Grocery Shrink

Remember when I mentioned about my cousin Rachael’s seed starting shelf with lights?  I convinced her to write a little post for us on how to build one and get started with the seeds.  She is continuing the theme on her own blog with more step by step care instructions and photos.  At the end of the article, we’ll give you a link to get there for more information.  When you visit, leave her a comment and let her know you came from the Grocery Shrink.  Here’s Rachael:

Spring is so close! Are you ready to start some plants of your own and save some money?

If so, let’s get out our potting soil and seeds and get started!

Making Your Plant Shelf

First off, my husband bought a sturdy metal shelf (the kind where the shelves look like an oven rack) and attached a fluorescent light fixture to the underside of each shelf. He used zip- ties to do that. This year he is improving on that and attaching them permanently with brackets.

Either way works. We bought GE Plant and Aquarium F40, 48” bulbs. They were $8.50 each at Home Depot. A fixture requires 2 bulbs. Ouch! On the ‘bright’ side, they last for 9 years, and your plants require a wide spectrum bulb to grow! Might as well not waste all your time and effort by letting your plants die with cheapo bulbs.

Preparing Your Seed Trays

You can use plastic egg cartons with holes poked in the bottom of each “egg”, 9X13 pans (again, with holes poked in the bottom), used plastic plant containers, or professional seed starting flats. Whatever you use, sterilize it first. Fungus is not your friend, and here is where you head it off. Normally I don’t like Clorox, but I make an exception in this case. 🙂

Fill your sink or a bucket with a solution of hot water and 1 TB of Clorox. Wash off all the old dirt, rinse well, and air dry.

Preparing Your Soil

If you have dry potting soil, dump some of it into a plastic container large enough to fit your seed trays. Add water until it is nice and moist. If you add too much water, just mix in more soil. It should look like wet soil after a gentle rain, not like mud, and not like a desert with rivers running through it. You will have to mix it together and be patient, it has been dry awhile in that bag, and requires time to absorb the water.

If you have wet potting soil, dump it into a plastic container large enough to fit your seed trays, and you’re ready!

Filling the Trays and Planting the Seeds

I stick my trays in the soil with one hand and with the other hand fill the tray with soil. It’s similar to the motion of filling a bowl with popcorn by dipping it in the serving dish.

Pack the soil until it is firm but spongy to the touch. It should not really be loose at all.

Now with a toothpick, meat thermometer, pencil, or some other sharp device, poke a hole in the soil everywhere you want to plant and plant your seeds! You can figure out how deep to plant them and how to cover the holes if you can read the seed packet. J

Label the seeds! You would be surprised how people think they will remember. You’ll wish you did if you don’t!

Popsicle sticks make nice labels, and if you put one in each corner of your tray and one in  the center, they provide a stand for plastic wrap.

Daily Care

 In the beginning you will cover your seeds with plastic wrap to give them humidity. Water your seeds every day by setting each tray in a container of water for 2-3 minutes. Drain, and put back on the stand. Spraying or top watering is nostalgic, but it leads to fungus problems, and the greenhouse where I worked always watered their trays this way without exception.

Leave the lights on all the time for about 4 weeks. (to keep them warm)

Your goal is to wean your plants off of the need for the plastic wrap as soon as possible, because too much humidity will cause problems of as well.

After about 2 weeks it is best for your plants if you re-plant them. This is how they become hardy enough to withstand outdoors.

At about 4 weeks, you will begin hardening them to the outdoors gradually.

Check in at my blog ‘rachael-thefarmersdaughter.blogspot.com’, as I take you step by step through this process with my own plants this spring (with pictures J). I wanted to give you pictures here, but technical difficulties wouldn’t allow. Thank you so much for this opportunity to share with all of you! It has been a joy and I wish you blessing as you begin this wonderful project. Tending plants is a little like having children, it takes time and nurturing. Be patient with yourself, check out library books, and enjoy the advenure! You can do it!

Quality seeds can get expensive, but if you purchase heirloom seeds you can save seeds from year to year and never buy that variety again.  Imagine how much money this saves for just a little effort!  If you’d like to save seeds from your garden vegetables, look for seed varieties that say open-pollinated or heirloom.  Avoid seeds labeled as hybrid as the seeds from these plants won’t be true to the parent plant.  When in doubt, ask before buying.

Some types of plants, squash for example,  require another plant for fertilization.   If you have more than one type of plant (say zucchinni and yellow squash), they will cross pollinate to create an unknown seed.  You can prevent this by only growing one type of these plants (there are 4 different families of squash that generally don’t cross-pollinate), building a fine net shelter for them to prevent insects from cross-pollinating, or by hand pollinating them to reduce the chance that the wrong plant will pollinate it.  If neither of these options sounds appealing, you can plan to just buy the seeds for these types of plants and save the seeds from the easier savers.

Here’s a list of seeds that are self-pollinating for easy seed saving: beans, peas, lettuce, most tomatoes, eggplant, some peppers

Seeds that might cross-contaminate if another variety is nearby:  corn, squash

You can also prevent crossing by checking out the scientific names of the plants.  Plants with the same name will cross.

You should select your most beautiful, healthiest, tastiest plant to save seeds from.  Tie a little ribbon around it, or the piece of fruit that you want to save seeds from.  Allow that fruit to become fully ripe (or a little past) before picking to make sure the seeds are mature.  There are 3 methods to saving seeds: 

1.  Allowing seeds to dry on the plant

2.  Removing seeds to dry in the air

3.  Fermentation

Want to know more?

http://www.virtualseeds.com/seedsaving.html

http://www.backwoodshome.com/articles/clay56.html

http://www.backwoodshome.com/articles/clay51.html

http://www.northerngardening.com/LSseedsavg.htm

http://www.kidsgardening.com/growingideas/projects/aug04/pg1.html

As with anything, planning a garden is key to the success of the project.  If you know me well, you know this is backwards thinking for me.  I’m a doer, not a planner.    Details tend to slow me down.  But if planning helps me get the most from my grocery dollars then it will help me save gardening money too.

