Spend one tenth what you do now on laundry soap

It's true; you can spend one tenth what you do now on laundry soap. It costs 30 to 50 cents a load for commercial laundry soaps like Tide, Era and other brand names. Many people report using alternative soaps that work and cost them 2.5 to 3.5 cents a load – and these soaps eliminate the petroleum-based detergents making them better for you and the environment.

As a first timer, it took me 45 minutes to make 2.5 gallons of liquid detergent that will be consumed at ¼ cup per load. That's more than 150 loads of laundry for my investment and I have plenty of stuff left over to make more.

Think about it: corporations have used media to convince us that what our grandparents used (homemade detergents) wasn't good enough. They use pride and status to urge people to use their products, not make their own. Give up some TV time and you save loads of money.

Surprise testimonial while in the store:
My wife thought I was going overboard making our own soap, but last week she agreed to try it and if it didn't work, she would switch back. Good enough. Be bought the three ingredients, 20 Mule Team Borax (a naturally occurring chemical from Death Valley), washing soda (another natural compound) and Fels Naptha soap (as far as I can tell, made from natural ingredients). We placed these in the bottom of our grocery cart away from the foods and continued shopping.

"Excuse me, excuse me – sorry to bother you," a woman in her late 20s said as she stopped us. "I couldn't help but notice what you have there – do you make your own laundry soap?" I said it was our first time and we were going to try it.

"I've been making it for quite a while and it really works. Now my sister-in-law and mother are making theirs too. It really works and saves so much money."

Later my wife accused me of secretly planting the woman there to convince her I wasn't some odd freak of nature trying to make my own detergent.

The recipe:
There are tons of recipes. I used a simple one 1 bar Fels Naptha soap; 1 cup Borax, 1 cup Washing Soda with 1 quart water plus 8 quarts of water.

Steps:
1) Place a quart of water on the stove and boil it
2) While you wait for the water to boil, grate the bar of soap, it will make about 2 cups'
3) Reduce the heat after the water boils
4) Add the grated soap in small amounts and stir until all is dissolved. This takes the longest, about 30 minutes.
5) Add the Borax and Washing Soda, stir until dissolved
6) Add this to a large pail and add 8 quarts of warm water, stir
7) Cover and let sit for at least 24 hours before use. It will gel.

When you get ready to use it, you will need to stir the gel to mix it and measure out ¼ cup per load.

Some things to note:
If you are allergic to perfumes, you can control that by not adding any perfumes to this. If you like perfumes, then add ½ to 1 ounce of essence oil.

This soap doesn't foam or create a lot of suds. Suds don't do the work or the cleaning, the recipe does that. Again, corporate media has convinced people that suds are an important component to cleaning "scrubbing bubbles" who doesn't remember that advertising phrase.

I had never heard of Fels Naptha before but found it in the laundry soap isle of a big-box store and then later at my local country grocer – seems it has been a spot cleaner used for years. The same with Washing Soda, the most common one available is Arm and Hammer. Don't confuse this with baking soda which is very different.

Alternate bar soaps can be used like Zote and Ivory, but the recipes I've found say stay away from the perfumed other brands.

You can reuse your old plastic liquid detergent containers and save space by doling out what you need from the large pail into the smaller more manageable container.

Here's some links with more recipes and blogs with people's comments on them.

10 commonly used recipes http://tipnut.com/10-homemade-laundry-soap-detergent-recipes/
One family's recipe and story, the Duggars http://www.duggarfamily.com/recipes.html
Comments from blog readers about their experiences: http://ihavetosay.typepad.com/randi/2009/03/laundry-soap-recipes.html

Vegetable seed companies succumb to corporate whoredom

As much as we possibly can, we should be examining our values, our locality, our abilities and rejecting corporations in favor of what we know and hold dear to ourselves or family. Even the family garden is paying the price of our inattention to what they are doing to our seed supply. The banks and Wall Street have proven we can't trust others to do what is right for our society as a whole.

