seriousness this is a scary development where people could be malnourished even with a decent supply of fruits and vegetables.

First/Last? trip to the NW Home and Garden Show

cheapvegetablegardener — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 16:13:00 +0000

My daughter and I made our first trip to the NW Home and Garden show yesterday. It was a great experience which if you want to know more you can check out my guest post on Flora’s Blog. Apparently there is a March 31st deadline to find a new owner, so keeping my fingers crossed since I would love to go next year with both my daughters.

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Computerized grow box update

cheapvegetablegardener — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 16:45:00 +0000

Haven’t mentioned the computerized grow box for a while, so think it is a good time for an update. The moisture sensor corroded away, but have plans to make a much more beefier one. With the exception of the hard drive failure, the basic functionality of the computerized grow box has been excellent and the plants have been thriving. The only physical improvement I have made is adding some particle board to the top and side (salvaged from packaging material from some furniture we ordered) of the grow box. This helps retain heat and allows the access panel to stay put without requiring tape and/or bags of coffee grounds propped against it. I also mounted the LCD panel securely to the top of the box.

They say as your paycheck increases, somehow your expenses follow suit. I have a feeling same concept applies for grow boxes. As the computerized grow box is about four times bigger than my PC grow box it has quickly getting pretty crowded waiting for the time I can move my summer vegetables outside. I am planning on doing some reorganization this weekend to clean things up a little bit but still going to be pretty tight quarters.

The current inventory in the grow box are 12 tomato plants (was 18 but gave six away at a recent gardening talk), 2 cucumber plants (had one fatality from Peat/WonderSoil experiment, looks like Peat lost), 6 pepper plants (need transplanting), and a cilantro plant which was the source of my first harvest of the year.

Now just hoping Punxsutawney Phil is wrong and we really don’t have six more weeks of winter, though with the snow we got two days ago and the current temperature outside, I think he might be right.

Light sensitive automated grow light

cheapvegetablegardener — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 16:12:00 +0000

I came across this interesting concept for an automated grow light. It uses a photoresister to detect when lights get low and proceeds to turns on some red LEDs to provide the plants a few extra hours of light.

From my experience if you are growing indoors, your seedlings can use as much supplemental lighting as they can get and would recommend turning them on when there is light as well, but though still a very cool project.

This could be an interesting concept for something like a greenhouse during the fall/winter seasons though.

Via Hack-A-Day via Instrucatable

Growing seedlings with compostable coffee cups

cheapvegetablegardener — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 05:51:00 +0000

Occasionally at work I get a craving for some hot chocolate. When I do, I reach for a company provided compostable coffee cup (I know I should bring in my own cup, but I did say “occasionally”). When I am done with my delicious beverage, I simply dispose of them in the proper "compostable” reciprocal. Last week was different, with my recent frustration with the durability of some of my newspaper pots, I got the idea to extend the life of these cups a little longer and grow some seedlings in them.

This particular type of cup breaks down in 47 days, unless you happen to leave one half filled with liquid overnight on your desk, in that case they magically breaks down a few minutes after you walk out the door. I am planning on growing my tomatoes and peppers in these cups and plant them directly into the soil. To help with more freedom in root growth I will cut out the bottom of the cup. I will let you know how it works.

Now if your work does not use these cups, never fear many coffee shops are featuring these same type of cups with the purchase of an overpriced hot beverage.

New site design

cheapvegetablegardener — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 16:55:00 +0000

If you have visited us before, you may notice some changes to the site design. Felt things were getting cluttered, so did a little spring cleaning. We have a little more tweaking to do but I am getting used to the lighter feel. What do you think?

How to make a cheap soil moisture sensor

cheapvegetablegardener — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 01:03:00 +0000

UPDATE: Though this still a great sensor, check this post for the latest version of a more heavy duty soil moisture sensor.

I mentioned in a previous post that my previous soil moisture sensor did not hold up in my automated grow box update, so I needed to make a new one. After a little research there was the classic science class method of creating a homemade sensor by simply putting two galvanized nails in the soil and measuring the resistance between them. A major problem with this solution is the soil composition can significantly vary the resistance and keeping the spacing between the nails could be troublesome.

After a little more research I came across the method that has been working well for over 50 years. This method includes taking two metal probes and inserting them into a gypsum block and measuring the resistance between them. The gypsum absorbs the water and provides a decent range of resistance and moisture measurement.

Unfortunately I was fresh out of gypsum (sort of), so I looked around the garage and found a good substitute, Plaster of Paris. Plaster of Paris is created by heating gypsum to around 150 degrees where it becomes calcium sulfate hemihydrate. After adding water and allowing to dry it magically turns back into gypsum with the added bonus it also has the ability to mold to any shape I could come up with . On to construction…..

Material required:

1 tsp Plaster of Paris
1/2 tsp cold water
Disposable cup for mixing
wide straw (I used one from McDonalds, but most fast food straws should work)
2 small pieces of metal (I used wall hangers, but nails, paper clips, etc will work as long as they can fit inside the straw with room for plaster to form around)

I straightened out one end of both wall hangers the best I could with some needle nose pliers. I then carefully positioned them approximated 15mm apart, the exact measurement is less important though if you are creating multiple sensors I would recommend making them the same gap to ensure consistency of measurements without having to individually calibrating each sensor. I then used some hot glue (insulator) liberally at the top and at the bottom just enough to keep it in place during while pouring the plaster and while the mold solidifies.

Now insert your secured metal probes into the straw, ensuring that both metal probes are equal distant from the sides of the straw. The great thing about the wall hangers is they do this automatically due to their wedge shape at the top. Once you have them centered apply gobs of glue to keep the probe in place but also to seal any gaps between the straw and the bottom of the straw. This needs to be water tight since this will be the bottom our your mold.

Prepare the Plaster of Paris according to the instructions on the box. On my box it said 2 parts mix to 1 part colder water. Given the small size of the mold 1 tsp of mix and 1/2 tsp of water which gave you more than enough to make one sensor. I used a bamboo skewer to stir since I would have gotten in trouble for trying to use our new silverware.

Now it is time to pour your mold, depending on how steady your hands are you should be able to pour the plaster right into the top of the straw. Fill about 1/4 of the length then tap the probe gently to help the plaster settle between the gaps. Repeat the previous step until the straw is full. If you have problems pouring you can also dip the skewer into the plaster and scrape it against the top edge of the straw. This step is optionally but I wanted to give my sensor a little point so I carefully added plaster beyond the end of the straw to provide a sharp point. Once you are done filling the straw, use your glue gun to secure the probe onto the paper you are working on and allow at least 1 hour to set.

After about an hour you can remove the bottom part of the probe. Do this by carefully cutting around the diameter of the bottom 3/4 of the straw, along with a lengthwise cut as shown in the lines marked above using a utility knife. You must be very careful in your cutting going too deep can result in cracking the plaster and you need to start all over.

Allow the plaster to dry for 24 hours and it should be ready for testing. With my probe it is essentially an insulator dry (beyond what my ohmmeter can measure) and a reading of 957 ohms when slightly damp which was a great range for measuring moisture level in my computerized grow box.

Finally, I attached attach wires to my analog measuring device (in my case a PS2 Controller) and I started getting readings. At this point you should calibrate the sensor by getting a reading with the probe dry then again when it is full saturated in water. Ironically, the probe I made was almost exactly specifications as the one I repurposed from a cheap commercial soil moisture sensor so I didn’t even have to modify the constants on the automated computerized grow box software.

Given you can make hundreds of these things with a regular sized box of Plaster of Paris, box of paper clips and a few trips to your favorite fast food restaurant. The cost of each of these things would be pennies and given the cost of buying a commercial product seems like a very economical alternative.

Ultimate cheap cold frame/greenhouse

cheapvegetablegardener — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 12:22:00 +0000

For using windows they found lying around from homes in the neighborhood getting torn down the end result looks great. Functional and doing some serious reduce/reuse/recycle in the process.

Adding windows to the top would be nice, but sure finding the right ones for a weatherproof fit could be difficult.

Instructables via Make

Growing in dirt outside

cheapvegetablegardener — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 00:26:00 +0000

I haven’t done many posts in a while about regular old gardening in actual dirt so figured a good time to do an update. Though I enjoy indoor seed starting in my LED grow box and computerized grow box, some plants need to be started outdoors. Today my daughters and I planted the last these plants for fall outdoor planting.

A few weeks ago, we planted garlic, onions, spinach, and peas which are doing well. I love growing these plants no matter how late your spring comes these plants are hardy they are pretty hard to kill off.

Today we planted carrots, lettuce, and cilantro leaving a little space left to do some successive cilantro planting in a couple weeks to ensure I have enough for salsa by the time the tomatoes are ready this summer.

Speaking of tomatoes, they along with jalapeño peppers, and cucumbers (actually flowering) are doing great in the computerized grow box. In the LED grow box I have pumpkin, Black Eyed Susan, small sunflowers, and Purple Coneflowers using Grodan Gro-Blocks.

Nice to finally see some stuff in the ground though still hoping the weather gets better before my cucumbers try to escape the grow box.

