How-To Harden Off Starts

Posted on March 16, 2012 by amyp

Hardening off means gradually acclimating them to outside conditions. If you moved tender young plants from a warm environment immediately to a cool environment, they would go into shock and falter. Instead, you must adjust them to outside weather conditions slowly. For the first three days of hardening off your seed tray, place it outside, sheltered from wind and rain, during the warmest part of the day for two hours. From the fourth to the sixth day, place your seed tray outside for four hours during the warmest part of the day. On the seventh and eighth days, place them outside for a total of six hours a day. You may have to adapt this depending on weather changes; use common sense. This practice should condition the starts enough to harden them off and prepare them for being planted out in containers.

If the current weather conditions are not conducive to planting out in the garden (i.e., too cold, too wet, etc.), instead of hardening off plants straight away, you can transplant (or pot up) the seedlings. Transplant the seedlings into small pots (four-inch pots from the nurseries work great) filled with regular potting soil and keep indoors under a grow light until the weather allows you to harden off the starts and plant them out.

Host for Check, Please! Northwest

Posted on March 7, 2012 by amyp

Have you heard the news or seen the show?! I am the host for the PBS show Check, Please! Northwest which airs on KCTS9 each Thursday at 7pm. It’s a show about dining out – each week, three guests join me around the table and talk about their favorite Pacific Northwest Resturants. The most exciting thing for me is watching people try something new and going out to a restaurant they never would have thought of. It’s awesome! The show is a great way to gather some new restaurant suggestions AND a perfect way to try something new. All guests dine out at their favorite resto AND get to try two new places, meeting back at the table to discuss. Anyone can be a guest, so you should most definitely apply here! And for anyone outside of the Pac NW, you can keep up with the shows online. A special THANK YOU to SkyCity Restaurant at the Space Needle for underwriting the show! If you haven’t eat on top of the Space Needle yet, now’s the time. I’ve had great meals there, and that view? Come on!

Small Plants for Small Pots

Posted on March 3, 2012 by amyp

SPRING HAS SPRUNG! It is time to get organized, get smart & Get planting. Now is the perfect time to purchase your copy of Apartment Gardening in print or on the Kindle. It really is an awesome book full of information, tips and how-tos. Thank you for your support!! (Excerpted from my book Apartment Gardening)

I’d like to reiterate that the size of the container will eventually affect the size a plant will grow. I’m not a huge fan of small pots for grow- ing anything edible. The plants may not die, but certainly many will not come to full maturity if you inhibit their space in this way. small pots will also dry out very quickly. in my own garden, the smallest pot i have used is about four inches deep and about that wide—i treat it as an experiment. nothing really grew well in such a small space, and what little plant was alive was horribly root-bound, poor thing. even lettuces, which are pretty tolerant, suffered in such tight confines. Their leaves never got bigger than baby lettuce size, and i wound up scrapping the whole project.

Very few plants work well in these conditions, but there are a few you can get away with. The smallest pot i would recommend would be six inches deep and about the same width. This size pot can accom- modate one small plant. Just one! i can’t tell you how many plants I’ve seen crammed into these tiny pots, and i promise you—they will not grow. (Unless you plan on going the microgreen route, in which you harvest plant starts when they are only an inch or two tall. in that case, you can fill the pot with seeds and, generally, harvest within two weeks.)

Shallow-rooted plants work best in small pots. small pots can also accommodate plants that you do not need to harvest from often. lemon balm, for instance, is quite hardy and will survive the tight conditions, though its leaves will be much smaller than those of a plant given room to reach its full potential. This doesn’t matter so much for lemon balm, as it is a strong herb that will likely not be used frequently. Keep in mind, also, that small pots need lots of watering on hot days— likely at least twice a day.

The following is a list of some good plant options for smaller pots—as either they are shallow-rooted, or a kind of plant you will not use in large quantities and can harvest in smaller batches.

Lemon balm
Microgreens: arugula, radish
Scented mints: chocolate, pineapple, apple Strawberry

Converting Your Yard to a Garden & Making a Plan!

Posted on March 1, 2012 by amyp

I swear I am the WORST at tying up all of my projects in one neat place.

BUT, I’m finally taking time this morning to alert you to an awesome collaboration I made with Food52.com, City Dirt. City Dirt is a step-by-step, seasonal, organic guide for anyone wanting to grow food at home. We will cover the basics in a detailed fashion, there will be weekly q&a for individual plots/regions/gardeners and all in all you should DEF bookmark this and make it your bi-monthly resource for all things urban farm related. It’s a MUST.

This week, I covered how to convert yard space from lawn or shrub to lush organic material for planting vegetables this spring. NOW IS THE TIME, people! Break ground, did in and read the article (in addition to the first three on seed ordering & strategy!!) here on Food52. It runs every other Tuesday.

I’m pulling a GREAT question from the comments here, as a source of inspiration, and an example of a really great question:

A question that will reveal the depths of my novice-ness: when you make the forms for the bed (out of wood or whatever) are you laying them OVER the top layer you’ve created of burlap/newspaper/cardboard? And then putting the soil on top of that layer? Or do you remove that layer first (assuming it has not fully decomposed…)?

AMYP: GREAT question!!! You can do it either way, really. Ideally, you would allow the burlap to decompose the organic material for a few weeks – 4 to 8 weeks depending on when you want to plant your first crop rotation. After that time, the materials should be decomposed at which point you can either a) remove the burlap and save it for another time (this is what I would do) OR b) you can dump soil over that burlap, as it will (eventually over several seasons, though not quickly) decompose.

As for ‘filling’ a raised bed, you can either pull soil from your rows or another spot in your yard OR order in topsoil/compost blend to fill the beds.

Any more q’s? OR does this make sense yet? LET ME KNOW!