The more I delve into the journey of becoming as self-sufficient as I can and move closer to the land, the more I discover the manipulation of corporations in our everyday lives. Oh, I've always seen the obvious: a good example is the commercial on television right now promoting more exploration for natural gas and oil using what looks like everyday people saying how taxes on the industry don't make sense in this economy. Wind and solar threaten their bottom line.

No, it's the subtle things that slipped by me. Like the fact that the big seed companies have now bought up the garden seed suppliers and are reducing the number of seeds made available for even the home gardener. I noticed something was wrong this year when I got my Henry Fields and Gurney seed catalogues. Most of the pictures, names and descriptions of the vegetables were the same in both catalogues. Since then I've learned how Monsanto and other big seed corporations have made these bought up garden seed suppliers.

As a result, in catalogs in 1981, there were about 5,000 non-hybrid vegetable varieties. Today, thanks to these corporate thinkers who count money and push the hybrids their companies produce, they have reduced that number to 600 non-hybrid vegetable varieties. Obviously the corporate whores who work for the suit and ties in these companies think they are doing a good thing. In 2005, Monsanto bought Seminis, another large corporation, and as a result owns 75 percent of the world's tomato seed supply. While garden catalog companies like Burpee may not be owned by Monsanto, they now get many of their seeds from them as a result of the 2005 purchase.


What's next: they'll genetically modify these seeds so they can sell people the chemicals they make and are being used by the millions of pounds on our commercial food supply? For what, corporate profits at the expense of human health, that's the definition of corporate whore – they have no allegiance other than to make money for shareholders – who are the corporate pimps running the world and most of Washington.

Take a gamble, plant a few thing way before you should

I think every gardener should be a garden gambler, plant early gardens and pray.

Don't be afraid to be a garden gambler and plant at least a small portion of your garden early if you have the space to play with. Plants like broccoli, cauliflower, Chinese cabbage, kohlrabi, cilantro, chives and parsley are just a few of the plants you can put out and take a chance on catching a cold night or two.

Farmers always say agriculture is a gamble. Like farmers, we gardeners don't control the weather. If you are a gambler and have a few more plants than you need, put a small number out well before the last freeze date for your area. Gamble, but don't be gambler with a problem – you succeed one year so the next you put everything out: Do that and you have a gambling addiction.

More than 50 percent of the time you will beat the odds and get the few plants you put out to grow. I was a real gambler this year. I put out a few plants when the NOAA weather chart said I had a 90 percent chance of still having a hard freeze. Still, despite the temps last night getting into the mid twenties, the only thing I lost were carrots I transplanted for bunching.

Unlike farmers who can't cover a huge field with newspaper for plastic tarps to protect plants from the cold, gardeners can. The simple act of covering plants will sometime save delicate ones that emerge before the last frost date. Often potatoes will come up early but will die if hit by a late frost.

If you plant early, you are a gambler, but don't cry if you lose your bets.

The 10-minute garden takes shape in two sessions

The ten minute garden continues to be very little work for an amazing amount of space. On two days within the same week I used a pitch fork to break up the soil and pile it into a heap in a four by four foot square bed. Make no mistake, I still have my huge garden, but I just want to see how much a person can do with as little as a 10 minute commitment.

Looking at how much I could do in just 10 minutes, I decided my bed would be a standard 4x8 foot bed and I would use the fork on another day to expand it. Voila! I have a remarkable amount of space with just two 10-minute days – that even surprised me at how little time I had spent.

In all fairness, this requires some plot of dirt that was already bare. Anyone starting with a grassy spot would have had to use 10 minutes to put newspapers down and pour bags of top soil over them to kill the grass, or the previous fall weigh down a tarp or something to kill the grass where the garden could be approached and forked up in two 10 minute periods.

