Scamperings

I finally bought some more potting soil, set up a seed-starting tray, and put some seeds into the dirt.

I'll be taking a landrace approach starting this year: No more individual packets marked with variety, harvest date and location, and careful notes. No, they're all just going to get mixed together, with new seeds mixed with old ones. I'll overplant, both to use up old seed and to force myself to thin the seedlings for just the healthiest ones that can best tolerate my particular brand of neglect and weird soil nutrient levels. I'll probably also transplant too many so that I can thin out in a later step as well.

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Tomatoes: I have seeds collected from a mix of cherry tomato varieties we picked at Waltham Fields. No big tomatoes this year, as the squirrels and/or rats are prone to taking a single bite out of the big tomatoes.

Tomatillos: I've recombined all my bags of tomatillo seeds. There might be some golden berry or ground cherry seeds in there too, so I'll *definitely* have to overplant these. :-P Anything fuzzy is a golden berry, and will be weeded out, as they are a long-season plant. (The one I brought indoors in autumn did finish fruiting, but very reluctantly. Not worth it.) Ground cherries are welcome!

Hot peppers: A mix of seeds I collected at Waltham Fields this past summer. I made a fermented hot sauce and sampled the peppers as I chopped them; if they were nice I put a few seeds in a bowl. The bowl sat out all winter and is very dusty, but it's probably fine. (See notes on neglect.) I've also planted a few seeds of a sweet Italian pepper (probably Jimmy Nardello) that has grown on elusiveat's windowsill and even produced fruit during the winter -- very tough, and I want those genetics in there. Maybe in the future I'll try mixing in Capsicum flexuosum to try to get a winter-hardy hot pepper (can I get a long growing season?) I'll transplant a few sweet peppers out next to the hot peppers.

Sunflower: Hopi Dye (deep purple seeds, for dye) and/or Inca Jewels (red rings on some of the flowers). I have one packet of seeds from a really big plant, and another from a plant with gorgeous red/orange on it, and another of mixed seeds from various years. I'm *not* mixing these together; I want to very intentionally keep crossing the first two into the last, and keep selecting for large and colorful. The mixed seeds, interestingly, have pale stripes on them! I don't think any of the parent plants had that. Maybe something else got mixed in, or perhaps this is a heterozygous trait. Anyway, I'll be scraping a lot of the mixed seeds into a promising area along the bike path where they can fend for themselves. Anything good that the birds don't eat too quickly will go back into the mix, and I might do some pollen transfer as well.

Sweet basil (Genovese basil): Probably not a lot of variation here. Some will go into smaller pots that can be brought indoors for the winter, as it turns out that basil can overwinter indoors if you *really* stay on top of getting rid of any flower spikes. (They don't seem to be very susceptible to spider mites.) When it does go to seed it is very prolific, so I've ended up with a *ton* of seed. I should give some seed away. (I often end up giving away plants each year as well.)

Beets: I have some Detroit Dark Red seed from forever ago. No idea if it's still viable, and I don't eat many beets, but beet greens (chard) are nice. We'll see.

Onion: Sometimes we buy onions and they sprout heavily before we can eat them, so I just plant them; later, we get scallions. Sometimes they set seed. I have no idea what variety these seeds are, but I like scallions, so in they go.

Nasturtium (Tropaeolum): Pretty flowers, nice to snack on. We have some railing-mounted planters I haven't used yet. There's a place we get sun but don't have space for regular planters, and it seems like nasturtiums are a good fit. If I get enough seedset, I can make pickled nasturtium seeds, which are apparently like capers.

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I might also plant out some of the tomatillo, pepper, and tomato directly into the ground just to get a bigger gene pool and more crosses, even if I don't eat the fruits. (I don't know the lead levels here yet, and some would be in my neighbor's yard.) Actually, my neighbor has a raised bed and is somewhat new to gardening; she might agree to grow out some of the peppers and tomatoes for me and return some seeds of any that she likes. :-)

I put together a new raised bed from some spare materials I scavenged or had lying around:

• A 50 gallon plastic tub the neighbors were throwing out because it was cracked
  
• A long flat board someone had used to make a campaign sign, which they then threw out
  
• Some plastic jugs
  
• Used potting soil off of Freecycle
  
• Some old straw that a former upstairs neighbor had intended to use as mushroom substrate
  
• Worm compost
  

It's a bit unorthodox, but I think it will work well enough. If it all falls apart, it is unlikely to do so catastrophically, and I can always just move stuff into a new container at the end of the season.

