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.