Still, it proves a substantial space can be tilled on a couple mild march days, and the soil heaped up in the middle of a bed. The heaping is very important. It does what farmers do in fields with what is called a field cultivator. The surface area of the soil is raised and the amount of surface area is increased – both create good drying conditions in the spring when not all days are warm enough to dry out flat ground enough to plant.

The sun and spring winds will dry the mound of dirt faster and later it can be shaped into a bed and planted.

The 10-minute garden experiment

So just how much food can be raised in 10 minutes?

We tend to measure our gardens by the square foot – there's even a square foot garden guru, a PBS host and books on the subject. Recommendations of garden footage accompany garden tillers descriptions. Size apparently matters: one of the first things gardeners mention to one another is how much space they tend.

Yet there's no mention of people's most precious commodity – time. The reality is, when a person decides to garden, they envision a space but have no idea how much time that garden will require. That got me to thinking: just how much could I grow using only 10-minutes when the weather was fit to work outside? And I don't mean doing the dirty little 10 minutes-a-day average trick that would mean 70 minutes a week over the season. I mean, hey, I've got 10 minutes, the weather is good, I'll go do some gardening; what exactly would come out of such a plot?

It makes logical sense. Most gardeners don't have the time to spare. Let's face it, we live hectic lives and many gardeners like the idea of growing their own food, but don't want to live every spare minute in their gardens after working all day. That's why I hear way too many stories of people starting gardens, tilling up some measurable space, planting it, then by August weeds have taken over because they over estimated the time commitment needed for the space they tilled. They either scale down their space the next year or abandon gardening altogether because they remember the noxious unsightly weeds.

So how much can grow in a 10 minutes using nothing but hand tools? I'll be sure to let you know . . . maybe.

Raised garden beds beat row-crop gardens hands down

Whether you organic garden or use chemicals, raised bed gardens will out produce old-fashioned row-crop gardens. Garden beds save time, money and are good on the environment too.

In a raised beds you plant the area that normally would be empty between the rows. After the bed is prepared you get more plants in a small space by placing seeds the recommended distance from one another in all directions of the last seed planted, you fill the space solid with plants.

For example, up to 30 carrots spaced equally in all directions can grow in one-square foot of soil; compared that to the six or more square feet needed if they were planted in a straight row. The same is true for onions, radishes, beets or peas.

A row garden six-feet long would require empty dirt on each side of the row for cultivation requiring six-square feet of space to grow the same 30 carrots in one-square foot of a raised garden bed..

I don't know about you, but I'd prefer to weed one-square foot instead of six square feet for the same 30 carrots. Because beds are three- to five-feet wide, they are weeded by hand from each side.

Bed gardens:
Save water because you have less space to water. Plants form a leaf canopy that shades the ground and conserves water.

Shade the ground, making weed germination slow or stop. Any weed that germinates and grows through the canopy, it is easy to pull because it has a much weaker root system.

Use less compost or uses fertilizer if you use non-organic methods

Require no power equipment – you can use shovels and spades to till small high-yielding spaces.

Root systems develop better because hand weeding can be done from each side of the bed, keeping the soil loose because you never walk on and compacted.

Raised garden beds can be constructed from almost any material (video). As you plan your garden this spring, you really need to consider beds, especially if your space and time are limited.

If you've got rotten soil, check this out and get started fast.

Quick organic gardening fix to poor soil in urban gardens

Just moved in and want a garden this spring, but there is none at your new home? Here's a quick and dirty way – pun intended – to get a garden and you don't even have to till up the ground or remove the sod.

Step 1: Locate a sunny spot in the area of the yard you want the garden. Check it morning, noon and afternoon to see how the shadows of your house or other building around it might fall onto the area. It's okay if shadows fall, but you want it to receive light 70 percent of the time.

Step 2: Decide on the size you want. Sometimes it's wise to start small, building only one or two garden beds if you are starting from scratch. A no-till garden will have beds that are four to five feet wide and eight to 25 feet long. Once constructed, you never should walk on them, but will care for them by reaching in from the sides.