Remote monitoring of computerized grow box

cheapvegetablegardener — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 03:30:00 +0000

My wife saw this wireless indoor/outdoor thermometer on clearance at Eddie Bauer and knew this was something I could use. I simply put the wireless sensor in the computerized grow box and instant temperature monitoring where at a quick glance I can be sure my summer vegetables are toasty warm in the garage. Sure, I could connect to the machine remotely, or look at the backup digital thermometer inside the box, or check the LCD panel on the box but this definitely gives some piece of mind at a quick glance. I have considered a Vista Sidebar Gadget or have the box report its status on its own RRS feed. This may be a somewhat lower tech solution, but it works. At least until I get around implementing my other ideas and then I can actually know what the temperature is outside.

[As you can see from the indoor temperature we are not just cheap in the garden.]

Finish outdoor seed planting with coffee grounds

cheapvegetablegardener — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 04:58:00 +0000

It has been a blessing that the competition for free coffee grounds at the Starbucks at my work has increased now the weather warmed up and I have freed from the temptation to grab yet another free shiny silver bag of grounds. The reason is, I have put four bags in my compost, worked generous amounts into my vegetable garden and I still have six bags left. Now I am looking at inventive ways to use the rest up. I tried mixing with perlite to make a cheap potting soil (failed still no room for roots) but I believe I have come across one success I thought I would share.

When you are finished planting seeds outdoors apply a thin layer of coffee grounds. This will deter slugs from going after your new seedlings and keep cats from mistaking your nicely loosened and raked soil for their kitty litter.

I have done this for my larger seed plants (peas, garlic, onions, cilantro) but for the small seed plants (carrots, lettuce, spinach) I used the coffee grounds as a seed covering.

So far the results are great. All of my peas/garlic/onions/spinach have sprouted with no signs of pests (four-legged nor zero-legged).

Protecting your seedlings when your weather does not cooperate

cheapvegetablegardener — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 21:33:00 +0000

I like to push ~~the envelope~~ my luck when I decide to start seeds outdoors and this year is not an exception. Just yesterday I posted about planting the rest of my outdoor seeds where karma responded with a freak snow storm and freezing temperatures.

I am not too worried about about the new seeds I planted since many have been sitting dormant in the refrigerator for almost 12 months so few more days in about the same temperature shouldn’t be too traumatic for the lettuce, carrots, and cilantro.

The plants I have concerns with are the spinach seedlings which have just started to break through the soil. Fortunately spinach are pretty cold tolerant but weight of the snow on top of them is not a great way for them to start their time in the world.

After a quick search through the garage I found a great solution, a plastic storage tub, which fit perfectly over the irregular rectangular space I planted them.

Tada. If I wanted to get all fancy, I would add some holes for venting/etc but I chose to set a small cinder block on top and call it good. After a couple days, I should be able to remove it until the next freak storms comes our way.

Stupid groundhog…

Update: This is what the tub looked like after a few minutes in the sun (instant humidome)

Water your plants with authority

cheapvegetablegardener — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 15:51:00 +0000

This is only a concept, but I am surprised SuperSoaker has not already released something similar. Now a gun shaped water nozzle is definitely not necessary or possibly even safe in some neighborhoods but sure to make you more manly while watering your pansies.

design reactor Via Gizmodo

Garden trellis made from CAT-5 network cable

cheapvegetablegardener — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 03:59:00 +0000

Last year over at The Genteel Recessionista their trellis made of twine rotted away. This year they chose to use wire salvaged from some old CAT-5 Ethernet cables to create a new one. They were able to create two trellises for about a dollar each which in my opinion look great.

Free tomato seeds

cheapvegetablegardener — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 02:35:00 +0000

If you want to get some free tomato seeds head over to Campbell’s Help Grow Your Soup site. After simply entering some numbers on the bottom of a can of soup they will send you a free packet of tomato seeds. Seems like a pretty good deal to me, as an added bonus they donate 100 seeds to the National FFA Organization just for making your request.

Be sure to check out there site because they have some good basic gardening tips on the site.

If you want more sources of cheap/free vegetable seeds check out my Cheap Vegetable Seeds post.

Last frost dates are not the same

cheapvegetablegardener — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 22:39:00 +0000

It came to my attention it seemed every time I see my average last frost date it comes up as a different date.

Average Frost Date (Seattle, WA)	Location
3/10	The Old Farmer’s Almanac
4/20	Victory Seed Company
3/22	Ed Hume’s Seeds
4/15	USDA Zones
5/14	USA Gardener
3/25	Clyde’s Garden Planner
3/24	Garden Web

Now the humors part of this is I didn’t go out trying to find as many non-matching dates as I could those came in order from my Google query for last frost dates.

Under conventional wisdom, this number should be simply an average of the last frost dates for the past 30-40 years to give you about a 50% chance of avoiding frost given past history. So it seems really strange why these numbers vary so much.

Then I came across U.S. Climate Normals this site includes no only the dates but the probability of them being true. So if you are a betting man/woman (or just impatient) you can press your luck and plant with variable odds.

For my area (Seattle, WA) I have the following options:

	Probability Level
Threshold	90%	50%	10%
36	Mar27	Apr11	May18
32	Feb13	Mar10	Apr22
28	Jan01	Feb25	Mar20

From the information above, only The Farmer’s Almanac had the number I was really expecting. But given the information above and how late frosts have “bitten” me in the past I think I will give myself a couple extra weeks and plan on my last frost being Mar 24th to hopefully avoid and hard frosts for tender seedlings.

Make your own supplemental LED grow light

cheapvegetablegardener — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 03:19:00 +0000

I never got a round to making a hydroponic system out of my Cafe Steamer, but I did use part of it to create a supplemental red LED light. The construction of this was very easy and you can do the same thing with an old string of LED Christmas lights and some soft plastic (margarine or frozen dinner container) from your recycling bin.

Take the plastic and drill evenly spaced holes through the plastic. Make sure to do a few test holes with a few different bits to determine which will allow a snug fit but not causing you to force/break the bulbs. Once all the holes are drilled, carefully slide in all the bulbs, plug it in, and your project is done.

I am adding this one to my computerized grow box as a little supplemental light for my peppers plants, which I am planning on growing completely indoors this year.

Growing with hydroponics in the grow box

cheapvegetablegardener — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 05:14:00 +0000

There has been some major changes since I started the plants above in my cheap DIY hydroponic setup about a month ago. Since then I have added a couple of pepper plants I saved from thinning. I must say the plants are doing better than I expected. I am still using the same homemade nutrient solution, 2 pumps of liquid plant fertilizer and half a teaspoon of Epsom Salts.

The sickly plant on the bottom left is a cloning experiment which is not going great but the plant is growing roots and apparently surviving.

Some views from below:

How to determine your own personalized last frost date from local weather station

cheapvegetablegardener — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 22:20:00 +0000

There was a discussion in comments on my previous average last frost post on how to determine an accurate last frost. A great point was made by Daphne where every garden can have its own microclimate so the date you find online or in a book could be many weeks off for your microclimate in neighborhood.

To be able to predict your last frost date accurately it takes some history, if you have lived in your current residence and happened been capturing your temperature data accurately by memory or paper you may the information to predict your last frost date.

For people that are relatively new to their residence, like myself, I felt there I had very little information to determine an accurate prediction of my last frost date. This was until I remembered Weather Underground which logs results of schools or private individual that register their weather stations.

After a quick search I was able to find someone who had a weather station in my neighborhood. After doing a custom query of the full range of the of the weather station, which in my case was a little over 4 years, I had all the information I needed. By carefully adding a horizontal line at freezing using a graphics program (Microsoft Paint) I could easily see where the low temperature dipped below the freezing mark.

From a quick glance at the data it appears that the first week of April is a pretty safe date for past few years. But if you look the the irregular low temperatures we have had this month this might be harder than I thought.

Now of course your neighbor may a different microclimate than you, but should get you in a better ballpark than the generic number you find fro your city. You could always spend $500-$1000 on your own weather station to get some better accuracy, but for me seems close enough to me. Though the weather station would be a really cool gadget to have.

Vegetable Gardening Software Review

cheapvegetablegardener — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 14:39:00 +0000

When it comes to planning my vegetable garden I must say this is definitely one of my weaknesses. I make a good attempt to map things out on graph paper ahead of time only to decide to add/remove a crop and eventually resort back to my memory and then get a surprise when I find I planted carrots and cilantro in the same place.

Given I am required to spend around 10 hours a day in front of a computer my first thought was to find a solution online in the form of some sort of vegetable gardening software. I tried some trials of several products and got so frustrated I was about to create my own when I came across GrowVeg.com. After signing up for their 30 day trial within 15 minutes I had my gardens planned out and saved for future reference.

Now if when I change my mind on planting preferences I can easily modify my plan to the new desired configuration. When I see easy I really mean it, it completely passed the “I am a man and don’t read instructions” test but there are some helpful video tutorials for those with more patience. I can honestly say it is so easy a 4-year-old can do it. She saw me “playing” with my garden and asked if she could “play” the gardening game as you can see below.

