Seeding Onions in January

It took me several years to find a method that worked well for seeding and transplanting onions. 

First, I tried my son TOG’s excellent method for starting leeks.  He seeded them in three wide rows in a 3 foot by 1 foot flat.  He looked after them and they grew well but he was chronically late in transplanting them into the garden – (too many other things to do at that time of the spring).  The leeks would get very root bound and tangled around each other and we found the best way to loosen them from each other was to use a jet of water to dislodge the soil from the roots.  

Once that was accomplished it was clear sailing – with a scissor, he would trim the roots to 1.5 inches and the tops to 5 inches resulting in a package close to the size of a Bic pen.  Then he’d use a preset dibble (sharpened broom handle with depth limiting flange) and press 4 or 5 inch deep holes in the bed while I would drop one little leek into each hole.  No back filling was needed; the rain or watering quickly back filled the loose soil around the leeks’ roots and as they grew they filled the holes and became self-blanching.

So I tried growing my onions that way.  Before transplanting into the garden, I trimmed the roots and slipped them into a fold in the bed.  It didn’t work.  They didn’t take off.  They stayed quite small.  I surmised they didn’t like their roots disturbed and bare during transplanting.

The next year I made some changes.  I still seeded them into a tight fitting flat – about 25 seeds spaced an inch apart into the cut out bottom of a milk jug.  Before transplanting them into the garden I did the usual transplanting method of slicing the root bound mix with a sharp knife to divide the onions’ roots into their one inch cubes of soil.  Then I waited the prescribed five days for them to recover from the stress of the slicing before transplanting them into the garden.  They still did poorly.  I surmised they didn’t like their roots cut or sliced, unlike leeks.

So the third year I planted each into their own small pots and didn’t disturb them until I gently slipped their root balls into the garden with as little root disturbing trauma as possible.  It worked!  I got a fine crop of winter storage onions lifted in late July.

Since then I’ve fine tuned my growing method.  Watching TOG, I tried three seeds in each pot and let whatever number that came up stay together.  That worked too but some onions weren’t quite as large as with the pairs and singles.  Also, it seemed that adding a mulch layer of chopped old maple leaves, once the soil really warmed up, worked wonders to moderate the soil moisture.

So this year on January 7^th, I seeded my Patterson Onions at two seeds per pot.  (TOG starts his in mid-February, he uses smaller paper pots).  I use one cup sized yogurt containers for pots.  

I get to use my Lovely Wife’s retired cookie sheets for flats that can hold 15 pots each. To get closer to a proper germination temperature I placed the flats up above the cupboard above the fridge in the kitchen and kept an eye on them each day to maintain moisture levels and get them immediately under the grow light as soon as seedlings started to appear.  They took 7 days to germinate.

My newly ordered seed from Johnny’s Selected Seeds arrived one week later so my Mofga Hybrid Yellow Onions are a week later than the Pattersons.  These are the two varieties that Johnny’s recommends for my latitude just north of the 49^th parallel.

Both TOG and I have been having trouble with our Patterson’s going to seed – growing seed stalks near the end of the season just before harvest.  The onions still keep well over winter but they aren’t salable since there’s a core / shaft inside each onion that grew a seed stalk.  10 years ago, TOG discovered that afternoon shade was a major culprit for toggling seed stalk growth.  However, last year he had quite a few go to seed in spite of full sun.  So there must be other influences that we haven’t discovered yet.  And I’ll try the Mofgas.

Last year I miscalculated my onion seedling needs and hurriedly grabbed some Stuttgart onion sets from the local Buckerfields feed and garden store. Those I set into pots to give them a head start and they got some roots going while the garden bed soil warmed up.  The Stuttgarts transplanted alright, grew quite well, sized up nicely and didn’t go to seed but they are more prone to fungi and diseases while growing.  They are rather overpowering in flavour and didn’t pickle as well with our bread and butter cukes.

My seeded onions will stay under the grow light for four weeks and then graduate to the south facing garage window where they’ll grow slowly in the cooler temperatures.  After that they’ll head for the greenhouse for a month or so until the soil warms enough in their bed in the garden.  That should get their roots just nicely filling their pots for easy, stress free transplanting in mid April. 

