| The PEAS Farm: Soil & Seed-Starting |
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| Written by Heather McKee | |
| Wednesday, 05 March 2008 | |
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Seed-starting on the farm means doing some pretty intense backwards math. Like, if we need one bunch of carrots each week from June to October for eighty CSA families, and each carrot needs seven-and-a-half square inches of dirt, and we have three four by thirty foot rows to plant carrots, then how many seeds should we plant right now? The answer is always 25% more than what we calculate. Some seedlings aren’t going to come up - even though we order from FedCo and Johnny’s, who have similarly cold climates, and who test their seeds fairly rigorously (and are cooperatively owned companies.) We're planting onions, leeks and flowers now because they take the longest to mature. Today, we planted Gold Coin and Bianca De Maggio cipollini onions, both small, saucer-like varieties good for soups and pickling. Onion and leek seeds are tiny – the regular, palm size seed packet I had listed its contents as “About 1200 seeds.” Because they are small and difficult to space evenly, we just take a heaping teaspoon of them and sprinkle them slowly and carefully over an open wooden flat instead of a divided plastic tray.
Our onion flats are 2.5 square feet, constructed of not-quite-adjacent 1” x 4” wooden planks and lined with straw, so that they can drain water, but don’t lose all their dirt. The onion and leek flats use a seed-starting mix with extra fertilizer, because they’ll be sitting in the greenhouse until April and May.
Here are our seed-starting dirt recipes (we use shovelfuls for all but the BioGrow):
Flats (Onions, Leeks)
4 Compost
4 Peat
3 Vermiculite (asbestos-free)*
1 Sand
½ small pot of BioGrow (organic fertilizer)
Trays (Other Veggies, Herbs, and Flowers)
4 Compost
2 Vermiculite (asbestos-free)*
2 Peat
½ small pot of BioGrow
(*Vermiculite, styrofoamy as it is, is a natural substance that is mined. However, vermiculite is often found with asbestos, and so has been the source of terrible health issues with miners – you may have heard of the Libby scandal in Montana?)
Just as you’re wondering how we can spend a whole week just mixing dirt and sprinkling seeds in boxes, I will say that we’ve also been putting a floor in the washshed, and taking shingles off the new toolshed – but more on that in the next post.
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