Once my daughter was done with her garden I proceeded to check out some of the other features. The next feature I came across was by clicking on any of the plants it would return helpful plant information from how to plant, how to harvest, and even how/when to apply fertilizer.

Definitely the feature I was most impressed with was the planting schedule it automatically generates after you have added plants to your plan. Not only does it tell you when to plant but also when to expect your harvest. What I love about this is, if you are like me, you can’t decide what your frost date is, you can simply change it in the settings and the schedule automatically updates. Now if you are forgetful like me, there is even a feature to notify you by email when it is time to plant your seeds.

Once you have built your history of garden plans throughout the years, the program will use this information my warning you if you are planning on planting the same type of plant in the same location you did before. This enforcement of crop rotation can significantly help reduce the accumulation of soil borne fungus/disease.

For more information see GrowVeg.com

Vegetable Gardening is a winner in the recession

cheapvegetablegardener — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 04:59:00 +0000

Well I have been talking about the financial benefits of vegetable gardening for quite some time now and looks like US News and World Report agrees with me. They have given “Home Gardening” the number one winner of the recession.

They tout statistics such as Park Seeds and Burpee showing 20-25% sales growths and the Burpee research that found $50 worth of seeds and fertilizer can yield $1,250 worth or produce. I must say 2500% is a pretty good return on investment, especially in today’s economy.

Gardening Gadget - EasyBloom review

cheapvegetablegardener — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 03:14:00 +0000

I will admit, I have a weakness for electronic gadgets, when I got wind of the EasyBloom I just had to try it out. The EasyBloom is a device that has built-in sensors to measure light intensity, humidity, temperature, and moisture content in your soil. It has three basic modes: Recommend, Monitor, and Water.

With the Recommend setting you place the EasyBloom into a location you want to grow something, let it sit there for at least 24 hours, plug it into your computer, and it will provide a detailed analysis of your planting area and provide a list of plants that would thrive in that location.

The Monitor setting allows you to diagnose problems with a particular plant. You first define the type of plant you want to monitor, turn on the device and place it next to the not so healthy plant, water, return 24 hours later, and plug it again into your computer. It will use the data stored in the sensors to give you a diagnosis to what the plant’s ailment might be.. Of course, this will not diagnose various pest or disease issue but can let you know if you have planted a little too early, in the wrong location, or are not watering enough (or too much) based on your soil structure.

Finally it has the water setting which the name should imply, will notify you when you need to water your plants.

To test this thing out I had three locations in mind to take measurements, each of which would provide a huge diversity of readings.

First, I put the EasyBloom in my grow box in the Recommend mode. I have complete control over the temperature and lighting I definitely could confirm the devices accuracy and I expected to see decent diversity of plants recommended. After placing the device in my grow box for almost 24 hours (see missing results below)

Average Temperature:61° - 72°

Moderate

Sunlight and Shade

Medium

Relative Humidity

Optimal

Overall the readings were nearly exactly what I expected though I was hoping to get a full sun rating, guess I may need to add an extra bulb to the box. Even with my conditions it did recommend 176 plants that I could grow inside it to maturity, though I am going to demand a rematch after adding a little more light

Second, I brought the sensor and set it up next to my office window. Currently I am growing Lemon Verbena I transplanted from my garden. I wasn’t concerned about moisture content so for this reading I didn’t include the moisture sensor and here were the results that were returned.

Average Temperature:65° - 69°

Moderate

Sunlight and Shade

Low

Relative Humidity

Moderate

After this result I felt a little better about my grow box since it at least it was beating of an eastern facing window sill. With this result the program recommended 92 shade loving plants with Lemon Verbena not being one of them, though I have been providing some supplemental light to the plants.

Finally, I used the EasyBloom on my southern facing fence line plot (where I normally grow my cucumbers and tomatoes) This is where I wondered of the usefulness of EasyBloom to actually give good information about planning a garden in the offseason. Though I can not grow tomatoes outside right now due to cold, would it still let me know that it was still possible. Well here are the readings:

Average Temperature:37° - 46°

Cold

Sunlight and Shade

Full sun

Relative Humidity

Optimal

When I put the sensor outside it was raining pretty hard so passed the “weather proof” test. Though it did clear up the next day which is reflected in the “Full Sun” light reading. This was the obvious winner with 3458 plants recommended with the over 5000 in their database.

In conclusion, I will be the first to admit that the EasyBloom would not be on the necessity list for gardening tools, but for a beginning gardener it could provide some valuable incites to help your first few years be much more successful. For nerds/geeks like me it is a pretty cool toy, that I will be sure to be using in testing new lighting and grow box designs in the future.

Tending your garden with am army of robots

cheapvegetablegardener — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 17:20:00 +0000

I must say gardening and robotics are a couple of non relating interests, well at least until now. Fortunately some smart students at MIT have joined these two areas into one. I am a little skeptical about the real world implementation of this, I guess if production cost was low enough and you had a large enough green house; a little army of plant tending robots would be a cool site to see.

Either way, this a really cool academic project. See the video below for the robots watering and harvesting some tomatoes.

“The idea for the project came from work done by Nikolaus Correll, a postdoctoral assistant working in Professor Daniela Rus’ Distributed Robotics Lab. Correll, who came to CSAIL in 2007, saw the possible applications of swarm robotics to an agricultural environment. In the long view, the researchers hope to develop a fully autonomous greenhouse, complete with robots, pots and plants connected via computation, sensing and communication. Each robot is outfitted with a robotic arm and a watering pump, while the plants themselves are equipped with local soil sensing, networking, and computation. This affords them the ability to communicate: plants can request water or nutrients and keep track of their conditions, including fruit produced; robots are able to minister to their charges, locate and pick a specific tomato, and even pollinate the plants.”

[via MIT via Make via Gizmodo]

Cheap Vegetable Seeds

cheapvegetablegardener — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 21:40:00 +0000

Looking at my web logs I have seen the query for "cheap vegetable seeds" a few times so figured would be good to help people find what they are looking for. Being The Cheap Vegetable Gardener, I can do better than "Cheap vegetable seeds" how about some "free vegetable seeds" as well.

Free Vegetable Seeds (pretty much)

Ask your neighbors – Notice your neighbor is a gardener, check if they want to go in on a seed order and share unless you really need 200 carrots this year.
Harvest your own seeds – If your plants bolt to seed early this year, don’t pull them out let them create some seeds for next season. Notice your neighbor has some seeding plants, ask if you can get some (important part is to ask though)
Get seeds from the grocery store – Before putting those vegetables in the compost bin, set the seeds aside to let them dry and you got some free seeds. Though a word of warning many vegetables are hybrids and may be infertile or not produce the same quality of product but hey its free.
Check your spice rack – Many cases you can plant seeds from your spice rack. Some ideas, mustard seed, dill seed, coriander, poppy seed, celery seed. If your spice rack is lacking you can pay a few cents buy a teaspoon of organic spices in bulk, last time I bought dill seeds got about 100 seeds for $0.05.
Seed swap web sites – Below I have listed a few links where you can share seeds with others. This is a great way to find some heirloom seeds you might not be able to find in stores/seed catalogs. In many cases people will offer seeds for free by just sending a SASE (Self Addressed Stamped Envelope) Just remember to pay it forward when you come into a plethora of seeds yourself.

Cheap Vegetable Seeds

Local seed swaps – Many groups will have annual seed swaps where you enter for a small fee and/or a packet or two of seeds and you leave with much more than you came with.
Buy online – If you want to save some time and just buy them check online. You can get great selection and some great prices. For example Park Seed right now is having a $1 seed sale, if you click on the image on the left side you will see many are on sale for $0.75.

UPDATE - Special Park Seed Coupon codes:

If you order by end of April 30, you can get an additional $15 off a $75 purchase by using the code “VICTORY” on your order at Park Seed.
~~If you order by end of March 15th and enter the promo code "NEWPARK" you can save an additional 10% on your order at~~ ~~Park Seed.~~
~~If you order by end of Feb 28th and enter the promo code "SPRINGSEEDS" you can save an additional 10% on your order at~~ ~~Park Seed.~~

Time lapse video of cucumbers, tomatoes, and peppers in grow box

cheapvegetablegardener — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 22:12:00 +0000

As you can see they are starting to take over the even larger box and the camera.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pZwJeXJhUA&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0]

Hardening off plants in the grow box

cheapvegetablegardener — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 23:14:00 +0000

When you have seedlings growing indoors or a greenhouse during their life they have had the opportunity spending it in a near perfect environment with controlled temperatures, consistent lighting, no wind, etc. If you take this happy plant and move it directly into the wild (your garden) it can, and probably will, go into shock leading to its sudden death. The solution to this problem is to hardening off the plant. This is a process of slowly getting the plant accustomed to the real world environment a couple hours at a time.

You start by bringing the plant outside for two hours in the late evening or early morning hours. If the plant begins to wilt let it recover indoors until it appears healthy again. Each day increasing the amount of time it is exposed to the outdoors over 1-2 weeks period, or until the plant can survive a full day/night outside. At this time it is ready to get its permanent home in your garden.