Now that I’ve discovered (been given) a new and simple temporary Bed Cover  I should be able to get them in the ground even earlier.  Last year I managed to harvest more than one pound of onions per square foot of bed space.  An eight month supply of onions stored in the garage is an easy accomplishment once one knows how to grow them.

Happy Gardening.

A Favourite Tool: My Grow Lights

 

“Beware the ides of March!”  So said the soothsayer in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Act 1, Scene 2.  I think we took that play in grade nine English class.  The teacher, a Welshman, was thrilled.  Us, not so much.  But the Ides of March (March 15^th) is how I used to remember when to start my tomatoes, peppers, and cabbage family, seeded into pots to go under my grow lights.

My first grow lights and their adjustable stand started close to 40 years ago.  The stand was built on a budget – mostly scrounged plywood, ripped 2 by 4’s, drywall nails and screws, bits of chain and such and I still use most parts of it today.  It usually sits on an old coffee table in front of the dining room window when in use. 

The plan is to make a simple stand that has an adjustable set of chains on hooks so the grow light fixture can be raised incrementally as the plants grow taller.  The secret to a good stand is to make something that is taken apart and stored easily.  The trick is to assemble a base that is accessible from most directions, to two uprights and a cross piece that holds stiffly together without any wobbling, bending, or sagging.

My second stand is a taller one that stacks two platforms and grow lights one above the other.  This one takes longer to assemble.  For stability I incorporated metal shelf angle supports into its design but that only partially solved the wobbles.  

My third one that I built recently, finally solved the stability verses easy to assemble and disassemble problem and is designed to sit on the floor.  That one is made from a piece of three-quarter inch think plywood sitting on a frame of 2 by 3’s.  These 2 by 3’s give the uprights the stability they need.  Each of the two 2 by 2 uprights has a diagonal brace and are screwed onto the sides of the base’s 2 by 3 framing.  The top cross piece is only 1 by 1.5 inches thick since it doesn’t hold much weight – the 86 watt LED fixture is quite light.

Until last year my grow lights fixtures were the standard fluorescent tube kind.  The original article I followed four decades ago mentioned that each fluorescent tube lost its brightness / efficiency in the tube’s ends up to a foot so a successful grow tube should be at least four feet long.  

The instruction back then was to install one cool white tube and one warm white tube in each paired fixture for a better balance of wavelengths and rotate the plants under the tubes every other day.  Today I head towards ‘Full Daylight Spectrum’ tubes whenever I can.  I believe the need for expensive ‘Grow tubes’ is totally unnecessary.

The old (T-12) tubes used to all be 40 watts but the Eco geeks have tried to strangle that to 32 watts (for energy savings!) and the number of lumens has been reduced.  So far I’ve still managed to find 40 watt tubes with good lumen outputs.  My fixtures still use the old, thicker 1.5 inch diameter T-12 tubes but all new fixtures now take only the thinner ones and that might include the reduction in wattage. I’ve been finding my current tube fixtures are barely enough light.

So, if I were to build a new fluorescent-tube grow light I would use two fixtures in parallel, side by side, with four tubes to cover a growing space of 16 inches by four feet.  Today many lumber supply stores carry a finished ‘workshop’ four-foot tube fixture which often includes a cord, plug and switch.  There is also the option for very new LED ‘tubes’ in a four foot fixture but one would have to weigh the tradeoffs of price, lumens, etc.

Last spring, I bit the bullet and got myself a true LED (pot grower’s) grow light (now legal here in Canada, thank you Justine).  My research showed that there were different choices for pot growing LED lights.  Some emphasized a higher percentage of blue bulbs for better ‘Bud’ formation.  I chose the less blue and mostly red, orange and yellow? -- 'Full Spectrum' mix for more overall green growth.  My best LED selection was found at the local Home Depot.

These many years growing with fluorescents have had a tendency towards leggyness in my tomatoes  -- they tended to grow taller too fast rather than stocky plants.  I always tried to compensate for that problem by repotting into progressively larger, deeper pots, placing the root ball at the bottom of the new pot and backfilling / burying the stem.  It helped a bit but wasn’t the true solution.