Step 3: Construct the frame of the bed. Any material except treated lumber can be used. Many gardeners will use stones or landscaping bricks to outline the beds. Others will buy lumber and make wooden frames – just remember, because the wood isn't treated, you will have to replace the frame every three to five years.

Step 4: Place several layers of newspaper in the bed over the grass. Be sure to cover the corners and edges as the newspapers will be what will kill the grass so you don't have to remove the sod. After the first year, the grass will be dead and you can use shovels or spades and turn the soil over in preparation for the next year.

Step 5: Buy 10 to 20 bags of top soil (not potting mix) and a bag of peat moss. See my story on how peat is a great fast start material. Mix the soil and peat on a tarp or in a wheel barrow and dump it carefully into the bed. Mix enough peat so you have a light fluffy soil mixture at least six to eight inches thick over the newspapers.

Step 6: You are ready to plant. Be sure not to dig too deep if you put transplants in so the newspaper will not be disturbed. Within 45 to 60 days the grass will have died and you can do anything you would with any other garden after that.

Top soil costs less than $1.50 for a 40 pound bag, so this is a quick fix to get anyone going on a garden bed or two. You can expand your garden in the fall by digging more beds and using your own compost to build your gardens – it’s the best route to building a rich garden soil and true organic methods.

Peat moss: rescues organic gardening and community sustainable agriculture

Peat moss has to be the organic gardener's best friend and the backbone of Community Sustainable Agriculture, CSA. Organic materials decay and become humus in the soil. It is so vital to good soil health, but when many urban gardens are born, precious little is around and that's when peat moss can come to your rescue.

The soil around subdivisions has been so torn-up by machinery, basement digs; backfilling foundations that most city gardens need organic material to build good soil. Compost is the very best way to add fiber to your soil, but until you get settled into a home, most organic gardeners just don't have a compost pile started or yielding much yet. So peat moss is a fast economic way to turn the hardest poorest soil into something more palatable.

It won't add a lot of nutrients like compost, but it will give you more till ability. There are many kinds of peat moss and peat bogs can be found in many states, but most of the Sphagnum peat comes from Canada today.

Its wiry texture creates space between the sand and clay particles in soil and that helps create a little fluff that helps water filter through the soil. The peat will also act as a spong – keeping water close to rootlets rather than draining rapidly through sandy soil or being baked out of clay.

I highly recommend organic gardeners have at least one brick of peat around at all times. It can even help your compost pile as you work toward building good soil in your little patch of urban nirvana.

For more info: catch my next article on another quick fix to turn crappy dirt into black gold

Safe watering techniques protect seedlings from erosion

Water can be a destructive natural element if used incorrectly. Gardeners starting their own seeds often lose a few because they water their newly emerged seedlings incorrectly.

Many gardeners use the pretty sprinkling cans sold in every gardening section of almost every Big-box store. The sprinkle head of the can appears to gently douse plants with fine streams of water. To a newly emerged seed, these seemingly fine streams of water resemble a July gully washer rain that drops two inches of rain in 30 minutes.

The smallest drop of water from one of these cans will leave a minor divot in the soil. If a seed is only an eighth or quarter inch deep, the droplet can burrow strait down and expose the roots.

Several safer methods of watering plants should be used until the seedlings have established a strong root system and stem. One method that many gardeners use is the emersion method – this waters the plants from the bottom up. For this method, the plants must be in a container that has drain holes. The container is simply placed into a larger container of water and the water is soaked up through the drain holds and into the soil. The gardener removes the container and the job is done.

I prefer giving my flats a spray mist sprits from a well cleaned recycled spray unit off a Windex bottle now attached to a smaller plastic bottle. It takes about 10 minutes a flat, but the spray is like a miniature rain more proportionate to the young seedling's size than the deluge of water from a sprinkling can.