This process takes a lot of patience, which as they say is a virtue. Unfortunately I believe I am missing this virtue. My history of hardening off plants follows a similar pattern; bring out a plant in the evening with the full intentions of bringing it back in after a few hours, unfortunately I forget and it spends its first day out in the cold all night which normally the demise of my summer plants.

This year I am using my grow box to harden off my plants. Normally the grow box runs at about 68-72 degrees which is a great environment for my seedlings. By allowing some hot air to vent and lowering the maximum temperature setting in the software I am able to bump the temperature down to a range of 57-65 degrees. After a few days I will drop the temperature a few degrees until it has similar low temperature to the outdoors, while still staying at a safe temperature for the plants.

Given today using an unknown neighbor’s weather station we had a high of 48.2F and low of 35.1F I still have some time before I can safely bring my tomatoes/cucumbers outside but they should be toughened (hardening) up and ready to go when it is.

First ever CVG giveaway – Free one year subscription to GrowVeg.com

cheapvegetablegardener — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 14:51:00 +0000

GrowVeg.com has graciously offered us a free one year subscription to their site ($25 value) to give away. To enter simply enter a comment to this post and a name will be randomly selected using some sort of complicated means.

We will pick a winner in a few weeks but if you can’t wait to get started planning your garden go ahead and sign up for the free 30 day trial and if you are lucky you can continue using it for free. Good luck.

UPDATE: Just for some shameless self promotion, if you mention this contest on your site you are free to add a second comment to double your chances to win.

UPDATE #2: Drawing will be on 03/31/09, so if you have not entered time is running out.

Gadget to make time lapsed videos in your garden

cheapvegetablegardener — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 04:48:00 +0000

If you liked my time lapsed videos in my how box like the ones below. Here is an easy way to do the same in your garden. For just the mere price of $159.95 this weatherproof camera will take 1280×1024 resolution photos at an interval of 5 seconds to 24 hours.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pZwJeXJhUA&hl=en&fs=1]

Via Hammacher Schlemmer, Via Oh Gizmo

And the GrowVeg subscription goes to….

cheapvegetablegardener — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 00:56:00 +0000

There were 57 entries so I had my kids pick a number between 1 and 57 and they decided on 51. So the winner is Robj98168 the 51st commenter, please send me an email using the “Contact” link at the top of the page and I will send you the information to activate your one year subscription.

Thank you for everyone that participated and hope to have more contests in the future.

Cheap fogger hydroponics final results

cheapvegetablegardener — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 00:06:00 +0000

In case you missed them here is the original post on the creation of this fogger hydroponic system, and the latest update (before this one).

The plants still are still looking pretty healthy with the exception of a little phosphorus deficiency, but the blame goes on me for that one. Been a little busy at work and have been neglecting the plants.

I decided to end this experiment since their roots were starting to get tangled and I want to use these plants for another project.

These roots are healthier than they look, some soil leached in when I put some of my pepper plants on top of the hydroponic box.

This pepper plant look really good, haven’t decided what to do with it yet. Maybe the ~~victim~~ volunteer for the next hydroponic experiment.

Always have a “Plan B” in gardening

cheapvegetablegardener — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 16:03:00 +0000

In college I had a business class, it definitely wasn’t the most memorable since all I remember it had something to do with working with small businesses. There was an important takeaway, which was always have a “Plan B”. The teacher used this term in particular when we were preparing to give presentations to the class, it was fine to use a PowerPoint presentation, though better have some overhead slides “just in case,” which many times became a necessity in the end due to “technical issues”.

This advice definitely applies to gardening as well. In my case, especially if you want to push your planting date for your summer vegetables due to your short growing season. It is great to be ambitious and plan on getting your tomatoes out weeks before your last frost date, though when the inevitable frost comes and kills your plants you need a “Plan B” Last year, I really didn’t have one so I was forced to go to my nursery and blowing my gardening budget on the limited selection of summer vegetable seedlings.

This year I was a little smarter and planted my seeds still ambitiously but also planted a few more a couple week later. This way, if Mother Nature is cruel to my optimism I still have a backup. If she is kind I always have some extra tomato/pepper seedlings to offer to friends and neighbors or create a couple more upside down tomato/pepper planters.

3rd Annual Ladybug release

cheapvegetablegardener — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 18:15:00 +0000

In case you missed the first and second annual lady bug release, you can follow those posts. We have never had a serious aphid or spider mite problem and I like to feel our annual release of lady bugs is the reason why. Either way, great entertainment for the girls for a couple hours for a $6.00 bag of lady bugs.

Lady bugs sometimes naturally choose to wander from the location where you release them and may just take residence in your neighbors yard, so I have thought about releasing them in my neighbors yard so they will end up in mine. Fortunately there are a few tricks to help entice your lady bugs from leaving your garden.

Give them a nap. Before you release them put them in your refrigerator for at least a couple hours. This will make them go asleep (dormant) until you are ready to release them. This way when you bring them outside in their sleepy stupor they may be more inclined to check out your garden before heading over your neighbors.

Feed them. After watering your garden before releasing them spray the ground with some sugar water. This will entice them to feast on that while waiting for a the aphids and spider mites to show up.

Choose the right time. Put your lady bugs out as the sun is falling and ensure that they are shaded from sun when releasing. This will prevent them from hiding from the hot sun and possibly finding a new place to make home.

Encourage your neighbors to have their own lady bug releases. One of our friends and neighbors had a great time with their girls releasing lady bugs last year and fortunately they are close enough that we may be sharing some bugs from both of our releases.

In the past I have had good results with the releases maybe seeing 30-40 lady bugs still crawling around on my plants the next day. This year had great results with hundreds of lady bugs in my aphid killing army.

Guest post: Huge strawberry

cheapvegetablegardener — Sat, 02 May 2009 21:57:00 +0000

I have been pretty busy lately and was happy and honored that Megan from Megan’s Garden would do a guest post about a strawberry she found.

It was a crazy day I found a strawberry, a double strawberry . I am not kidding. A strawberry is not like this. I ate it. It was yummy. Find one in your strawberry box. I want one again.Their hard to find.

Mulch your garden with human hair

cheapvegetablegardener — Fri, 08 May 2009 22:37:00 +0000

Need a renewable mulching source that is completely renewable? Check your shower drain.

After spending 18 years as a hair stylist, Phil McCrory got an idea. He developed "SmartGrow" — mats woven from human hair. The product is becoming a popular organic alternative to chemical herbicides

If you don’t have the time to collect and weave your own human hair mats you can always purchase one from SmartGrow from under $4.00 to over $15.00 depending on the size you need.

Winner of $100 Gift Certificate from Home Depot

cheapvegetablegardener — Fri, 22 May 2009 14:04:00 +0000

There were so many great entries I couldn’t just pick one and with no budget to select multiple I settled using random.org.

And the winner is lucky number commenter 33…Chandra. Please send us a email using the “Contact” link at the top of the page within 72 hours otherwise I will select another random commenter.

We have partnered with The Home Depot Garden Club to offer a $100 Home Depot Gift certificate to a lucky reader.

To enter the contest is simple, just respond with a comment on how you would spend $100 at Home Depot with a home/gardening project and we will pick our favorite and send you out a gift certificate.

If you don’t have any ideas, here are some things I would do with the money (unfortunately I am not eligible) that may would help:

Create a nice cold frame to extend my growing season
Add drip irrigation to my garden which I neglect to water
Install a rain barrel (they have complete kits there)
New and improved grow box
Shelves and lighting for seedlings next season
Summer vegetable plants (peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers, etc) for those I was a little too ambitious with earlier this season.

None of these sound good to you? Feel free to check out some of the DIY Projects at The Home Depot Garden Club or many of their content and tools on their site.

Entry Deadline: 5/21/09 12:00 PM (Pacific)

Make your own upside down tomato planter - UPDATE

cheapvegetablegardener — Mon, 25 May 2009 03:06:00 +0000

Every time my daughter sees the Topsy Turvy commercial on TV she asks when we can grow tomatoes upside down. I am definitely not one to pay $15 to $20 to buy one of these things in the store when I could have the fun of making my own for much less money.

Though this has been commercialized recently, the concept growing plants upside down is not a new one. Many people have been growing plants like tomatoes in 5 gallon buckets or hanging baskets for decades. Not having any spare bucket or hanging basket to sacrifice I went with my daughters suggestion and used a 2 liter bottle.

Materials required

Empty 2-liter bottle
Eye bolt with washer
Duct tape, contact paper, or spray paint
Drill or hot nail

Step 1 – Create access hole

Make a hole on the side of bottle, this has two purposes: it allows adding soil much easier and also provides an convenient way to water your plant. I used a 2-inch hole cutter, though you may also carefully cut a hole with a knife.

Step 2 – Add the hanger

By design 2-liter bottles are extra thick in on the bottom immediate center which will make a perfect place to hang it. I used a drill of the same diameter as the eye bolt. This allowed me to thread the bolt right into the bottle, which was pretty strong it itself. Though expecting a great harvest, I also added a bolt to prevent the discovery of my plant on the ground after having a hard fall.

