West Coast Notebook

1) You Get What You Plant

When you sow your own seeds, you get exactly the plants and produce that you want. The seed producers are very careful as to what goes into the package and I’ve always had good results from them.

One year I bought some acorn squash seedlings and they all turned out to be spaghetti squash. One can only handle so many spaghetti squashes, but I guess it was better than them all turning out to be zucchini.

Another time, I bought corn seedlings from a nursery and they were just marked “corn” nothing else. And it turns out the nothing else was what we called “cow corn” or “field corn”.

I found this description

“Although field corn kernels start out soft like sweet corn, it’s not harvested until the kernels are dry. Field corn is used to feed livestock, make the renewable fuel ethanol and thousands of other bio-based products like carpet, make-up or aspirin.

Sweet corn is harvested when the kernels are soft and sweet, making it ideal for eating. If you grab an ear of field corn and try to take a bite, you’ll probably break your teeth. It’s hard and dry (and only tastes good to cows, chickens, pigs, turkeys and some wild animals).”
Minnesota farm guide

Needless to say, it was the wildlife that got the corn that year.

 2) Control

One of the nice things about growing from seeds is you also get to control the quality of the plant. Whenever possible I buy non-GMO and organic seeds. Let me restate that. I never purchase GMO seeds and if the seeds I purchase don’t say organic on the package, it’s usually because the farm is waiting to be certified organic.

When in doubt, you can contact the seed company and they are very helpful and informative.

3) Variety

If you go into a garden centre and want to purchase some bean seedlings, you will normally have a choice of bush beans, pole beans and maybe a drying bean if you are lucky.

Beans are so easy to grow from seeds that you can have any kind you want and in looking through one of the places that I purchase my seeds from they have over 39 different varieties. Now that’s not anything that you are going to find in a nursery.

4) Suited For Your Area

One of the reasons that I like to purchase seeds locally is that they are grown in the area I live in and do well in the climate.

There is no sense in buying a plant that does will in Arizona only to plant it into my west coast garden. The soil and rain requirements are so different that the seedlings would wither and die.

A great place to get local seeds are what are called around here “Seedy Saturdays“. It’s where all the local seed savers come together and swap and sell seeds. There is a huge variety and just about all of them are of an heirloom type seed as hybrid seeds don’t always ring true when you are saving seeds yourself. They will revert back to the parent variety.

Case in point, I saved some squash seeds from a hybrid plant one year (can’t remember what it was but it looked like an acorn) that we really enjoyed.

The following spring I planted them and to my surprise, I got two different species of squash. One was a definitely a kabocha and the other was a hubbard squash. It was called a mystery until the fall came and you could distinctly see their colour and shape.

5) Disease

Large greenhouses and places that start plants, don’t always have disease free soil which in turn can contaminate your garden.

I know this one first hand as last year when I purchased some Brassica which is just a fancy latin word for broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, kale, brussels sprouts and kohl rabi.

The cauliflower wasn’t doing as well as expected and the broccoli was almost non-existent so I pulled up a few plants so I could plant some more. The roots of the plants were covered in what looked like knots or growths.

In doing research I found these are caused by something called nematode which is a microscopic worm and very hard to get rid of organically. It is also known as root knot.

I always have done crop rotation, so I must have had some poor seedling stock last year. Needless to say, I am starting my own Brassica this year and planting them in different beds. Only 2 beds were affected, but I treated all my beds like they were.

I planted a cover crop of winter rye this year and I’m hoping that will do the trick. I will let you know how that worked.

6) Succession Planting

When you grow your own plants it’s a lot easier to do succession planting. That is when as soon as one plant is finished you put in another.

As we have a long growing time on the west coast, this makes an extended garden season. A lot of plants overwinter and I’m still eating kale and pulling leeks from my last year’s garden as I type.

I’ve always found that when I want another plant to replace the last one, I can never find anything at the nursery. They have either quit bringing in plants or just have the basics like lettuce and kale.

If I’m doing my own planting from seeds then I can have a seedling ready to plant, and I get the variety I want.

7) Satisfaction

There is nothing more satisfying than looking through the seed catalogues, picking the seeds you want, starting the seedlings, planting them into the garden and watching them grow. This is when you truly get to see the miracle of life.

Plant a seed, add light, warmth and water and watch it grow. Amazing!

One day I’m going to save all my own seeds and get exactly the plant and produce that I want.

Just an update:

Last fall I saved seeds from:

• snap peas
• shelling peas
• chives
• sunflowers
• dill
• basil
• scarlet runner beans
• pole bean
• black beans

They all seem to be sprouting and viable seeds and I will plant them in the garden this year.

