THE TOMATO EXPERIMENT – HOW TO MAKE A PLASTIC BOTTLE GREENHOUSE

September 12, 2012 4 Comments

Watercolour design for a re-used plastic bottle greenhouse/pot for seedlings

It begins…

with your overflowing recycling bin and a sigh of shame that you are not doing enough to be sustainable. But be warned what begins as a wholesome notion to re-use can quickly escalate and before you know it you’re that crazy lady

looking at the neighbours’ bins with a twitching desire to rummage through them for treasures.
It’s best to dial it back a notch at this point and stick to finding alternate job descriptions for your own rubbish, we can’t all be Tiffany Sedaris.

And besides when you have five housemates you have plenty of material to keep you busy.
The youngest drinks at least one 3L plastic bottle of orange juice a week, two if there are no bottles of coke in the fridge, that’s over 52 binned a year!

They might be recycled into the latest in green bag technology or a jazzy promotional hat, but I’m sure that comes at a huge energy cost. It seemed like a waste, so I started thinking about what else I could do with them…

Plastic juice bottle pots with bottle water tray

Autumn came and it brought with it a slimy army of snowpea killers! I sliced the bottom off the juice bottle and dug it into the soil to became an impenetrable snail guard. The peas climbed upwards and their salvation became their prison as they clawed at the closed bottle lid. I set them free with a twist and the snails savaged them with a crunch.
I retaliated, slicing the top off the bottle as well and added another, then another bottle, stacking them to form a tower, the peas grew tall and strong and when they were released the snails turned up their nose at the strong tough stems and didn’t think to crawl upwards to the tender shoots.
The weather cooled and the bottles doubled as greenhouse to encourage young lettuces to be sweet while their unbottled neighbours grew world weary and bitter.
And now we come to the current day, the weather has mellowed and soon I will need to start planting my tomato seeds and I thought…

tomatoes despise being transplanted almost as much as they hate the cold, dry soil and wet feet!

Coupled with a general lazy attitude toward fiddly potting on, the bottle greenhouse was born!

Now we finally come to my experiment (Don’t you hate it when people take ages to get to the point? Ha!).

The “pot”

is a bottle with the top and bottom removed and is filled 3/4 with potting soil, then a piece of damp newspaper and 1/4 of seed raising mix. After this has settles the seeds are planted in the top in the more friable, low nutrient soil, when the roots are large enough to break through the thin paper they get a boost from the more nutrient rich potting soil.

A half bottle cut length wise is

the water “tray”

at the base. The “pot” is placed in the “tray” before it is filled which prevents the soil from falling out. Then from the top the soil is well watered until the water pools in the tray. While the seed settles the soil moisture levels will stabilise so it is neither too dry or too wet, if it is hot additional water may have to be added to the tray before planting. When the seeds go in the top should be gently misted and the tray filled with water.

The seeds won’t be washed away by overenthusiastic water spray and the water in the tray will slowly wick up through the soil to the developing seedling’s roots as it needs it.
Even it hotter weather the tray doesn’t have to be filled everyday so you are free to leave your nursery for a long weekend beach break without coming home to crispy reminders of what could have been. It will also encourage deep roots, which are preperable as shallow roots are more likely to dry out when planted in the garden.

A bottomless bottle acts as

the “greenhouse”

in cooler weather it keeps heat in and as it warms up it prevents too much moisture loss. Ventilation is important as the soil can get mouldy so the top can be left off. If pests are a problem the lid can be left on and small ventilation holes pierced around the bottle neck, too small for a slug.
When it comes time to transplant the “pot” can be gently buried, the roots undisturbed grow out the bottom into the soil with no transplant shock. The tomato experiment? More about that soon…

Garden, Recipes

HOMEMADE POTTING & SEED RAISING MIX

September 8, 2012 4 Comments

Potting mix ingredients: worm castings, coir, compost, coarse sand, cow manure

Pre-Spring, creeps up on you gently.

My mornings are still painstakingly timed to allow maximum cuddled up in bed time, the train becomes my breakfast nook and hair salon, all for a few more precious hours in my warm feather cocoon. But with the first few days that hit 20C, the first fruit trees bloom and the warm breeze brings sweet perfumes wrapped up with nostalgic memories of jasmine wreath crowns and daisy chains. Birds are stealing straw and string for nests and parakeets play court jester in the leafy canopy above.

I’m just itching to get planting, but gardeners beware for this is a “False Spring” one day of glorious sunshine can be followed by a freezing one with a real nasty bite to it. It’s going to get busy when True Spring arrives next month so I might as well get the nursery ready before the babies go in! Ha! It’s time to start preparing the Solanaceae garden bed for planting out when the weather is warmer, any planting is better done inside or under glass to protect it from the chill. I’ve been reading up on how to make your own seed raising and potting mix and am excited to share with you the recipes, once my seedlings taste the goodies I put in, they won’t be able to go back to that icky commercial stuff.

