Life in Cowtown

In writing the zucchini post, I added the most wonderful transplant instructions EVER. How do I know? Cause I finally planted my three little peppers and zucchini, all survivors of the great backyard destruction.

So I did what I said YOU should do to ensure transplant success, and by golly it totally worked.  If you live even more north than me, and have stuff yet to transplant, (I imagine everyone in a normal climate has their stuff looooong in the ground, anticipating a harvest), then do what I did:

Pre-mix a bucket of full strength kelp and fish fertilizer.

Stinky fish juice

Dig a really really deep hole. About three times the size of the plant root you’ll be burying.

Add some decent fertilizer, like the COF, or any equivalent thereof, and mix it in at the bottom of the hole. The idea is to have the food below the plant.

Fill the hole back up, leaving just enough room for your plants root ball.

Place the plant gently inside, and fill the hole with the pre-mixed fertilizer water. You’re aiming to make a nice slurry that you will gently press around the roots. Like making mud pies for adults. Really fishy mud pies. Do a happy dance.

I did this two days ago, and everything seems to be doing great. No drooping, listing, yellowing – all the plants seem healthy, vibrant and green. The zucchini promptly put out a flower. I’m always listening to myself from now on.

Speedy little plants!

All the seedlings are doing well. They’re healthy and happy and sturdy and BIG. They’re growing WAY faster than I expected, and it’s becoming a little rainforest in the room. They are quickly approaching their recommended transplant height of 6 or so inches, and since we’re in Zone 3A here in Calgary with a last frost date of May 23 so I have no idea how tall they’ll get in three weeks or so before they go outside.  The cukes seem tiny and undeveloped in contrast, but they’re sturdy and healthy so I guess they’re okay.  All are heavy drinkers, and now I find myself watering pretty much every day or two. Every two weeks I feed everyone with the 1/3 diluted fish and kelp fertilizers, and that seems to be working.

Fuzzy tomatoes

Tomato canopy

Lopsided basil

 

Cuke and pepper

 

 

What is not working is the light situation. This spring has been rather crappy in the cool, cloudy kind of way – we even got some snow in the last two weeks, and the awesome T5 fluorescent strips I got are simply not enough anymore. All the plants are twisting towards it, just about hugging the bulb, and now that they’re BIG and LEAFY it’s just not enough light. Bravely navigating the world of grow lights I found a Hydrofarm 125 watt Grow Light that’s supposed to be adequate for a 9 X 9 area. Of course it wasn’t cheap, but at least it will last a good decade, and it was still WAY cheaper than the proper plant set ups with the tiers and the sodium/metal halide lamps. Since I’ve been enjoying myself immensely with this seedling operation I figure I’ll likely grow something or another every spring. That’s the story anyhow.

 

This past weekend I also started a bunch of alpine strawberries – about 20 plants or so. I have no idea if that’s enough or too few, but that’s about the amount of plants I want to take care of, so seemed okay to me. Strawberries are perennials and apparently don’t produce much their first year, so this is more of a long term plan anyhow. And they take a hundred days to mature, so it’ll be a while before I see any berries. What they will need though, is a straw mulch (hence the name – learn something new every day J) and I have no idea where to get a small amount of straw around here. I mean, this is the prairie and there are monstrous hay bales not two minutes from my house, but I’d need something akin to a few garbage bags, just enough for a 2 inch layer of mulch. The mulch is there to keep the roots at an even temperature and to prevent the leaves and berries from touching the soil, as I guess they’re quite susceptible to soil borne diseases. I’m googling strawberry mulches as I type this, and it seems that pine needles make an excellent mulch as well. They’re slightly acid which strawberries like, and more inclined to lay flat which gives more access for suns’ rays.  Thanks to http://leslieland.com/blog for this one. Now pine needles are beyond plentiful here, you could call them abundant, so at least supply won’t be an issue.

 

Now it’s mostly a waiting game. It’s supposed to rain for the next few days, shocker, I know, so we’ll begin building the 4 X 8 raised bed that we just picked up the materials for. And by me, I mean my significant other who’s quite handy with tools and not liable to kill himself. On a different note, we ordered a cubic yard of compost for the newly cleaned up garden beds (post coming) to be delivered by the very helpful Western Canada compost. They’ll be driving up with some garden soil and compost on Monday, which will mean quite a workout to haul it into the bed. Check out http://www.westerncanadacompost.com/first.htm if you need a large quantity delivered and don’t feel like shoveling all day to fill your topper covered truck and making multiple trips. We’re nothing if not lazy around here. A big thanks to http://www.calgarygardencoach.typepad.com/  for lots of local knowledge and tips.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Awrighty. Now that some of the seedlings have a set or two of leaves, it’s time to start supplementing their soilless growing mix with fertilizers. I’m using a mix of fish and kelp fertilizer and as per the advice of my garden gurus, I’ll be feeding them every other watering or so, at one third the strength. The danger with young seedlings is overfertilizing, which burns and kills them, not under so I want to be quite careful and dilute the liquids properly.

To do that I had to pull out my very rusty and basic math skillz, and work with ratios. Isn’t gardening fun?

The fish fertilizer is some potent stuff – the label says mix about 1 tbsp to a gallon. I needed to figure out how much that would be in 2 cups of water that I was using to water the seedlings.

So… 1 gallon = 16 cups
15 ml = 16 cups
X = 2 cups

Takes ya back to high school don’t it? Solving for the x, I got about 1.9 ml. Since I wanted the fertilizer at about 1/3 strengh, it worked out to be about 0.5ml for 2 cups of water. By the way both fertilizers look like brown sludge, and the fish one smells exactly like what it is. Mmmm.

The kelp fertilizer is a bit more forgiving, allowing 1.5 oz to a gallon. Using the exact same formula as above, I ended up with 1.5 ml of fertilizer per 2 cups of water. I rounded up and down freely by the way, since the quantities we’re talking about are so small.

I’m shooting to fertilize them at this very weak dilution about once a week or every other time I water. The seedlings are thirsty and at this stage I check them daily and water about every three-four days.

Of course I had some help doing this. Thanks Tweaks, couldn’t have done it without ya!