Posts Tagged onions
Garden Update: Baby Plants!
Posted by Joshua Bardwell in Food on February 15th, 2010
I built a light stand for my baby plants out of PVC.
It’s pretty rudimentary. 3/4″ PVC and some fittings. Didn’t even really glue it, as friction seems to be doing the job okay so far. Since I took this picture, I even hung some aluminum foil curtains from the lights to reflect more light on the plants and less into the room.
This little plant right here is going to grow up to be broccoli some day.
As a side note, the grow lights make wonderful photography lights too, as long as the camera and lights are both about 6″ or less from the subject.
These here are the onions and leeks.
I actually started the first batch on the 12th, and most of them didn’t germinate. I may have planted them too deep in the soil, or maybe the seeds are just no good, because they are left-over from last year. I put in a 2nd batch of seeds, and if those don’t start, I may chuck the whole batch and open the new batch I ordered this year.
I have also started some lettuce and carrots.
First Seedlings of the Year
Posted by Joshua Bardwell in Food on February 4th, 2010
The first seedlings, onions and leeks, have been started, and a few are even poking their heads up to get some light.
It’s really early in the year to be starting seedlings, but onions are a slow starter,and as near as I can tell, late January is actually the right time to have them ready to go into the ground by April.
Especially with the trouble we were having with the wood stove, the house has been very cold. 50 degrees in the morning, and seldom higher than 60 throughout the day. Putting on thermal underwear first thing in the morning has become routine, although hopefully that’ll resolve itself now that the stove seems to have been fixed. (New gaskets. Where, by, “new,” I mean, putting in gaskets that somehow were not present at all.)
They say that the soil needs to be above about 60 degrees for the seedlings to germinate. This is a bit of a mis-statement. Many plants will germinate at lower temperatures, even down to freezing. They just take a good long time to do it, and the whole point of starting seedlings indoors is to use the warm, protected environment to get a jump-start on the year’s crop.
Additionally, I have found that, with starting seedlings in a windowsill there’s just not enough light and they get very spindly. This house is especially well shaded. Although it has a south-facing front, it also has a porch, and the sun is usually shaded from the windows.
So I decided to get some grow lights and a heat mat for my seedlings.
You can spend a lot of money on grow lights, and perhaps the high-priced lights are better, but for my purposes, I’ve decided to see what kind of results I get with fluorescent shop lights. You can buy them at your local hardware store for about $20 each, and a pack of ten bulbs is about $20. All told, I spent $50 for two lights, which I estimate will be enough to light all of my seedlings.
In the photo above, the lamps are resting on the greenhouse boxes. I plan to build a stand out of PVC. It’s nice to have a stand so that you can adjust the height of the lamps. As the plants get taller, you raise the lamps so they’re consistently just a few inches above the plants, maximizing the light the plants get.
The lights are on a timer so that the seedlings get 16 hours of light and 8 hours of dark. Some people say that you can give them 24 hours of light, but I figure they might get a little confused when they get set outside. The timer was about $10 and has integrated switches to allow you to set “on” and “off” in 15 minute increments. I like this better than the ones where they give you four plastic tabs that you have to set for “on” and “off.”
Heat mats, you can buy online all day long, but finding them in stores is harder. Even Mayo, the local lawn and garden center didn’t have any in stock. Luckily, Ferry-Morse makes a heated greenhouse kit that comes with 72 peat starter-pellets, a mini-”greenhouse,” and a heat mat, and Home Depot carries all variety of Ferry-Morse products. The kit is about $24, which, if you were going to buy the greenhouse at $7 anyway, is a fair price for the mat.
One of the problems you can run into with a heat mat is overheating the plants. The heat mat will keep the plants about 10-20 degrees warmer than ambient temperature (mine is doing about 22 degrees, so it’s a bit of an overachiever). For my house, that’s no problem, as they hover around 80 in the kitchen. For a typical American house, it would put the temperature in the 90’s, which may be too hot for some seeds. You can buy a digital temperature controller for about $30, but I suggest simply putting the heat mats on a $10 timer.
The lights are on a timer so that the seedlings get 16 hours of light and 8 hours of dark. Some people say that you can give them 24 hours of light, but I figure they might get a little confused when they get set outside. The timer was about $10 and has integrated switches to allow you to set “on” and “off” in 15 minute increments. I like this better than the ones where they give you four plastic tabs that you have to set for “on” and “off.” The nice thing about this timer is that, if I wanted to, I could put the heat mats on the timer and do 15 minutes on, 15 minutes off, all day long. If the timer had removable plastic tabs, I would only be able to turn on and off four times a day.
In order to monitor the soil temperature, I have stuck a kitchen thermometer into a peat pellet that hasn’t been planted with anything. I set it so that 80 degrees is straight up and then I can quickly check the temperature through the moist plastic of the greenhouse.
Garden Layout
Posted by Joshua Bardwell in Food, Homesteading on January 25th, 2010
I’ve finished a first pass at my garden layout. You can view it here (you’ll need to click on the “layout” tab at the bottom of the page).
The beds are 30′ by 3′ each. On the spreadsheet, they’re one on top of another, but in reality, what I will have is a four-by-two grid of 30′ by 3′ rows. Hence, the first two beds, which are labeled “1 north” and “1 south” will actually be end-to-end with each other. It’d just make for a lot of scrolling to actually arrange them that way on the spreadsheet.
Coming up with the layout was pretty challenging, especially because there is conflicting advice as to what compliments what and what plants should rotate with what. I ultimately settled on an arbitrary set of advice and left it at that.
