Is Plastic a Gardener's Best Friend?

There was an email announcement in my inbox a couple of days ago for an upcoming talk (Feb. 23) on vegetable gardening in Fayette county, south of Atlanta. The announcement claimed that the guy who is giving the talk is a big proponent of plasticulture.

I hadn’t heard that word before, so it’s probably no surprise that my brain started wondering what our credit card-based society had to do with gardening. However, I looked up the word plasticulture and found that the word just refers to the use of plastics in gardening, mostly to cover the soil (as mulch) or plants (as row covers and hoop houses).

This article on Plasticulture from the University of Washington explains the uses of plastics in the garden. And these uses are mostly familiar.

For several years, various seed catalogues have offered red plastic sheeting to be used as mulch under tomatoes. The red plastic is supposed to be very beneficial to tomatoes, boosting their production. This year I noticed that one catalogue is also offering green plastic sheeting to use as mulch, with the claim that melons, especially, show improved production when grown on green plastic mulch.

I do use plastic in my yard for covering a frame over plants as a season extender, and buying more when the old has worn through always gives me a bit of a twinge, but somehow, knowing the actual word makes this practice seem worse. Even without these uses, there is a lot of plastic in gardening. Nursery pots are plastic, and lots of soil amendments and other useful products come in large plastic bags.

It would be great if gardening could be a truly “green” activity, but that dream seems unlikely to be fulfilled any time soon. I do hope that my own bits of plastic aren’t heading out to the Pacific Ocean to join the continent-sized gyre of plastic swirling around out there, but I have no good way to know. Even if it doesn’t, my “demand” for plastic encourages the production of more, and some of that will undoubtedly be going for a swim with the fishes, eventually.

A long time ago, Joe made a little wood shelter with an old window on the top to use to protect my plants, but it is not as easy to use as the plastic that I use now. It was small, so only a few plants fit inside, and it took more time and attention to not cook the plants on sunny days (it was a good lesson in the “greenhouse effect”). In addition, it was heavy enough that I couldn’t move it on my own. Obviously, though, I need to be rethinking my season-extending tools.

I do re-use plastic pots over and over again, until they wear out, and some of my soil amendments are bag-less, hauled in the back of my little truck, but that really isn’t enough. It’s a problem.

31 Jan. edit: This Good Morning America segment contains more information about the Pacific Garbage Patch:

Tools Inventory: A Wee Widger

The slender metal tool on the rim of the flat is a widger, a tool for transplanting seedlings from their starter medium (which is usually a very low nutrient, sterile, finely textured mix) into a more nutritious medium for their next stage of growth.

My father-in-law, an engineer, used to remind us that it was important to use a tool designed expressly for whatever task was at hand ("the right tool for the right job"). On Friday, I used my widger to lift the delicate little potato seedlings from their very small starter flat, and to open up planting-holes in the potting mix that fills the larger flat that will be their home for the next few weeks. It was the right tool for the job.

However, before I had my widger, I used a table knife for the same purpose, and a good friend uses an old paring knife. My father-in-law might not have approved (he has been gone for ten or so years), but it is unlikely that I would have harmed the table knife by using it in this way, and it worked just fine.

He would have been glad that I finally used the appropriate tool, though. Happily, a widger is not an expensive item. Mine is from Bountiful Gardens, and it cost $5 plus S/H.

Joe (husband) made the wooden flat to fit in the baker's rack that stands by the back door. While the seedlings are small, two fluorescent bulbs lie across the top of the flat. As the seedlings grow, those lights will be raised slowly (suspended by strings) to stay just an inch or two above the tops of the plants.

Fall Carrots

My sister in Louisiana called a couple of weeks or so ago, laughing about her carrots. She had planted the seeds back in September when she was supposed to. Then, she had pulled a couple up in early December, and at the time the roots were still spindly and pale. After Christmas, she still couldn't see anything but green above-ground, but she pulled another one up, just to check.

It had definitely grown; in cross section, it was shaped just about like a wedge of pie. The carrot was three inches at its widest diameter and only seven inches in length. The shape is what made her laugh, but, as a bonus, the carrot was sweet, with good carrot flavor. The leaves smelled carrot-y, too, making the plant a complete carrot experience.

The other carrots she has harvested from her garden since then have all been similar.

When choosing the seeds, she bought whatever was available in bulk at a local store. The stores that carry bulk seed, for gardeners to measure out themselves, (usually a "feed & seed" store) typically carry seeds that will work well in their area, making it hard for a beginner to choose poorly.

The variety my sister's store happened to have was Danvers, which, according to Wikipedia

"has a conical shape, having well-defined shoulders and tapering to a point at the tip. They are somewhat shorter than Imperator cultivars, but more tolerant of heavy soil. Danvers cultivars are often puréed as baby food. They were developed in 1871 in Danvers, Ma."

My sister's yard definitely has heavy soil, but she built some raised beds to keep her plants up out of the worst of it.