Be careful, even the hand pumped sprayer if held too close to the soil will erode the soil. This method requires you to systematically spray the whole flat a section at a time then return after the surface is wet to add more water at least two more times over the entire flat so the water is absorbed well below the surface. If you only wet the soil's surface once, then not enough water will penetrate the soil and the roots won't form properly.

The misting method does something bottom watering does not – it strengthens the plant stems. One reason trays of transplants must be put out in a shaded area away from the protection of a greenhouse is to expose the plants to gentle breezes of the real world. The breezes tend to make the plant strengthen their stems. The gentle force of the mist I think tends to do this too.

There are other safe watering methods too. Container gardeners often use wicking to keep their container plants with a constant source of water from the bottom. I have not used this method but don't see how this wouldn't work too.
Soon gardeners will be thinking of starting some plants from seed, so now is the time to collect the supplies you'll need to safely water those young plants.

Heirloom tomatoes a must for sustainable living

Heirloom tomatoes should be on your seed list and in your garden plan this year. In the past decade the interest in heirloom seeds – plant varieties that were once grown from seed collected each year and no longer commercially grown – has continued to increase.

Unlike hybrids, the seeds from heirlooms can be collected and planted. The seeds of heirlooms will produce a plant like the parent plant. When you plant seeds from hybrids, you get something very different – usually one of the plants used in the cross to make the hybrid.

I've always grown one, maybe two, heirloom tomato varieties, but this year I dove in "whole hog" and plan to plant six different varieties or about 100 plants. Because the Italians quickly adopted tomatoes after their discovery in the New World in South America, many think tomatoes originated in Italy. If you haven't explored heirloom tomatoes, you will be astonished at the number of varieties out there.

Gardeners plant heirlooms for various reasons; some are ultraistic, like to extend the gene pool since commercial hybrids tend to narrow the number of varieties available. Some are gown because gardeners want to see if they can grow something rare. I grow them to experience the new flavors not listed in the typical hobby gardener seed catalogues.

Hybrids that you see in catalogues, and the hybrids planted by commercial growers, are the result of promotion and the need to pick and ship tomatoes great distances and they still be fresh in the market. The trade off has been flavor. Advertisers have stressed the "continuity of size" for display purposes. To machine pick a tomato that can be shipped from California to New York sacrifices taste for shelf life. Anyone who has visited a farmers market will already know that heirloom tomatoes will not always be uniform, but that the taste can be superior.

Unfortunately, the desire to have uniformity in size has resulted in seed providers to offer hybrids and sacrifice variety. Hybrids produce more consistent yields, but heirlooms can out yield hybrids in some years.

With heirlooms you have a wide variety of seeds from which to choose and after you collect the seed and replant them, over time you will develop plants that are acclimated to your climate.

As you explore the varieties, you will find some will produce in as little as 50 days and others, like Siberian varieties, will set fruit even when the temperature drops into the 30s.

I'd suggest you grow three or four varieties, collect the seed each year and add a few more until you find the three or four you want to grow regularly.

For more info:
http://store.tomatofest.com/category_s/31.htm

Winter is a great time to make plant labels

Yikes! Onions and leeks when they come up from seed look a lot alike; so do cauliflower, broccoli and cabbage. Plants, especially seedlings, need ID tags and it is easy to make your own.

Winter is the perfect time to do some of those garden chores that you too often procrastinate doing. Many gardeners, me included in my younger days, put off making plant labels or tags, relying on memory of what was planted where, only later to vow; Next year, I'm definitely going to make plant tags.

Most gardeners will put sticks and hang the empty seed packet or plant IDs at the end of each row of seeds they plant. Because bed gardeners often plant a variety of plants – interplanting – in a single bed, they need more plant labels than a row-crop gardener.

If you start your seeds in flats, use peat pellets trays or containers and transplant them later, tags are almost essential so you will know where one vegetable planting ends in the tray and the next begins.