You might notice that row 1 north and south are awfully similar and likewise for row 2. Why not combine the plants into blocks? Two reasons: first, separating them might keep pests from migrating between them as easily. If pests find one batch of plants, perhaps they won’t find the other. This is an organic pest-control technique I’ve read about. Second, the south half of my yard gets more sun than the north half, and I’m curious to see the difference in planting the same or similar stuff in both halves.
The peas / corn / squash setup, I’m pretty confident about, as the Native Americans have done it that way for a long time. Usually, beans are used instead of peas, but I haven’t planned for any pole beans this year, and peas are also nitrogen-fixers, so I figure I’ll give it a whirl.
I read that onions can cut down on squash bugs, so I plan to interplant onions, leeks, and shallots around my zucchini and yellow squash. I’m sticking lettuce in there too, mostly because there’s room. I don’t think I need as many onions as it would take to totally fill in around the squash.
In the map, the sweet peppers and the hot peppers look like they’re on top of one another, but like I said, the rows are actually end-to-end, so they’ll be about 32′ apart, to prevent cross-pollination.
The melons at the end of row 1 take up a lot of space, and I could probably get away with planting something quick like lettuce over there, before the vines get too big.
Row 2 starts with a variety of tomatoes. I’m planting two each of slicers, roma, cherry, and tomatillos. These are surrounded by various root crops such as carrots, parsnips, beets, and radishes. The other end of row 2 contains brassicas like broccoli, spinach, collards, bok choy, and kohl rabi. The remaining space is taken up with potatoes.
Crop rotation guides say to plant nightshades (tomatoes and potatoes) and brassicas separately, but I just don’t have enough brassicas to really fill up a row, and I can’t see leaving half the row fallow each year. I figure if the potatoes suffer somewhat from their proximity to the broccoli, well, I’m growing a lot of potatoes. And if the broccoli suffers… it’s broccoli… I mean, come on. Acceptable losses.
Not present on the diagram are all the herbs that I will be or already am growing in planters, as well as garlic, which I started this fall, and will start again next fall, also in planters. I just don’t want to do the work of fitting garlic’s odd schedule into my rotation at this time. Also, I plant to dedicate an entire bed to strawberries, which don’t rotate.
Any advice from gardeners reading is welcome.
Veggie Order: Placed
Posted by Joshua Bardwell in Food, Homesteading on December 23rd, 2009
Placed my Seeds of Change order today. Will be starting the earliest plants, the onions and leeks, in late January, so I figured it’s time. When I originally posted my gardening plans, some people suggested I “start small.” Given my aspirations, this is starting small!
Grinding Up Salsa
Posted by Joshua Bardwell in Food on December 2nd, 2009
I love salsa. My favorite is the fresh stuff, pico de gallo, basically just chopped-up tomatoes, onions, garlic, and jalapenos with a little salt, lime, and cilantro. My sister once pointed out how easy it was to make, and it was like a light-bulb going off. Of course I can make my own salsa!
I’ve made pico by hand. It’s a lot of work cutting up all those veggies, but good practice at knife skills, I suppose.
I’ve made it in a blender too, but blenders are really made for mixing liquids. They don’t move mostly-solid mixtures around enough to bring new material into contact with the blades. They just end up puree’ing whatever is at the bottom of the blender, and then, hey, you’ve probably got enough liquid to blend, but you’ve also got a puree. Not good salsa.
I’ve made it in a food processor. That’s pretty good, but the art of getting just the right chunkiness without having big chunks left over and without crossing the line to soupy is a little tricky. And the work bowl of a food processor typically only makes a pint or two of salsa. Not nearly enough for my tastes.
Then my step-mom mentioned to me that she had the food grinder attachment for her Kitchenaid mixer. It had come as a set with the mixer, and she never used it, so she offered it to me. Of course, I had to make salsa!
The grinder produced a little less-chunky salsa than I normally would prefer, but it was still recognizably “salsa” and not “tomato and onion juice-drink”. One thing that I really liked was how consistent the product was.
The ground up tomatoes in the photo above are sitting in a colander, which is placed in a bowl. This is to allow some of the extra liquid to drain out, and reduce the wateriness of the salsa. I still have yet to find a way to produce salsa without it being watery, short of cooking it to simmer off the liquid, but that produces cooked salsa, which is wonderful, but not my favorite. It tends to end up tasting more like spaghetti sauce than salsa.
Everything went into the grinder: tomatoes, onions, jalapenos, cilantro, and garlic.
Issa prepped the veggies by cutting them down to sizes small enough to go into the grinder. This was some work, but not near as much as cutting it all up by hand. We had 15 lbs of tomatoes!
When we were done, there was about two gallons of salsa.
We put about five pints of it in the freezer…
We put about a quart in the fridge for later, and we dug into the rest.
I woke up the next morning with garlic taste still in my mouth. I am vampire-safe.
In case you’re interested, here is the recipe we used. Honestly, you can hardly go wrong.
- Some tomatoes
- Maybe half that much onion, or more if you like onion
- A whole bunch of cilantro, except if you hate cilantro, in which case you can leave it out. Did you know that there’s a bitter flavor compound in cilantro that some people can’t taste? That’s why some people hate cilantro so much and others love it. The ones who hate it have the gene that allows them to fully taste it. The rest of us literally can’t taste that bitterness you hate so much.
- Juice of one lime, or more if you’re making a really big batch
- As much garlic as you can stand to peel, but probably not more than a head. Or three cloves if you don’t want to vampire-proof everybody who eats it.
- About two jalapenos, seeds included. More if you like hot food. Or mix in other types of peppers if the jalapeno’s burn is not exactly what you want.
- Salt to taste. Don’t over-do it!
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