Step 3 – Covering your planter

Roots can be damaged if exposed to light for long periods of time so you need to cover your planter. You should consider color depending on where you live. In colder regions a darker color will help keep the soil warm on cool mornings, though in hotter climates a dark color could fry the plant. I would recommend a medium to light green color for moderate heat absorption and little more aesthetically pleasing in the garden. Not having any paint I used good ole duct tape. Wrapping around the entire bottle (even covering the access hole.

I then cut an X through the access hole and bent the corners in to soften the rough edges caused by cutting the hole.

Step 4 – Decorate (optional unless you have kids)

We used permanent markers to personalize both of my daughters planters.

This completes the construction of your upside down tomato planter. I will admit the first design flaw of this planter is its size. It will be fine for root growth but it can dry out very quickly. In response to this water retention was my primary concern when deciding on medium to fill the planters with.

I chose 2 parts WonderSoil (peat moss or coconut coir okay substitutes) , 1 part perlite, and 1 part Groden granulates. WonderSoil it contains coconut coir which retains water well but also contains water retaining polymers. The perlite and Groden granulates both provide water retaining properties an allow for proper aeration for easy unrestricted root growth.

To give the plants a good head start I also mixed in a couple of tablespoons of bone meal and tablespoon of balanced organic fertilizer. Add some water until the mix has the consistency of a wrung out sponge .

Lastly I used my tomato plants from my hydroponic experiment and carefully fed the roots into the now bottom opening of the bottle. We then added our soil mix until it reached the bottom of the access hole. Given the plants had a well established root system just the friction and weight of the soil is enough to keep the plant from falling out

Even though the medium retains water well the plants should be watered every day to the point until some water comes out the bottom. Within 24 hours we can already see the leaves turning over to face the sun.

You can also try other heat loving plants such as peppers, cucumbers, and zucchini. So if you every wanted to try growing plants upside down with the directions above you can have your own for less than $0.50.

If you want something a little more aesthetically pleasing there is always the commercial option, this one from Gardener’s Supply seems much more sturdy than the ones I have seen on TV:

UPDATE: 05/24/09

It has finally started to get a little warmer at night in my garden so seems like a good time for a little update on the upside down tomato planter. I wish I could give a direct comparison of the growth of these plants with plants a planted at the same time in the ground though unfortunately we had a light freeze that killed them off. Interesting enough both plants in the upside down tomato planter survived and even are showing some small blossoms.

Now as part of my pepper planting experiment, I also put a pepper plant in an upside planter with much less exciting success. Just to test if my super paranoid water retention worries had any backing I simply filled this one with regular potting mix. And the plant dried out very quickly which shows in the following results.

Given these results I am going to stick with my 2 parts WonderSoil (peat moss or coconut coir okay substitutes) , 1 part perlite, and 1 part Groden granulates recipe in the future.

How to make a cheap pea trellis

cheapvegetablegardener — Wed, 27 May 2009 04:37:00 +0000

This is really two trellises in one. I started by taking a couple bamboo stakes (reused from a couple of one season too long Halloween scarecrows) and bound them together at the top using some twine. I then put the ends in the corners of my garden leaning against the cinder blocks surrounding my raised garden. I following this by adding some twine up the trellis to allow the peas to climb up.

Thing started to get a little crowded so I browed a tip from Martha Stewart, now she recommends black birch branches, but I decided to go with the dead bush I had in my back yard. I was already chopping it up to compost so saved some of the larger branches, stabbed them in the ground and ala pea trellis.

Though the two part trellis was more of an accident, in many ways I really like the support of the bamboo along with the abstract reach of the branches.

Pea Blossom

cheapvegetablegardener — Fri, 29 May 2009 23:51:00 +0000

Caring for your pet caterpillar - UPDATE

cheapvegetablegardener — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 04:35:00 +0000

I would like to introduce you to the newest member of our family, named by the kids as “Emily”

Now normally these are some critters you want to keep out of your garden but with my kids asking for the "Live Butterfly Garden," bringing in a caterpillar from inside and putting it into a jar seemed like a much more cost effective option.

Growing up I have caught caterpillars with the great hopes that I would be able to witness its metamorphosis into a butterfly. Unfortunately, the lack of the internet or a nearby library I never got the knowledge of the particular “butterfly” I caught wouldn’t eat just any leaves I threw in it . Caterpillars are very picky eaters and each specie only will consume particular types of leaves.

If you found your caterpillar munching on a plant you are in luck and you can just pick a couple leaves a day for your caterpillar. They will not eat old or dry leaves and must be replaced daily. In our case our caterpillar was found on a plastic play set, which sort of limited out options. My girls did pick some leaves of various plants in our yard, and if we are lucky we may find one our caterpillar enjoys.

To improve the odds I was able to identify this caterpillar as a Painted Lady, which enjoys nettles and thistle. Both of which grow great in my area, though none is growing in my yard (which normally would be a good thing)

This led to a nice walk in the woods to attempt to find some leaves for the caterpillars distinguished palate, unfortunately we did not find any nettles or thistles though came back with a good variety of leaves.

That Butterfly Garden is looking like a bargain at the moment.

UPDATE – May 31, 2008

We are happy to announce that “Emily” has started has started her transformation into becoming a beautiful butterfly (or moth if my amateur identification is incorrect). We were successful in finding their favorite food which happened to be the little clovers growing in our back yard. Definitely a case of good reason to not kill all weeds with pesticides in your yard, by the way the rabbits love the stuff more than my lettuce so added bonus.

As you can see in the background “Emily” has some friends with her (3 total) though currently unnamed, though I am sure by the time my daughter reads this post she will fix that.

Stay tuned in 7-10 days hopefully we will have a butterfly/moth release.

UPDATE – 06/26/2009

Well 7-10 days turned into more like 26 days, just when we were thinking the worse, Emily emerged as a beautiful brown moth.

For info on the flight lessons and release, check out this post.

Make a greenhouse out of plastic bottles

cheapvegetablegardener — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 04:01:00 +0000

Not sure how long it would take to accumulate 1500 2-liter plastic bottles but if you happen to have that many piled up in your garage you have some makings for your own greenhouse.

Basic idea is you take the labels off the bottles, cut the tops off slide a pole through a hole in the bottom of the bottle, and repeat. After over a thousand iterations you have yourself a pretty cool looking greenhouse and saved most of over 1500 plastic bottles from ending up in a landfill.

This is not practical for construction for me though am considering a smaller version for a cold frame…I better start drinking up this summer.

If you want to see the full instructions check out the detailed plans.

via New World Geek

Kids eating vegetables from the garden

cheapvegetablegardener — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 15:58:00 +0000

One of my many reasons for growing a vegetable garden was to encourage my daughters (four and seven) to eat more vegetables. Currently other than a few raw carrots they do everything they can to avoid them. In the previous years, with the exception of strawberries and potatoes in “Baked French Fry form,” I have been the primary consumer of our garden harvest.

This changed this weekend when my youngest daughter tried and decided she loved peas (pea pods) I even heard the quote, “I like peas more than fries” and if you only knew how much she loved fries you would understand how much of a compliment this is. Not to miss out on the extra attention her younger sister was getting, our older daughter tried the peas with less stellar results though definitely gave her points for trying.

Right now our plants are not keeping up with demand with my daughter eating every pod that comes out. The old primary consumer is patiently waiting for the time when the plants are producing way more than we can keep up with so I can have some extra sweet peas myself. But really who could deny that cute face any delicious peas.

Lemon Verbena Lemonade Recipe

cheapvegetablegardener — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 16:15:00 +0000

I am moving into a new office this week so I had to bring a couple of my lemon verbena plants home and given the great weather we were having I decided to move them right back into the garden. Fortunately they were a little leggy from lack of sunlight in my office so I cut off some of the dropping stems and was about to put them in the compost until I got the idea to make some Lemon Verbena Lemonade.

The basic idea is the same as regular lemonade though you add Lemon Verbena leafs and use fewer lemons. It has been said that lemon verbena can have calming effects and can reduce stress; sounds like a great summer drink to me.

Lemon Verbena Lemonade

24 Lemon Verbena Leaves
2 lemons
Sugar (or artificial sweetener)
Water
Peppermint sprig (optional)

Directions: Squeeze lemon juice lemons into a small pot. Add Lemon remains, Lemon Verbena leaves, 2 cups of sugar, and approximately 4 cups of water to pot. Bring to boil and let boil for 4 minutes. Strain mixture into 1-2 gallon container and fill with water. Add more sugar to taste (kids like the stuff tasting like Kool-Aid though I would recommend less sugar) Add ice and enjoy on hot summer day. Given Max and Ruby’s grandma “secret ingredient” to lemonade is peppermint we can’t make any lemonade without it so this part is completely optional.

Gardening Gadget Deal of the Day

cheapvegetablegardener — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 22:08:00 +0000

Want a EasyBloom but $59.95 is a little out of your price range? Well good news, right now it is on sale for $20 off so you can have this little gardening gadget for the low price of only $39.95 with free shipping through Amazon.com. I have no idea how long it will stay at this price so if you were thinking about picking one of these up, now is the time.