Labels for bed gardeners serve more than just as identification; they act as markers so that when weeding larger plants that might already be growing in a bed, the smaller plants don't accidentally meet an untimely death by the hoe. The larger number of plant labels needed by bed gardeners can become expensive to purchase unless you get creative and make them.

A packet of 25 plastic plant tags or labels costs $2 to $3, but homemade labels not only cuts costs but can recycle other materials. Whether you make your tags or buy them, you will need a permanent marker to write the names of plants.

The best plant ID tags I have made for garden plants are plastic. In about 10 minutes I can cut 15-20 of them from plastic containers I've tossed in the recycle tubs. They are thinner than the store-bought tags, but if you cut a point on one end and stick them in the ground or in a flat and they stay put. Milk cartons, fabric softener, and laundry soup containers all make a good raw source for labels. I find clear plastics too hard to find in the garden and too hard to read.

I have also made metal tags using tin cans or aluminum from soda cans. Scrap aluminum roof flashing is my favorite metal for this. It doesn't rust, you can cut it with scissors if you don't have tin snips and it's cheap. An inexpensive engraver, the kind that you plug in and vibrates, can be used to put plants names permanently into the metal.

Metal tags are great for herbs or flowers because they last practically forever and the lettering doesn't fade like markers on plastic can when exposed to the elements for years. I prefer the plastic labels for vegetables because you can make them so much faster, but etching or engraving in the metal is better for perennial herbs and other long-term plants.

For more info:

Here are some other ideas:

http://www.gardenmarker.com/

http://www.metalgardenmarkers.com/

http://www.homeharvest.com/propagationplantlabels.htm

New method gets seeds planted in flats more evenly

Part II:
Onion and leek seeds are tiny – how is it possible to place them accurately enough so as not to have to thin the whole flat?

First rule, the smaller the seed, the closer you can plant them. Onion seeds typically are smaller than leeks. I plant leeks at a rate of about 12 per 10 inch row in the flat and shoot for about 20 to no more than 24 rows. That's about 240 to 280 seeds per flat. Plan to plant onions about 17 to a 10 inch row and shoot for 33 rows, that's about 550 plants to a flat – you'll end up with much less due to germination rates.

Start by cutting a piece of construction paper or card stock down to 10 inches wide. Then mark one of the 10-inch sides off to either 12 or 17 depending on what you are planting. Draw at least a half inch or more line back from each mark on the edge, then number each line 1-12 or 1-17. These numbers come in handy as the planting process can be monotonous and your mind will wander and if you count the seeds for each row and lose your place, you just find the number you left off at and begin from there. I found that without the number, I had to count the lines to find which one in the middle of the page I stopped or lost track of.

Now fold the paper just a little along the 10-inch side with your lines and numbers. You want just enough fold so you can sprinkle seeds in the crease, but not so much of a crease that to get the leading edge next to the dirt in the flat that the seeds all spill out at once.

Sprinkle seeds in the crease or trough and place the leading edge of the paper in the flat where you want the first row. If you have trouble visualizing where each row should be in the flat, place some tape or anything else along the edge so you will know after planting one row, how far back to scoot your paper to the next.

Once the paper is in position, take a lead pencil and nudge a seed over to the line marked number one and off the edge of the paper onto the soil. Don't worry about pushing it in or scoring the soil to make a row, when you are all done, you will sprinkle potting soil or mix over the entire bed as the last step. Repeat the process, counting to your self the seed number for that row, until the row of 12 or 17 seeds is planted. Then tilt the paper back so the seeds are in the crease, scoot the paper back to the next row and repeat the process until the flat is planted.

Since I have a pencil in my hand anyway, I always make a hash mark on the paper so I know how many rows I panted and multiply out the number of seeds per row for a total number of seeds per flat.

