Amy in the Garden

Here we go: planting indoors for my 2012 Outdoor garden!

I made my potting mix, used my nifty soil-block cube tool, and placed chunky dirt cubes into my beautiful seedling trays. I planted with my treasured seeds, watered, placed on the seed rack up in my office, and have felt like the luckiest person ever since. It has been Only Happy Times since March 18th. Here is what happened:

I started with materials:

And following the advice of Eliot Coleman’s “The New Organic Grower,” I assembled compost, sand, and topsoil in my wheelbarrow:

Still following his worthy advice, I added soil amendments (See “Field Notes”):

And I sprinkled them atop the soil mix:

I mixed these ingredients thoroughly with a hoe, and added some water to create a moist mix that held together politely.

Time for my wonderful soil-block cube maker, tool from Johnny’s Selected Seeds:

I pressed the cube maker firmly into the dirt, turned it 90 degrees and lifted it up. There were a few hapless worms in the compost, and I promise I made every effort to remove each one gently and deposit them in my pea-bed in the garden.

The first cubes went into the first tray:

I continued to fill the trays with dirt cubes. It seems the maximum number of cubes, and therefore seedlings, that each tray will hold is 54. Not bad, when you consider that I have 8 of these trays. That’s 432 plants, if I get 100% germination! (happy happy happy)

After assembling each tray’s cubes, I dropped one seed into each dibbled hole (the cube-maker automatically adds the dibble):

I planted three kinds of peppers, and thyme. I will now water gently as needed, and try to be patient until April 3, when the calendar tells me I am allowed to make more soil cubes and plant again! Stay tuned….

WORDS FROM OTHERS

“It was Hans Jenny, a soil scientist, who first pointed out that there is often more life below and within the soil than there is above it, including Homo sapiens. This inversion of soil as medium to soil as life itself should be enough to convince any agri-scientist to adopt only those means of agriculture that support and nurture this life.”

— Paul Hawken