If you have no idea what I am talking about, check out my full review of the EasyBloom Plant Sensor.

Aquarium with plant filtration system powered by fish poop

cheapvegetablegardener — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 23:49:00 +0000

Yet another design concept, though seems like there are definitely plans for this one to go into production next year. The concept is very simple, fish poop in the water, pump brings “soiled” water to filter through some river sand, bacteria converts “impurities” to nitrates, and finally the plants absorb the nitrates as food returning cleaner water back to the fishes.

Now this has a couple of good target markets for environmental friendly types who can feel good about the natural filtration of the water. Second is lazy types who can use this as a reason to not have to change the water for an extra week. I fall under both categories so if priced right I may be seeing one of these on my desk in the next year, unless the price is horrendous in which I will be creating my own version which I will be sure to share here.

[Duende Studio via CoolHunting vi Gizmodo]

How to build a raised vegetable garden bed?

cheapvegetablegardener — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 13:15:00 +0000

I have been asked this question a few times by friends and family so I thought I would share my answers.

The first you have to pick a location. There are a few things to keep in mind when choosing the location; sun, water, convenience, and competition for nutrients.

SUN - You want to pick a location where the plants will get adequate sun for success. If this is an area where you will be growing summer vegetable a southern facing location should be used. For other cooler crops East/West facing should suffice.

WATER - You want a place that is convenient to water your plants. If you have to unravel/coil up 200 feet of hose every time you water you most likely will begin to have under watered plants during the summer months. If a hose is not really even an option the method of filling a couple five gallon buckets and bringing them to your garden is great exercise.

CONVENIENCE – The more often you walk by your garden the more likely you will not forget about (or neglect it) If it happens to pass it on your trip from my car to your back door you most likely will notice suffering plants or potential additions for tonight's dinner to harvest.

COMPETITION FOR NUTRIENTS – Make sure your garden is not too close to other planting such as established plants or trees. This will force both sets of plants roots to compete for water and nutrients where both may end up coming up short.

Now you know where to build your garden next is to determine the best materials to build you garden out of. Personally I like cinder blocks since they never have to be replaced, relatively inexpensive, have ability to hold solar energy and as an added bonus have great little holes to grow strawberries in. Now on the negative side I will be the first to admit they are not the prettiest thing to look at and don’t really make the most comfortable bench to sit on.

Below I have included some of the pro and cons of various building materials.

Building Material	Cost per linear foot	Tools required	Pros	Cons
Cinder Blocks	$0.97	None (other big muscles)	Extra plating area in holes	Hard to sit on, not as aesthetically pleasing
Chiseled Wall blocks (2 high)	$5.96	None (other big muscles)	Most aesthetically	Expensive
Bricks (3 high)	$1.36	None (if dry stacked)	More aesthetically pleasing than cinder blocks	Expensive, and mortar may be required depending on height
Wood – Cedar (.75” X 8”)	$1.60	Drill (screws)	Looks good, natural appearance	Wood is organic so eventually will decompose. Some assembly required

Third step is actual construction of your raised garden bed. I agree with Mel Bartholomew's recommendation (from Square Foot Gardening fame)where he suggests limiting the width of the garden bed to no greater that 4 feet. This allows for easy watering, weeding, and harvesting of your vegetables without any serious reaching. This also works out good since lumber normally comes in 8 or 12 foot increments so very limited waste.

For all methods I recommend digging about 2 inches around your perimeter of your planned raised garden bed. This first will give you a visual idea of your new space but also give the blocks/bricks/wood a good foundation to prevent slipping. Speaking of foundation the weight of block/bricks is enough to keep the dirt in place, though with wood I would recommend creating a 4 foot 1X1 as a cross support every 4 feet to help spread out some of the load as you add soil.

Finally it is time to fill your your garden bed with some great soil. If you happen to be luck enough to have this in your backyard go ahead and fill it up. For the rest of us this is a great time to start your garden off to a good start. I recommend a recipe of three main parts (compost, filler, and “fluff”) of equal quantities. Compost should be self explanatory, great organic material thriving with life. For filler I recommend materials like coconut coir, peat moss, or even some good topsoil. For “fluff” add a material such as perlite or vermiculite to add some moisture retention and some great aeration for your plants roots.

Now all my recommendations above all mention a height of less than 12 inches. There are some good reasons for this given there are not too many vegetables you can’t grow in less than six inches of good quality soil. Assuming you are lucky like me and have an abundance of clay in your backyard this means significantly less soil to purchase when filling. Now this is harder on the back bending over so for someone with limited mobility you can bring up the garden bed to a more comfortable height though there really is no reason to fill the garden bed with 2-3 feet of soil. This is an area to be creative, maybe some free fill dirt for the first couple feet, aluminum cans, anything that can take up space and not use your precious garden soil.

Getting rid of aphids on pepper plants

cheapvegetablegardener — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 03:09:00 +0000

First of all I am a little embarrassed that I let the infestation get this bad before noticing. I unfortunately set the grow box to have the sunrise at 1:00am and the lights always were off by the time I got home. Though the cause is not as important as how to get rid of them.

If this plant was outside my local lady bug population would have kept these buggers in check though they seemed to thrive without the vicious predators. For an outdoor plant a quick high pressure spray of water on the the leaves (as well as underside of leaves) would take care of the problem. Though this does not kill the aphids, they will starve to death before they make it anywhere to do any more damage.

This has not been my first battle with aphids, so fortunately I had some insecticidal soap on hand. I sprayed the entire plant from the top and bottom. I removed the major yellowing leaves and did another quick spray. Now if you don’t have any insecticidal soap, or just want to save $5 on buying a bottle here are a couple of proven recipes:

Simple Aphid Killer Spray

1 tsp dishwashing soap
Fill spray bottle with water

Directions: Shake and spray liberally on tops and bottom of leaves ensuring aphids are covered completely.

Complex Aphid Killer Spray

1.5 tablespoon baking soda
1 tablespoon Murphy's Oil Soap
1 tablespoon Vegetable Oil
1 tablespoon Vinegar
1 gallon water

Directions: Pour into spray bottle and spray liberally on tops and bottom of leaves ensuring aphids are covered completely.

Extra Spicy Aphid Killer Spray

3 hot peppers chopped finely
1 quart of water

Directions: Mix peppers with water and let seep overnight. Strain and pour into spray bottle and spray liberally on tops and bottom of leaves ensuring aphids are covered completely. WARNING: You care not to get this spray in your eyes.

US Department of Agriculture Mix

2 tsp dishwashing soap
1 cup of vegetable oil
Fill spray bottle with water

Directions: Shake and spray liberally on tops and bottom of leaves every 9-10 days, ensuring aphids are covered completely.

If none of these solutions work, squish those buggers with your fingers being sure to include a sinister laugh while doing it. Which even if you are squeamish, this is what you will see if you let them have their way.

Growing peppers at high latitudes - UPDATE

cheapvegetablegardener — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 03:28:00 +0000

Here in the Seattle area we are, as you say, latitudelly challenged. We are fortunately to have the Pacific Ocean to give us mild winters and summers though our distance from the equator provides our plants with less intense light and a relatively short growing season for summer crops. One in particular difficult summer crop are peppers.

This is important because one of the major exports of my garden are the ingredients to allow me to make homemade garden salsa (tomatoes, garlic, onions, cilantro, jalapeño peppers) Al ingredients come from my garden (except for jalapeño peppers) This year I am determined to fix this.

I have a couple strategies for doing this, the first is to “start early” pepper plants require 80-110 days from seedling to harvest, timing is everything. Given our late winters here over the past couple years, I don’t really have much of a cushion here and would also be nice if the peppers were ripe when the tomatoes are getting red as well. To get a head start many weeks ago I planted several jalapeño pepper seeds and they currently are turning into some great looking pepper plants in my grow box. As they have grown I have potted them up to encourage them to continue to grow vigorously.

Not wanting to put my ~~eggs~~ peppers in one basket, I have decided to try a few different techniques in case one completely fails I hopefully have a couple backups:

Grow pepper plant in grow box in WonderSoil
Grow pepper plant hydroponically using a Grodan Gro-Blocks
Grow pepper plant in the ground beside my tomatoes
Grow pepper plant in large pot in sunniest location

I honestly can not really predict the outcome of this experiment. The grow box as the advantage of accurate temperature control but the CFLs though work great can’t compare to full sun. On the other hand outdoors has the great light intensity of the actual sun though given the pepper plants can stop growing lacking 60 degree nights and at least 70 degrees during day. Given we don’t have too many nights greater than 60 degrees the grow box might have a chance.

UPDATE – 05/25/2009

Plant grown in WonderSoil in grow box at temperature controlled to remain above 60 degrees at night and a high of 80 during the day. This is amazing results compared to the 2.5 inch plants I started with less than a month ago.

Plant grown hydroponically using a Grodan Gro-Blocks also in temperature controlled grow box.

Plant grow in actual dirt outside in good light

Plant grown in pot outside…well this one is already out after some high winds and cold mornings this one was looking pretty bad to I brought to the infirmary (the grow box) to bring it back to life, which seems to have done wonders.