Time consuming yes, but no more than having to later thin out seeds that were planted rapidly by sprinkling or put to thickly in a crudely drawn row in the dirt. If you are careful, you will only have a few places where things got away from you and two seeds dropped instead of one. With small seeds like onions, sometimes they will flip or pop up and God only knows where they landed. If that happens, just scoot another seed over to that line and drop it. Sometimes those flipped seeds do land in the flat and do germinate, but still, it's much less work to thin than a broadcasted flat.

When the onions come up, you can identify rows, but because the seed is so small, the placement isn't near as perfect as it is for larger seeds like spinach or beets.

Care and Feeding:
I water my flats just as carefully as I sow them. Any kind of garden sprinkling can puts way too much water on small seeds planted very shallow. A large drop of water can displace enough soil to bring the seed to the top where it will dry out and die, or push it way out of position. I've found a water bottle fitted with a squeeze trigger sprayer – like what you'd find on a Windex bottle – can put out a fine mist and keep the soil moist if sprayed everyday. It's a good idea to use this even after the small plants emerge or until they are large enough and have established a good root system.

Unless you are lucky enough to have a greenhouse, you'll be moving the flats around a lot. After they have emerged, you will want to get them plenty of light so they don't get leggy. You can use grow light, a cold frame or sunny porch. Just be sure to move them back inside if there is danger of freezing. While both onions and leeks tolerate a lot of cold and frosty weather in the fall, the seedlings don't mimic their adult behavior.

Transplanting:
I'll have several blogs that will discuss transplanting, but for now just know that no matter what method of seed starting you use, you must nudge the roots apart very carefully. Because these are so closely planted in the flat, plan on transplanting them with a little more spacing after the weather moderates, then transplanting them to their final spot in the garden as needed. I have transplanted them directly from the flat to the final area of the garden but you better have real good weed control or you'll end up losing some before they get large enough to be missed by the hoe or not come up when yanking out weeds.

Plant seeds accurately and save time

For most gardeners who suffer through a winter, onions and leeks are the first plants they will plant in the spring. For gardeners who don't like to buy onion sets or transplants, they are also the first they will start from seed and usually begin in February or early March.

Plant in flats now, it's time!

While I normally plant most of my onions in my Midwestern garden using onion sets and plant them directly in the edge of my gardens in late March or April, I have one variety of oriental onion that I start from seed and I follow that up with American Leeks in late February.

Even if you don't plant leeks or onions from seed, some of the techniques I use can be adopted for planting other vegetables into flats from seed, also saving space and time.

The first mistake many beginner gardeners make is that they think they have to plant seeds in a flat that has little plastic spacers that divide the flat into 36 to 72 cells. If you only want a few plants and you have the plastic flats and plastic dividers or cells saved from planting flowers or something that you bought from the nursery last year, go ahead and use them. If you want 36 to 72 onions, realize that in a garden bed that is only about 2 to 4 square feet. The average American uses about 30 pounds of onions a year.

I shoot to get 300 to 400 onion plants per flat – now you see why I don't use the plastic cells?


But if you want to have plenty of plants or want to give away what you don't end up using, swap, barter or trade as any good sustainable agricultural community member should, then fill the flat with a potting or soil mix to about an inch from the top and plan on using my methods to sow it solid.

First thing you'll discover if you are going to plant a flat without cells is that if you decide to use the 11x22 inch plastic flats, they are flexible and you will need to put something rigid under them. If you don't, no matter how careful you are, they twist and bend when you move them, the soil cracks open tearing roots apart. Or seeds just planted will fall from their proper planting depth deep into one of the cracks and never be seen or heard from again.

Planting methods:

Many people will simply broadcast seeds from the packet out across the flat and thin what comes up later. If you know you won't need more than 50-100 seedlings, then that will work, but for me, the results never were satisfactory. Rarely do you ever achieve 100 percent germination so a bunch of seeds would come up on one area, none in another. When I thinned out the clumps of seedlings, the roots of others became damaged, weakened or I ended up pulling way more out than I intended.