I figured the plants were either too warm or didn’t get enough light.  My son TOG had his grow lights in a nearly windowless room so I tried moving my plants away from the warmer dining room window to an empty, less heated room and I placed my biggest and most important transplants under the new brighter LED grow light.  I also installed a small 6 inch fan to blow casually across the plants to encourage stockiness, just like TOG does. 

I noticed that some beginner’s kits for pot growers came with a reflectorized tent that reflected the stray light back to the plants.  So I taped aluminum foil onto some used plastic sign board and leaned those around the perimeter of the grow stands to reflect more light back to the plants.

My growth was better than before but there were still some tomato varieties that tended to grow wildly up.  

I’m still learning how close / far away the brighter LED’s must be from the leaves to avoid ‘burning’.  The old rule for fluorescents was to try to be about one inch from the canopy, plus the maxim: the younger the plants the closer the lights.  With the new LED’s this is an ongoing skill I’m learning.

Timing is important with growing transplants.  If the tomatoes are too big for the grow lights too soon and must go outside, then a frost can hit them if one isn’t attentive enough.  Start some seeds too early and you can get pot bound, stunted transplants waiting for the soil to warm before transplanting into the garden.  

Most plants transplant easiest when they’ve just filled the container with their roots -- enough to keep the root ball intact and not crumbling when lifted for transplanting.  Determining when and what size container to grow in takes some experience.

I keep my grow lights on an automatic timer.  Old school recommended 16 hours per day.  TOG is a bit looser on that issue and uses about 14 hours.  More research could be pursued.  I wonder what the potheads recommend.

With my vegetable transplants and my Lovely Wife’s flowers, we easily grow $200 worth of bedding plants each spring.  But it’s not just cost savings that’s the issue but the freedom of knowing how and doing it yourself and not being stuck relying on another supplier.  What happens in the nursery when Everyone wants bedding plants / vegetable transplants? 

 

With my own transplants I get to choose the exact varieties, health and optimum timing of my home-grown plants.  We also get to give away some large, healthy plants to family, friends and neighbours.  I’d be really stuck without my grow lights on the Ides of March. 

Fresh Vegetables All Winter Long

 My Lovely Wife sent me outside to pick some fresh vegetables.  -- in January -- for some more Beets, Parsnips and Rutabagas.  Off I went with knee pads and a pail to my two root crop beds.  All of these, as well as my carrots, live under a one foot thick blanket of fall leaves.

The Parsnips are ‘Albion’ and a bit oversized this last year, some weighing one pound each.  I hope to change my variety this next year to something bred even more for over winter storage in the ground.

The Beets are ‘Winterkeeper’ and a bit variable in size – mostly due to my uneven, not ruthless enough, thinning.  But they are just as sweet as the parsnips.  When roasted they’re a lot like candy.

The Rutabagas are “Helinor’ and since they’re completely above ground (except for their roots), they get more leaves piled on top of and around them to protect them from the frost.  The beauty of home-grown rutabagas is they stay mild tasting, unlike the store-bought ones. 

 

I lifted all these with my bare hands – no tools needed to dig with.  Sprayed clean with the garden hose and tops trimmed off with a sharp knife, these ones get bagged and kept in the fridge for a week or two until we need some more.  These ‘root crops’ keep well in the ground until April or even early May.  And when they taste so much Fresher than store-bought, they’re much more nutritious as well.

Happy Gardening.

Potting Mix Step Two: Fortifying the Mix

The new year has arrived and with it the beginning of the need for new potting mix.  I’ll be starting my onion seeds indoors in the next few days.  And I’ll need fresh potting mix to do it.

Step One of making potting mix consisted of removing my four-year old Slow compost and sifting it into the wheelbarrow to remove stones, oversized objects, and woody bits that hadn’t broken down, then filling my blue barrels with it.  

Step Two is to fortify the mix to make it ready for seed starting, transplant growing, flower bulb planting into portable pots, and later for filling containers of bedding plants --- flowers to set up on the driveway, deck and elsewhere.