The obvious winner at this point is the pepper plant in WonderSoil in the grow box, though I have noticed some recent growth in the outdoor plant now the weather has started warming up, so might be some time for Mother Nature to redeem itself. Overall I have been very impressed with the results of the grow box but still need to see if I can get flowers and fruit…until the next update…

UPDATE – 06/20/2009

We were blessed with some warm weather so the outdoor potted plant has been doing great blossoming and almost a dozen of good sized peppers growing.

I have seen plenty of blossoms on the pepper plants in the grow box though I have not have and fruit set. I have two theories what is causing this, first is we have hat some hot weather with the garage getting over 85 degrees even with best exhaust and airflow it was hard to keep the temperature from exceeding 90 degrees which causes the blossoms to drop. The second reason is I have been attempting to hand pollinate the flowers with the absence of some nice bees to do the work for me. I have been using a fine paintbrush without much luck. Switching to having better airflow and using a Q-Tip to simulate a bees bottom.

The plant I had in the ground eventually got overtaken by a pumpkin plant which I removed and moved to the grow box given it had not shown any significant signs of growth since I transplanted it there.

Right now seems the best method is grow the pepper plant to about 18 inches and just let mother nature take care of things at that point.

Picking strawberries in the garden

cheapvegetablegardener — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 21:31:00 +0000

In the past couple years we have grown strawberries the story has been my oldest daughter salivating over the strawberries asking, “Is it red enough yet?”

This year her desire for strawberries is just as great though with the plant maturing as well as the additional plant we propagated last year she has been easily getting her fill with plenty more ripe strawberries on the plants. Not wanted to be wasteful, we went out and picked all of the ripe strawberries.

Not having enough to make something like jam or even some strawberry shortcake for the family we opted to make a strawberry milkshake.

Strawberry milkshake recipe

handful of strawberries
2 scoops of ice cream
milk

Directions: Add strawberries and ice cream to blender. Blend adding milk until it has the consistency of…well…a milkshake.

And then there was a beautiful butterfly..err moth

cheapvegetablegardener — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 14:32:00 +0000

Well one of our caterpillar finally emerged from its cocoon. Looks like my identification was wrong (not surprising) since it turned into a beautiful brown moth.

As promised my youngest daughter dressed up in her butterfly costume to teach the baby moth how to fly.

After a few minutes of doing jumping jacks to demonstrate the moth figured things out and fly away to freedom.

How to grow onions and not onion flowers

cheapvegetablegardener — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 15:18:00 +0000

Last year, I grew a lot of onion seeds but unfortunately not many large onions I could use in the kitchen. I have learned a few things since then which hopefully can help you not have the same problem.

Use small onion sets: Last year I selected all of the largest onion sets in the 100 count bag which from some of my experimentation this year proves why almost all of my onions bolted to seed. Smaller onion sets were much less likely to bolt to seed during normal temperature fluctuations. Now what should you do with those large onion sets? Why not think of them as flower bulbs since that is what they will end up eventually. Given you know the onions will grow pretty small so you can plant a 1-2 inches apart and they do make a quite attractive flower and as an extra bonus you can collect the onion seeds for next year.

Grow from seeds: Well if you are like me with all of your plants bolting to seed on the positive side that gave you a considerable number of onion seeds. Now you have a couple choices here, you can plant some seeds at the end of the summer which will create basically small onion sets which will go dormant over the winter and pop back up during spring. The other option is to plant seeds indoors 9-10 weeks before last spring frost and plant seedlings the size of a pencil or smaller into your garden.

Try a different onion variety: The ultimate reason flowers bolt is temperature fluctuations which tricks the onion that it has completed its biennial (2 year) growing pattern which results into the onion jumping into its last stage of its life, flowering. Now unless you are growing in a heated greenhouse or grow box, unfortunately you don’t have too many options in controlling the weather. Fortunately you can select onion varieties that are more tolerant to temperature fluctuations.

Hopefully with these tips you can grow a few less onions flowers and a few extra onions. Though if you still get a few onion flowers you do have a couple choices. Pull it up and user the smaller onion in your kitchen or simply embrace the flower and the bees it will attract and get plenty of onion seeds for next year.

Volunteer potatoes

cheapvegetablegardener — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 15:24:00 +0000

Well I wasn’t planning on growing potatoes this year but looks like I have a couple of volunteers from last year. This could turn out to be a fortunately accident since they are currently growing under my onions and garlic. If they happen to stay low enough might actually get two decent crops in the same square footage.

Any predictions?

Growing sprouts in a Mason jar

cheapvegetablegardener — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 16:01:00 +0000

My daughter was required to do a presentation which included an experiment using plants for school and of course her mother directed her to me. Given there was not a lot of time until the presentation I suggested that she grows sprouts, given you can go from seeds to a jar full of sprouts in less than a week.

Construction

You really can grow sprouts in almost anything. We chose a mason jar, though plastic storage containers, trays, or even fabric bags (just drip in water and hang)

The important thing is to provide plenty of airflow, if you don’t your seeds will produce an awful stank that you won’t want in your house let alone eat. We used a piece of an old pair of leggings, which we stretched over the opening of the jar and applied the mason jar ring….well that's about it.

How to Grow Sprouts

The process starts with seed selection. You can grow any seed as a sprout though you may not want to eat them. Cilantro is a good example it will grow great but the root of a cilantro/yellow mustard sprouts are very potent so use with cooking, not raw. Some good suggestions are alfalfa, broccoli, buckwheat, cabbage, chickpea, garlic, lentil, oats, yellow mustard, peas, onion, radish, sunflower, fennel, arugula, pink kale, fenugreek, wheat, or wheatgrass. In our case my daughter wanted to determine how quickly and big seeds grew depending on the initial size, so I gave her a several different types of seeds for her experiment.

Take about a tablespoon of seeds and soak in room temperature water with a couple drops of liquid fertilizer overnight.

In the morning drain, rinse and let sit out of direct sunlight. Repeat the drain/rinse process once a day (twice a day if your sprouts begin to smell) During the first couple days it is advisable to shake and/or roll the jar on its side to allow the seeds to spread out a little. Doing this simple procedure within about a week you should have a jar full of fresh healthy sprouts.

Why grow sprouts?

Fun: Great for kids with limited attention spans. Within a day or two they can see their seeds sprout growing more and more each day. It is also a great way to keep your sanity during those long winter months.

Cheap: For mere pennies you can grow pounds of greens.

Nutritious: These little sprouts pack a ton of nutrients for their little size.

Easy: The process is pretty fool proof, just rinse with water, set them on your counter, and eat. What could be easier

How to grow seeds in your garden

cheapvegetablegardener — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 16:05:00 +0000

Because of a strange heat wave we had in June, I seem to be growing more seeds than vegetables this year. Now as they say when life gives you lemons, make lemonade. In that spirit I am planning on increasing the number of plants I will allow to completely go to seed this year.

I have always saved cilantro seeds, the first time it was almost an accident my daughter liked the pretty white flowers and after neglecting my garden at the end of the summer I had perfectly dried cilantro seeds on the plant. Free and renewable supply of seeds, what could be better. If I don’t have you convinced here are some more reasons:

Cheap: You really can’t beat free. With the price of seeds increasing depending on the variety of seeds you grow this could save you a considerable amount of money per year.

Easy: The creation of seeds of seeds is a completely natural process that has been happening for millions of years. In many cases you can do practically nothing other than harvest the seeds before the birds do.

Natural selection: With a little attention you can hand select only your best plants to harvest seeds from. If the plant survived to produce seeds it has to be at least a little disease tolerant and if you intentionally pick plants that bolted early you can also establish your own slow bolting variety.

Limited availability: Even with all the resources on the internet your favorite seed company may not always carry your favorite varieties or in some cases just a few seeds might be hard to come by. If you play your cards right you may even be able to make a few bucks selling your rare seeds.

Seed Exchange: If you collect seeds you more than likely will get more seeds than you need for the next 2-3 years from a single plant. This is a great supply to use for local or mail seed exchanges. Not only are you supplying someone else with seeds they need but also adding seeds to your collection which you can harvest and repeat the process again.

Growing sprouts: If you are paying for seeds growing sprouts for some plant varieties can be pretty expensive…unless your seeds are free. This is a good healthy way to use up some of those extra seeds you can’t get rid of any other way.

This year I am planning on harvesting spinach, pea, carrot, and radish seeds (along with my previous onions and cilantro) so stay tuned for more details.

How to freeze berries

cheapvegetablegardener — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 16:15:00 +0000

A well proven way to save money on your food budget is to stock up on produce while they are in season. Not only do they taste better but they also can be significantly cheaper. Now these “purchases” can be from your local grocery store, U-Pick farm, fruit stand, farmers market, free roadside berries, or even from your own garden.

Given the attractive prices of these fruits it may be tempting to buy more than you need. Which I would say go ahead and buy to your hearts content. After you have made all the jam you can eat in a year (don’t make 15 jars of jam when you only consume 4 per year) one effective and easy way to store your extra berries for winter is freezing.