Coconut coir after being soaked

Coarse river sand

Seed Raising Mix

Seeds are a neat little packages, with enough nutrients to send stems and leaves skyward towards the light. That means that seed raising mix doesn’t need to be particularly rich in nutrients, but it does need to be friable (crumbly texture, not sticky like clay, easy for root grow through)

Seed Raising Mix Ingredients:
2 parts sifted compost
2 parts soaked fine coconut coir
1 part sifted cow manure
1 part coarse river sand

Potting Mix Recipe

When seedlings have developed their first set of adult leaves they need a little boost, so I add some worm castings to the mix. I am careful not to add too much nutrient rich material as this can lead to weak, leggy growth seedlings susceptible to disease and pests.

Homemade Potting Mix Ingredients:
2 parts compost
2 parts soaked fine coconut coir
2 parts worm castings
1 part cow manure
1 part coarse river sand

Garden Bed

Annual roots are as delicate as cobwebs and plants like tomatoes that suffer badly from transplant shock need to have their garden beds well settled before they go in, at least a month beforehand so I recommend anyone starting from scratch with a no dig garden get it ready in the next few months.

I have heard that when looking through a microscope settling soil looks like little “earthquakes” around delicate roots. No wonder it results in stressed unhappy plants!

Infrastructure

If stabilising soil is like a mini earthquake, then a stakes slicing into established roots may be like a meteor shower. I planned the location of my tomato stakes carefully so I could put them in now, rather than after the plants have already been planted out.
As shown in my plan I have placed hardwood stakes, offcuts from Agroforestry, in three hexagonal patterns around central stakes. Each tomato will have its own triangular enclosure, supported by string horizontals as they grow.

ALTERNATIVE TEXT

Garden

STEP BY STEP CROP ROTATION – A YEAR OF SOLANACEAE & ALLIUMS

September 5, 2012 1 Comment

Deep Winter has been about planning, anything planted out has had a miserable stunted look to it, a bitter reminder that I should have planned my planting earlier when the weather was still sweet. There are still some sorry looking tomatoes and capsicums clinging to their withering stems, the eggplant lingered long enough to shelter a brood of ladybird larvae until they grew wings flew away home, and it curled itself up. A better time for dreaming about gardening than actually doing it.

One rainy day I logged into Google Analytics and noticed my post on the 4 Year Crop Rotation gets at least one view a day, often more. It gave me a delicious thought, would you dear reader like to walk through a year in my plot?

A week by week plan of how the rotation actually works?

Since November the garden has been busy settling in to its new digs, Legumes have been occupying my plot, taking nitrogen from the air and enriching the soil for a new year of Solanaceae.
So come on a journey with me a beautiful year of growing juicy tomatoes, chillies, capsicums and eggplants!

In Australia where the sun runs screaming past plentiful and sprints headlong into harsh, bare earth is an absolute crime. Space is also at a minimum (1x2m) so a plan was absolutely necessary to cram as much in as possible. I’ve divided my plan into Solanaceae and Companions and this works beautifully as these fall neatly into the categories of

tall and low level plants and early and late planting. I read somewhere that tomatoes really shouldn’t be rushed into the ground until the temperature is reliably over 10C and according to the BOM this doesn’t occur until November in Melbourne. So while my Solanace seedlings wait to be planted out the companions will have the opportunity to

establish themselves as a nurse crop to shelter the young Solanace plants when they go in. When the weather grows spitefully hot, in Deep Summer, the tomatoes will have grown tall enough to shade their companions whilst they in turn protect the tomato roots from drying out.

Garden

THE WISDOM OF A FLOWER

August 23, 2012 No Comments

I thought I had a fever.

As I walked that dreary path to work my skin prickled with heat, I had to tear my jacket off and then my scarf and gloves. But no, I had mistaken the glass for half empty, the sweet perfume of jasmine suddenly

tickled the edges of my consciousness

and then gathered me up and carried me merrily all the way to the corner.

Spring was suddenly close, she was waiting!

Where there has been european settlement seasons are detached from place. 4 seasons that tick over like clockwork at the end of 3 months means nothing to the almond which

wakes from its slumber

when it senses the end of deep winter. Its hopeful blossoms the first of the dormant orchard.

Where Melbourne is today the Aboriginal inhabitants had their own seasons based not only on weather, but lifecycle patterns of birds, animal and plants, when the first chill hinted they should move north to shelter, or first blossom meant winding there way southward to the ocean. Here they had six seasons, but ask a different tribe separated by mountains or rivers and they might have different ones.

I noticed the first buds on the almond at the end of July. I dont know about you but think I think I like the idea of embracing Pre-Spring, and shaking off the shackles of Winter a bit earlier than other Melbournians.

Will you do the same?

I’d love to know if you have different seasons where you are. When do the the leaves turn auburn and crisp, the first snow flakes fall and does the summer heat send those nasty snails into cool, damp crevices?

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