Several years ago my son TOG (The Organic Grower) gave me the recipe for fortifying the new mix.  I think he got if from either Eliot Coleman or Steve Solomon.  The recipe uses organic accepted ingredients or vegetative amendments from the local feed store.  It includes a source of:

1)    Lime – to smooth out the mix’s PH.

2)    Phosphorus – either Bone Meal or Rock Phosphate.

3)    Nitrogen – I use Alfalfa Meal and Soya Meal, both bought from Otter Co-op as animal feed supplements.  They come in 20 kg (44 lb) sacks. 

These are the same ingredients that I use as soil amendments in my vegetable garden.  

The Alfalfa is rated at 16% crude protein and is dustier and finer milled so I tend to believe it acts faster but lasts shorter.  The Soya meal at 46.5% crude protein is milled coarser but it is ‘hotter’ and holds more kick longer. At least that’s my theory.

TOG’s older recipe is for fortifying one five-gallon pail of potting mix.

1)    Lime:  1/6^th cup.

2    Bone Meal:  1/6^th cup.

3)    2/3^rd cup of mixed half Alfalfa and half Soya meals.

     

Left to right: Soya Meal, Alfalfa Meal, Rock Phosphate, Lime.

Instead of borrowing measuring cups from my Lovely Wife’s Kitchen, I opted on making the proper sized measuring cups from old, cut down yogurt containers. 

The five gallon pail of potting soil is poured into the wheelbarrow and the one cup of amendments are sprinkled over that.  Then using a hoe, I mix it all together, chopping, scraping, and moving it from one end of the wheelbarrow to the other.  Three times.  The mix then goes into my ‘Fortified’ Barrel and is the source for all my potting mix needs.  

At least that’s how I used to do it (the hoe mixing part).  With my old shoulder getting older by the day, a few years ago I bought a small electric cement mixer to do my mixing for me (as well as some concrete work).  A few days ago, my Lovely Wife and I got an assembly line going and we filled the Fortified Barrel in about an hour.

TOG goes through a lot of potting mix at his vegetable farm and he doesn’t use a four-year old compost as a base.  He uses peat as a base instead.  His growing mix base consists of:

1)     5 parts peat – sifted to remove any sticks.

2)     3.5 parts compost – his batch is usually 1.5 years old.

3)     1 part Perlite – medium sized.

Coleman also recommends throwing in a bit garden soil but with our compost we feel we are adding adequate ‘life’ onto the mix.  Plus I’m loathe to add anything that might add clay into the mix for clay turns to almost concrete in a pot.

TOG’s fortifying recipe has changed over the years and his needs are a bit different than mine.  Many of his transplants are in the ground within 2 to 4 weeks.  He uses a paper pot system -- one inch square and two inches deep, with a unique planting tool (it looks like a kid's larger wheeled scooter) that releases the small pots, in an accordion kind of way that draws them out in a line and plants them into the bed.

His fortifying recipe for those smaller pots is ‘hotter’ and ‘quicker’. 

1)    4 parts blood meal (or 3 parts blood meal and 1 part alfalfa meal)

2)    1 part kelp meal – an excellent source of trace elements.

3)    1 part lime.

4)    1 part bone meal or rock phosphate.

He mixes that up and adds one cup of it to each 5 gallon pail of peat/compost/perlite base mix.  On a tight budget one could possibly replace peat with old leaf mold if you knew where someone had been dumping leaves for years.

In one season we tend to use at least one 50 gallon barrel of potting mix for all our vegetable and flower seed starting and transplanting needs.  If more is needed, I’ll mix up / fortify enough to start the new strawberry transplants in the mid-summer and a bit more for some containers of pansies for the fall and winter.

The mix in the flower containers that are finished in the fall are recycled back into the first blue barrel to be fortified again the next spring.  After two seasons the used mix is tossed into the garden and is an excellent soil conditioner.  Any four-year old slow compost from my old compost box that doesn’t fit into my blue barrels under the deck goes into my vegetable beds as well.  

My supply of raw potting mix lasts about four years and that’s when my next Slow Compost box is ready to be emptied again. 

Happy Gardening.