She has been pulling the carrots "as needed" for meals, and they have all been tasty and not tough (the way root vegetables can get as they age).

She will plant them further apart next year, maybe six inches apart; she planted these about 4 inches apart which, for most carrots, would have been a fine spacing, but these carrots needed more room.

The carrots I grew in 2009, Little Finger and Jaune du Doubs, both did very well in spring, but fizzled in the fall, so I have ordered different fall carrots for 2010. If I were very smart, I would just buy a packet of Danvers, since they did so well for my sister, but I do not always do the smart thing.

Instead, I have ordered a packet of Oxheart, which should be shaped a lot like my sister's carrots and are advertised as doing well in the fall garden, and a packet of Nantes, which I have grown before with good success.

One potential problem with the Nantes variety is that some strains do better in spring and some in fall. I am not sure which category my packet belongs in, so they will be a bit of a gamble. However, I would likely lose more money gambling with actual cash in Vegas than in my yard with a packet of carrot seeds.

Seed Orders for 2010

I've made the major decisions about what to grow this year and am posting the list here. I also have seeds from last year (and the year before that) to plant this year, including Pigott Family Heirloom crowder peas, Dakota Black popcorn, Wuhib paste tomato, SloBolt lettuce, and MANY more.

This is a lot of seeds, and the garden space isn't exactly huge. However, the seeds - and transplants grown from the seeds - won't all go into the garden at the same time; some of these are for spring, some for fall, and some for summer.


From Fedco Seeds, in Maine:

Little Leaf H-19 cucumber
Rocky Ford green flesh melon
Raven zucchini
Cherokee Purple tomato
Scarlet Nantes carrot
French Breakfast radish
Evergreen Hardy White scallions
Jimmy Nardello pepper
Black Czech pepper
Rutgers tomato
Golden Detroit beet

Total $14.00 (no S/H charges since I ordered with a friend; together, we got above the no S/H minimum)

From The Cook’s Garden, in Pennsylvania, but owned by the CEO of Burpee:

Sugar Nut hybrid melon (2 packets)
Costoluto Genovese tomato
Cilantro

Total $13.35 (plus $5.95 S/H)

From Sandhill Preservation Center, in Iowa:

Blue Marbut pole beans
Ukranian Beauty eggplant
Red Russian kale
Vegetable mallow
Aunt Molly’s ground cherry
Pollock Rocky Ford melon (orange flesh variety)
Detroit Dark Red beet
Marvel of Four Seasons lettuce
Winter radishes mix
Straight Nine cucumber
Yellow Out Red In tomato
Sweet Genovese basil

Total 20.25 (no S/H)

From Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, in Virginia:

Oxheart carrots
Hanover Salad kale
Forest Green parsley
Capitan lettuce
Cajun Jewel okra
Napolean Sweet pepper
Ice Bred White turnip

Total $17.24 (plus 3.50 S/H)

The grand total cost for seeds (so far) is $64.84. With S/H charges included, it's $74.29. When onion sets become available, I will be buying a bundle of those. Last year, one bundle cost $1.50, and I am expecting this year's bundle to be a similar price.

If I were more strapped for cash, I would have ordered from just Fedco and/or Sandhill preservation. They have more varieties for lower prices than other sources I've seen, and they have no S/H charge on orders above a minimum ($30 for Fedco, $10 for Sandhill Preservation). If my seed-ordering friend and I could find a few more people to order with us, we could get a "volume discount" from Fedco (10% off orders above $100).

New Year, New Garden

Every year my vision of my garden changes. The garden always includes edible plants, but my goals shift, my tastes change, and curiosity moves my choices in new directions, so that each year the garden is new, even though it always has, for example, tomatoes, peppers, and okra. This year the plants will be essentially the same (even though there will be some new varieties and some different kinds of greens), but this is the year that I will be working on seed saving in a more systematic way.

I've had a copy of Suzanne Ashworth's book Seed to Seed for long enough that the text is making a home in my brain, and one of my new books for Christmas this year was Carol Deppe's Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties. Between these two sources, information I've gleaned from various blogs and websites, and the successes I've had with saving the easiest kinds of seeds, I'm making plans to work on my melon problem (my favorite melon is a hybrid with limited availability) and to segregate flowers of several kinds of vegetables to insure that the varieties don't get crossed with others nearby.

Of course, the main goal is to get as much good food as possible out of the space that I have, and many seed catalogs arriving in my mailbox promise abundant harvests of beautiful and delicious crops, but none of the catalogs I receive are from Georgia; the two nearest are Park and Southern Exposure Seed Exchange.

This means that many of the seeds I buy from more distant (Pacific Northwest!) sources might not do as well as I would hope; they aren't bred for this yard's weather and soil. By saving more of my own seeds, from plants that do well in my yard, I'm hoping to improve the odds of having a successfully productive garden each year.