Photos and description

The neighbors had thrown out this big 50 gallon plastic tub, presumably because it had a couple cracks on one side. I nabbed it because I saw potential for a large, roughly rectangular, movable raised bed. This is something I've been vaguely wanting.

It also still has a lid. I think I'll be able to put the lid on for the winter, and then if salty sidewalk snow is shoveled on top, it won't contaminate the soil. (Might require some supports, though. Snow is heavy!)



The main problem was the cracks. The soil pressure would cause the tub to bow out on the sides and would worsen the crack over time. One option I thought of was to tie the long side together via cords running through the tub, crosswise, resisting the bowing effect. Another was to brace the tub against something. What I ended up doing was cutting some boards to fit lengthwise so that they were pressing the narrow ends away from each other slightly. This might just cause new point strains on the ends and new cracks there, but it's worth a shot.



Next I had to provide drainage. I drilled about 70 holes into it along what should be the lowest points. I didn't like all the plastic shreds this generated, but I think I got almost all of it with the vacuum cleaner.

In some places (the last half of the work) I remembered to stagger the holes to avoid creating lines of weakness.



This is the silliest part. I didn't have enough material to fill it with, and I didn't actually need something all *that* deep. And I didn't want it to be so heavy it couldn't be moved. So I solicited some empty bottles from neighbors, tightened their lids (or hot-glued when necessary), and laid them down in the bottom. Now there's less space to fill, and less weight, but still something of a deep reservoir space for excess water to sit in before it exits.

These are all HDPE, same as the tub, so they should be *relatively* innocuous. We'll see if they collapse, or float up through the soil, or something else unwanted. They should stay fairly cool and protected, though.

Another option was to cut the tub shorter and raise it on blocks. Height is desirable for two reasons:

• We have a low wall around the front yard and I want the plants to get enough light
  
• I want to minimize soil splashup from the yard into the container
  

But that would reduce the structural integrity of the container even more.



This is the material I had to work with:

• A half-rotten bale of straw. This is difficult to work into the soil, but will add structure and later carbon.
  
• In the black bin, about 10 gallons of really lovely used potting soil. It's from an organic gardener who always mixes hers down with vermiculite, perlite, and compost each year to rejuvenate it. It had a good deal of structure and cohesion and I hated to break it up.
  
• In the lower white bucket, about 5 gallons of substrate from another person on Freecycle. This is maybe 30% perlite, 20% expanded slate (new to me!), and 50% bark and other mulch. Seems like something you'd grow cactus in.
  
• And in the other white bucket, about 2 years of worm compost, maybe 2 gallons of it. Should be quite rich.
  

I started by packing straw in around the jugs to create a drainage layer (I hope?) and to use up less-nutrient-rich materials first. (There was also just a lot of straw, although I know it will compress over time.) Then I mixed everything else together, which required quite a lot of elbow grease. I remembered to wear an N95 to avoid breathing rock and soil dust, and it's neat that that's just a thing I have readily at hand these days. :-)



I moved the bin to its final location, which required a little re-grading to give it a flat, level surface to rest on. The cracked side is shoved up against the brick wall as additional reinforcement. The exposed side is likely going to get some sun and may get damage from that, so I may just like... lean some plywood up against it or wrap it with some other sun-blocking material. Dunno.

The straw is going to pack down over time, so I'll need to to pit off occasionally with more soil and compost, but that's fine. I may even consolidate some of my other, smaller pots into this one, which will have a similar effect.

Overall I'm pretty happy with this, and I'm interested to see how it holds up!

1. The child trailer for my bike can carry over 300 lbs, despite the shitty wheels that sometimes let the tire fall off the rim (but not today!), as long as I balance the weight over the axle and don't let the hitch take all the strain.

2. However, 300 lbs is about the limit of what I can haul up the hills around here, at least without better gear ratios on my bike (although again, better wheels on the trailer would reduce rolling resistance).

3. Concrete blocks are surprisingly heavy.