While broad casting or sprinkling seeds across the bed is fast, I've found that taking care to carefully plant the flat evenly so you don't have to thin them later takes no more time than thinning them but with more satisfying results and more seedlings left to transplant in the end.
(Check back here for part II and see how to accurately place the seeds so you don't have to thin them).

Unemployment sends more people back-to-the-land

The current back-to-land movement might succeed where the communal movements of the 1960s and 1970s sometimes failed. One of the more widely covered social experiments by the media was a group of hippies lead by ex-marine Stephen Gaskin who formed "The Farm" in Tennessee. (I understand it still exists but with few original members).

Today, unlike the hippies who were of similar age, culture, and sought to remake society by using principals of love and peace, increasing unemployment is sending people with much more varied backgrounds back-to-the-land.

Some who have families with farms, or live on a property with a little extra land, or like me, who deferred dreams of independence on the in the 1970s to join the rat race, now find living a simpler life more attractive – especially if they have a predisposition to the sustainable food movements, or have a green mentality.

Because people are moving back-to-the-land for such varied reasons, more may opt to continue the lifestyle even after the economy improves. People like author Gene Logsdon have been writing about independence from the land for decades, so really this isn't a new movement as much as now there's a new urgency for some to reexamine their lives.

Logsdon wrote that if you are not getting enough time in the hammock, then you are not doing it right. For many, returning to a 9-5 job in their 50s or 60s just isn't going to give them the time they want in the hammock.

Unemployment numbers up by one

On Jan. 12, 2009 I became a government statistic

I lost my job and joined the rapidly growing number of unemployed. But unlike most suddenly without work, I rejoiced, not at losing half of our family income, but because the job loss would force me to do something different.

For too many years I always believed to be a good husband and father and the man of the house, it was up to me to go into the world and make as much money as I could. Unfortunately, most often that meant doing jobs that I hated -- or as in my last job – I had tyrannical bosses, or just had to work for stupid people that thought just because they had a title, they were always right. Sound familiar, if so, then this blog is for you.

Ever since college I wanted to pursue art and writing while living off the family's small 100 acre farm to fill in the gaps. My wife and I had planned what we would have to cut out of our budget if one of us lost our job. A good plan is the first step in this journey.

Within days I discovered that true freedom of mind and soul comes from not giving others power over me. Independence comes with a price – you either make it on your own or you don't.

On Jan. 12, 2009 I became a government statistic

I lost my job and joined the rapidly growing number of unemployed. But unlike most suddenly without work, I rejoiced, not at losing half of our family income, but because the job loss would force me to do something different.

For too many years I always believed to be a good husband and father and the man of the house, it was up to me to go into the world and make as much money as I could. Unfortunately, most often that meant doing jobs that I hated -- or as in my last job – I had tyrannical bosses, or just had to work for stupid people that thought just because they had a title, they were always right. Sound familiar, if so, then this blog is for you.

Ever since college I wanted to pursue art and writing while living off the family's small 100 acre farm to fill in the gaps. My wife and I had planned what we would have to cut out of our budget if one of us lost our job. A good plan is the first step in this journey.

Within days I discovered that true freedom of mind and soul comes from not giving others power over me. Independence comes with a price – you either make it on your own or you don't.

Today I dedicate this blog to the many who have dreams of becoming self-sufficient, strive to live a sustainable lifestyle, or who just like to live an alternative lifestyle removed from the materialism promoted by the corporate whores and media that seem to be running this country into the ground.

It is called Back-to-the-land Two because I will strive to avoid the mistakes that the first back-to-the-land movement of the 1960s and 1970s made. Most of them are not around, but instead are now a part of the large corporations that want to suppress individualism.

Future entries will be focus on gardening, grain production on small pots, stocking up and even some commentary analysis of how business and leadership in this country has molded out thinking to make living an independent life out of the question for most.
Enjoy.