I’ve been at the kitchen table today trying to figure out many snap together garden kits I should purchase, and been making a list of seeds to buy.  This little panicky feeling came over me at the same time, wondering if all those expensive seeds would fit into the number of garden squares I could afford.  As I was doing a little research, I realized there was a mathematical way to know if it would all work out.  Make a plan!

There were so many things to think about that I soon got overwhelmed.  Then I put the steps in this order.

1.  Divide your paper into 3 columns

2. In the first column, write down the vegetables that your family enjoys most (or will use).  Cross out the ones that won’t grow in your area.

3.  On the left, star the vegetables that you would like to can, freeze, or dry for use all year.

4.  In the second column write down how much a week of that vegetable you use.  For example, we eat about 2 quarts of green beans a week. 

5.  In the third column multiply by 44 to find out how much you need to preserve for the year.  (I subtracted 8 weeks of fresh produce use from the 52 weeks of the year.)

6.  Use this chart  from the KSU extension center to know how many seeds to buy/ plants to plant.

7.  Once you’ve done that, you’re ready to design a home for all those plants.

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I found this beautiful garden plan from Heart of Wisdom.  It’s worth the click over to her blog for more planning tips.  She used a 30 day free trial of the GroVeg software to make this beautiful plan.  I just signed up for my free trial and it is a lot of fun.

Another good source for learning to plan a garden is from My Squarefoot Garden.  She uses Excel to build a visual plan and also has examples adn tips on her site for making a winning plan.

If you aren’t convinced squarefoot gardening is for you, Better Homes and Gardens has an article to help you plan any style of vegetable garden.

Crazy busy is all I can say!  I’m on my way to my midwife appointment which are everyother week right now and chiropractor in between.  Pretty soon I’ll be over there every week and it’s feeling like a little much.  But I have many friends who are in much worse shape than I am and I’m so blessed with a DH that can work from home on the days I go to the doctor, so childcare isn’t  a problem.  But that’s not why I popped in today.  It’s to give you my favorite links on Sqarefoot gardening!

I’ve had many lovely tips pointing me to square foot gardening for small spaces, and it is one of my favorite gardening theories.  I really recommend the new revised edition of Mel Bartholomew’s book Square Food Gardening.   It has tips in it that make the idea more doable for those of us not physically able to double dig a garden by hand.  I also found out that Sam’s Club now carries snap together square foot gardening kits at the best prices around.  I don’t have a membership, but I’ll be calling my friends that do for a tag-along trip!  Without further rambling, here are my favorite links to help inspire, plan, and execute an effective garden:

Sample Gardens with a sprinkling of how to:

http://www.homeschooling.net/blog/square-foot-gardening/carrots-really/

http://www.homeschooling.net/blog/gardening/square-foot-gardening/

http://www.homeschooling.net/blog/gardening/a-new-way-to-garden/

Building your own

http://www.marksdailyapple.com/how-to-build-your-own-square-foot-garden-in-10-easy-steps/

Buying ready made:

http://www.orcaboard.com/page/DPDL/CTGY/RB

http://www.easygardenbox.com/garden_box.asp

http://www.kareelanegardens.com/shop/page/1?shop_param

*** (best price includes shipping!) http://www.samsclub.com/sams/shop/product.jsp?productId=prod1170390&iid=Category|TOPSELLER|Gardening|Greenland%20Gardener%20Raised%20Bed%20Garden%20Kit

If you have a porch, balcony, deck or patio, it’s possible to have a vegetable garden–even if you don’t have any yard space.  Our yard is so small that I grow my vegetables in flower beds.  I don’t even want to take up enough space for a square foot garden, because I want to leave as much as possible for the children to play.  Here’s a photo of my garden space:

I know many of you have even less space than I do, and it’s amazing what can be grown in containers!  Here’s are a couple if inspirational youtube videos.  The one change I would make is to use Mel Barthalowmew’s mix of 1/3 compost, 1/3 coarse vermiculite, and 1/3 peat moss instead of soil.

Another interesting small space idea is growing potatoes in a container garden!  This is something I’d really like to try.  Diane from Lovetolearn.net has great instructions here.

As you can imagine, a great way to save on food costs is to keep a small garden.  The Grocery Shrink Ebook has charts in it to tell you how much of each type of plant to grow to be completely self sufficient for the year.  But even just a salad garden will help.   If you are short on space, stay tuned.  We’ll talk about your options another day.

My favorite place to shop for seeds is Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds.  All their seeds are heirloom which means you can save them from this year’s plants to grow again next year.  The company is run by a young homeschooled family, and they’ve grown the company from a small Missouri based company to stores in California and on the East Coast.  I also like to buy from our local bulk seed store,  Antoines.  They have a great selection (most are heirloom), good prices, and they weigh everything on antique balance scales.  I love it!  They are also a great resource for herbs and spices.  They have an online order form, but the best experience is to visit their store in Independence, MO.

I’m not a seed starting genious, but I have friends who are!  They all use a method similar to the step by step tutorial here.  My cousin, Rachael, has a black metal shop shelf with aquarium lights strapped to the underside of the shelves.  She makes gorgeous plants in that.   If you can start your own seeds, you’ll save a bundle, but even if you’re like me and have decided to buy plants from those more capable, you’ll still save.

I realize that I have readers from several different countries and planting zones, but if your growing season is roughly April through mid-October, then start your seeds now!