When you are gardening, it’s all about the soil. It doesn’t matter what kind of plants or seeds you have if you don’t have the right soil to grow them in, they won’t flourish and produce.

I know this for a fact as when my initial raised garden beds were built, we purchased soil from a reputable source and I excitedly planted seedlings and impatiently awaited their growth.

I hadn’t grown a garden in a while, so it took me much longer than normal to realise that the plants weren’t doing as well as they should.

After being in the ground for a month, nothing was growing up. Well, maybe an inch or so, but really no growth, so I started to read.

In turning to Google, it appeared that the most common reason for stunted growth was poor soil. So… I’m thinking that can’t be the problem as had we paid good money to get the best dirt possible.

But still, nothing grew.

Gardeners on the web suggested a soil testing kit to test the levels of nitrogen, phosphorus, potash, and PH of your soil. So off I went to the local garden centre and found one similar to the following.

If you can’t find one locally, you can find it here on Amazon. Cost less than $15.

Once you have the kit, you just need to follow the instructions. If I remember correctly you mix the soil with water and then once it is settled you use the syringe to put some into the chamber of each tester along with a colour coordinated pill.

As you can see from the picture above, you can tell if your soil has too much of a good thing or too little.

Mine apparently had none… zip… zilch… nada… nitrogen. No wonder my poor little plants were stunted.

Nitrogen is essential for plant growth and without it… well, you know the story.

The tests also revealed the soil was high in potash and low in phosphorus.

So… back to Google.

You can add nitrogen back into your soil with many methods, some of which are quicker than others. I bought a commercial crystal nitrogen and applied that to the soil around the plants. This will give the plants a kickstart, but will leach out of the soil and won’t build it up, but at this point I was desperate.

So I also add blood meal. This takes longer to break down but adds to the existing soil.

In the meantime, I started a compost cooking to enrich the soil with nutrients that it so desperately needed but it probably wouldn’t be ready until the fall.

That took care of the nitrogen, but the earth was still low in phosphorus.

Phosphorus, as it turns out is essential for root formation and growth so without good roots, the plant won’t grow properly.

Double whammy.

I found that somewhere in the back shed I had a gallon of liquid fish fertilizer that had both the ingredients that my soil was missing and proceeded to apply it on a regular basis to the slow growing plants.

It took a while, but I started to see some growth on my lettuce and there was even a pea or two produced.

The most heart-wrenching plant was the corn. It grew about 2 feet high in total and had little baby corn cobs on it like the ones that you get in cans only these were fully matured. That was the best the garden could do.

On the other hand, if you want a low yielding zucchini plant, lack of nitrogen is the way to go. I got just enough of the little squashes to eat that first year, but none of the masses that have been produced since the garden has matured.

Looking back on the initially purchased soil, it looked wonderful, but I should have realised that something was wrong when I didn’t see any worms in it, only what we call wood bugs and they were there because they were eating the wood.

It was black, light and loamy and had small shavings of what looked like wood in it. Turns out, they were wood chips and that was one of the major reasons that it didn’t have any nitrogen in it.

If you purchase soil in large amounts it is usually a mixture of different ingredients. I tend to think of soil as something that is dug up out of the ground, but that’s not the case nowadays.

In our area, things that go into this mass produced or manufactured soil are wood chips, forest droppings, sawdust and a little dirt and sand to get the mixture going. This along with other compostable products are left to decompose. As it does so, you would think that it would be full of microorganisms and bacteria that would be beneficial to a garden plot.

But as the ingredients decompose, the wood chips require a lot of nitrogen to break down and deplete the soil.

Once the wood chips have composted, your soil will be nitrogen-rich, but until that time your soil will have a hard time growing things.

If I had only know way back then, I would have enriched the soil with steer and chicken manure, seaweed, granite dust, and compost before I ever planted a seedling.

At the end of the summer when all the plants were finished I started a major building up the soil. It was exciting to start seeing worms in the garden as I added organic material (compost and manure) to it and by the following spring, my soil was rich in all the nutrient and organisms and worms slithered freely.

Life is good.

Lessons learned.

• make sure you know what sort of mix your soil is.
• test it to make sure of its properties before you buy.
• ask around or look online to see if there are any complaints against the company you are purchasing from.

If you are just doing a small garden then you can pick up bags of different mixtures of soil at your hardware or garden store. You can make your own soil based on what you are planting.

Here is a handy calculator to figure out the volume of soil needed for a raised garden bed.

If you are looking for the perfect garden soil, just do a search online and you will find numerous recipes for what people consider to be the best for the garden.

No matter what mixture you use, make sure it can sustain a worm. I have found that if my garden has worms, that’s a good thing.

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Since this post, I have done some further soil testing that you can read about here.