For the impatient one you can simply dump the berries into a Tupperware or freezer bag and toss them in the freezer. Though in the end this will give a solid clump of berries which you would need to pull out an ice pick to separate the berries if you only require a few.

The more preferred technique is the following:

Wash your berries: Give your berries a quick rinse and let them dry in a colander for about 10-15 minutes
Spread your berries: Lay down some wax or parchment paper on a cookie sheet and spread your berries on a single layer just ensuring that the berries are not touching. If a couple touch it is not the end of the world they will just be close friends in the freezer.
Freeze your berries: Carefully put the berries in the coldest part of your freezer overnight.
Pack your berries for the winter: When it comes to freezer storage and fruit air is always the enemy. If you have a vacuum sealer that would be your best option but if you are like me and don't here is a cheap alternative. Take a regular old Ziploc freezer bag and insert a straw on one end, close the bag as tight as possible around the straw, suck air until you get dizzy, and quickly seal the bag. Just to be extra cautious I will then throw that bag in another bag for an extra layer of protection. Note: You have a little time to complete this step but don’t want to allow enough time for your berries to begin to defrost and refreeze stuck together.
Label the bag(s) and throw them in the freezer

Now to avoid getting too scientific (size/speed of water molecule formation) the faster you can get your berries frozen the better the quality your berries will be when you pull them out. If you have enough berries (or not enough cookie sheets) you can also add your berries and some broken up dry ice to a metal bowl (be sure to wear gloves) and stir to replace step 3. This will get you the fastest freeze and best quality though unless you are freezing many flats of berries I would recommend the cookie sheet method.

Following these steps you should have some tasty berries you can pull out individually from the freezer all winter long.

How to freeze herbs

cheapvegetablegardener — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 01:18:00 +0000

One of my goals in my garden is to make salsa entirely from ingredients from my own garden. In the past I have come close only requiring the purchase of a couple jalapeño peppers from the grocery store but this year with much effort and a strangely hot summer for the Pacific Northwest I have all the ingredients growing in my garden. Though unfortunately the ingredient cilantro could be my elusive ingredient since hot weather means great growth then subsequent bolting. My solution to this problem is successive planting and freezing herbs.

Now drying is also a viable option though I prefer freezing since many moist herbs can lead to mildew without the right equipment to dry efficiently. Frozen herbs also maintain the same potency for several months in the freezer as fresh so no guessing on measurements of your frozen herbs.

There are actually a few different methods for freezing herbs, each of which depends on how you plan on using them later.

The first method is great for keeping the herbs texture and flavor intact. The process is nearly identical to that of freezing berries.

Flash freezing herbs

Pick the best freshest herbs you can find
Wash and pat herbs dry
Lay on layer of wax/parchment paper on cookie sheet
Freeze overnight
Place leaves in freezer bag(s), using a straw to suck out excess air

If you are planning on using your herbs in soups or stews, I would definitely recommend the ice cube method.

Ice cube tray method

Pick the best freshest herbs you can find
Wash and pat herbs dry
Hand chop (or use food processor) leaves
Put chopped pieces into ice cube trays and fill with water of stock
Freeze overnight
Place cubes in freezer bag(s), using a straw to suck out excess air. You may also put the trays right into the freezer bag sucking out the air if you wish.

Note: Also try mint with a little extra water to add to drinks during the summer (or winter)

Now if you are planning on using your herbs for dishes that require oil such as Pesto with your Basil. This is a great time to do a little up front preparation.

Ice cube tray method (with oil)

Pick the best freshest herbs you can find
Wash and pat herbs dry
Add 1/3 cup of oil for each 2 cubs of herbs to food processor or blender
Put chopped pieces into ice cube trays
Freeze overnight
Place cubes in freezer bag(s), using a straw to suck out excess air. You may also put the trays right into the freezer bag sucking out the air if you wish.

Now in a few months you can add some parmesan and have some previously frozen pesto in the middle of winter.

Harvesting spinach seeds from your garden

cheapvegetablegardener — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 16:17:00 +0000

Growing up in rural Washington state, the job market was a somewhat lacking for those under the age of 16. Given this at the age of 14-15 I was sucked into the attractive and lucrative career of spinach rouging, also known as “The Worst Summer Camp Ever” The basic premise of the job was to walk down endless “female rows” in the hot sun and destroying any male spinach plants. For every 12 “female rows” there were 4 “male rows” of higher quality spinach plants which were desired for pollination. So in other words I was facilitating the hybridization of spinach plants.

Hoping to keep these memories behind me when I decided to grow spinach seeds this year, I realized I actually learned something which I thought I would share. In my case I am open pollinating so no rouging required though it is good to still know how to identify the boys and the girls since no matter how hard you try those boys will not be creating any seeds.

The plant on the left is a male plant, you can identify it by the little yellow balls under the leaves. As you may have guessed the one on the right is a female plant which only have green balls under the leaves. Not to over complicate things there is also monacious plants which are basically both male and female which I would normally just pull up since it will make things easier during harvest time.

Spinach seeds for the most part will wind pollinate on their own but if you garden is somewhat protected from winds it may be helpful to flick the male plants every week or so to help out the process.

Once the plants turn yellow go ahead and pull them up. If they are males throw them in the compost. If they are females hang them in a dark dry place. I chose to hang mine off my mountain bike’s brake cable.

After a few weeks of drying you should see the seeds brown and dry just like they came out of the package you planted them with. Store the seeds in a dry cool place (jar in refrigerator) and you should have a great stock of seeds for the next year.

Harvesting pea seeds from your garden

cheapvegetablegardener — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 00:05:00 +0000

Most of the seeds I purchase, I am able to keep for at least a few seasons before running out. The one exception to this rule is peas, which I always have to buy each season. To save myself a couple dollars next year after I had my fill of peas from my garden I let quite a few mature which I will reuse for seeds this fall and next spring.

Out of all the seeds I have collected peas definitely are the easiest by far. If you want to go with the ultra ~~lazy~~ easy approach just let them dry on the vine until the pod no longer has any moisture and the peas are loose in the pod. You even can store them in the pod and crack them open for planting. One disadvantage to this technique is the peas could end up getting enough airflow and could result in some moldy peas.

To be on the safer side here is a more conservative approach:

Pick pods when fine is yellow. The basic idea at this point the plant is not really providing anything to the pods so you might as well take on the responsibility
If the pod still feels a little moist store it in a dry location. If the pod feels dry using a small knife carefully cut a small slit lengthwise into the pod being careful to not to injure the peas.
Once the peas get all shrived up and look like what you planted to begin with store in a cold dry location (jar in the refrigerator)

Now you have seeds ready for fall planting (or spring planting next year) If you go a little crazy with your dried peas you can also add them to soups or stews during the winter time.

How to fertilize/side dress tomatoes/peppers in your garden

cheapvegetablegardener — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 16:10:00 +0000

When your fruiting plants are flowering and bearing fruit this is a good time to give them a little extra boost. Though you don’t want to throw any old fertilizer at them at this point. You want them to get the nutrients they need to produce high yields of produce, though you don’t want to shock them with an abundance of nitrogen to stimulate new vegetative growth when you would rather the plant expend its energy making you food.

The solution to this problem is to provide your plants with a low dose of balanced fertilizer. I couple of my favorites are compost and alfalfa pellets applied every couple weeks while the plants are blooming/fruiting. This ensures the plants have all the nutrients they be lacking without throwing the plant into a growth spurt.

If you have a little extra time take the compost and add some water and let it sit in the sun for several hours and water or spray onto the foliage for a great dose of compost tea.

If you forgot to apply a little bone meal when you planted your peppers/tomatoes this is also a good time to sprinkle a handful under your plants and work into the couple inches of soil to provide your plants with a boost of phosphorous and also a little calcium to help prevent blossom end rot.

Hopefully with these tips you can help your green tomatoes turn into bright delicious red tomatoes.

If you want to learn more about the chemistry of organic fertilizers I have a whole post on that subject

Black Bean and Corn Salsa Recipe

cheapvegetablegardener — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 03:58:00 +0000

My jalapeños peppers have been growing like crazy and I have had to start harvest to prevent the plants from stop producing. Given my tomatoes are still green I have been itching to do something with them, I decided to make some corn salsa. Given I couldn’t find a recipe that matched the ingredients I had on hand I decided to make my own.

CVG Black Bean and Corn Salsa Recipe

2 ears of corn (1-1/2 cups frozen corn)
1 small onion (chopped)
1/4 cup chopped cilantro
1/4 cup sliced green onions
2-3 cloves of garlic (chopped)
1/4 cup white vinegar
3 T sugar
1 chopped seeded jalapeño
1 chopped unseeded jalapeño
1-1/2 cups black beans (canned)

Directions: Cook corn for 2 minutes in boiling water and submerge in ice cold ice water. This helps stop the corn from cooking any more and also make handling while cutting the kernels a little more pleasant. Cut off kernels and add to bowl. Chop/slice remaining ingredients and add to bowl, stir, and refrigerate and serve chilled.

If you like your salsa a little spicier leave both pepper seeded.