Out of Ground Experience

So for those of you who were surprised by my post about doing kale, spinach, and chard starts indoors, this post is for you. Usually one does not plant these seeds indoors and then transplant them. They germinate at cooler temperatures, and conventional gardening wisdom states that one should sow them directly into the ground. However, we are all about experimentation at S-UH, as well as cultivating (no pun intended) ways to make gardening more accessible to people in climates less mild than the Pacific Northwest. I wanted to see if there was a way that my family in Central New York, or our readers in Chicago, Minnesota, and Alberta could get their plants going before the outdoor growing season starts.

Hence the article in which I planted kale, spinach, and chard into egg cartons to get the growin' goin'. These little sprouts are leafy and happy on my start shelf, but beautiful weather and the need to turn them EVERY DAY due to sun coming from only one direction finds me putting them out into the raised beds in the backyard.

First off, if you are following the blog, you know that the beds themselves are experimental. They have been out back rotting away for a while now, and I am please to report that the peas I planted recently have been growing well out there! Here's how I am going about planting in the sheet mulch, as well as details about the transplantation experiment.


The sheet mulch is not soil. It is a partially-composted mass of striated compost, straw, soil, and manure. To increase the success of anything I plant here I am digging a trench into the bed, and filling that trench with soil before putting in the transplants. In this pic I show the trench I dug today to put in the pea starts that I kept indoors for an extra week.


I used the cardboard egg cartons to plant in, which meant that I could just cut them up and place the plants into the soil inside the cups. Here is where the experiment starts getting interesting. The plants came up in the egg cartons just fine. I planted one row of each plant by scooping the start out of the cup and planting it bare into the soil, one row with the cups still intact, and one row I sowed seeds directly into the ground. Now all I have to do is water, fertilize, and watch to see what happens with each row. Not the most scientific, controlled experiment but hey, I am no scientist.


The plants are in! Will report back to see how it goes. At the moment I get to enjoy the happy kale, chard, spinach, and pea plants out back in the sun. Oh, and the cucumber starts are popping up!!!

Garlic Gone 'Bad'

We've all done it. I've done it, you've done it (admit it!) - it happens all the time.

We buy something, we forget about it, and it goes bad.

I try very very very very hard not to do this. I work with people who deal with food insecurity. I believe in sustainability. I hate waste. I think food is a precious gift. Yet despite all of these tenets I do find bizarre science experiments in the back of my fridge, and spend a fair amount of time convincing myself that the floppy carrots are OK to eat.

I will say that my commitment to composting makes things easier. At least I can take that bad food and put it to good use as worm food and soil. That said, there are some times when people determine that a food is not good to eat, but it need not be compost-bound. Today I am going to talk about one such food - garlic.

I LOVE garlic. It has medicinal properties, tremendous health benefits, and tastes amazing. However there are days when I just don't want to take the time to peel and chop it up into my food. I usually buy a bulb of garlic and get through only about 2/3 of it before it starts to move on. When I say move on what I mean is that it sprouts. You know, those tender green shoots that come out the top of the cloves. Once this happens the garlic IS edible, but not nearly as good. It tastes green, loses its bite, and is just not as appealing.

I realized this morning while making an omelet that the garlic in the kitchen was sprouted. I've been thinking about planting garlic for a while now, so I decided instead of composting it I'd put these babies in the ground! The problem: garlic is not included in the garden plan. I don't have space allocated for it. Hmmm...

I'd been thinking about getting some container gardening going for a while now, but have been working mostly on the raised beds. This seemed like a great opportunity to get something going. When I lived in Utah, I had a garden that was 100% in containers - buckets, plant pots, milk crates, and cardboard boxes. What I found was that the plants in the cardboard did the best. I think it was because in the hot Utah sun the boxes held in moisture the best. Though Oregon is not hot like the Utah desert, I do know that it turns up the sun and temperature in the summer, so I decided to put my garlic into cardboard boxes.
Lovin' the Hop Czar Box!

I cut the boxes to make them shorter. Garlic needs at least 6" of soil depth to yield well, so I cut the boxes to 10", and lined the bottoms with newspaper. I find that when planting in cardboard it helps to put the paper in the bottom so that less water gets lost out the bottom. I added 8"-9" of soil into the boxes on top of the newspaper. The soil we are using is about 50% potting soil, and 50% compost. It is very light, loamy, and drains easily. I find it great for plants once they grow, but know that when you are germinating in it you might need to water more often because it dries out very quickly.

I have made a personal commitment to plant all of my sprouted garlic from now on.


I planted the garlic in the boxes with 6" in between each clove. The planting depth is important for garlic - no more than 1-1.5" into the soil. Too close to the top and they don't root well, and too far underneath and they don't grow. As I was planting, the ones that had long sprouted "tails" I planted with the tip of the green sticking out of the soil. Be sure to plan the cloves right side up. The green sprouted end needs to point up, and the flat end that was attached to the rest of the bulb goes down.

At the food pantry I manage we have a whole bunch of potatoes that are sprouting. We are going to have to toss them per state laws (totally understand this), so I am going to bring a bunch of them home to cut up and do the same thing!

Egg-cellent Starts

So my campaign to get more containers for planting has been relatively unfruitful. I will pass on a big thank you to my mom who mailed me some along with a pound of home-roasted coffee! This weekend I got up to find that the peas we starting to sprout. I KNEW at that time that I really had to get this show on the road.

The garden plan this year is a pretty ambitious use of space. I think it will probably be too tight in a few places, particularly where the squash and broccoli are going, but we are going to play it by ear. I like planning out my garden from year to year, changing it up to match what actually happened. Doing this makes it possible to keep track of things like rotating nitrogen fixers, what needed more or less sun, or what liked/disliked being planted close to one another.

This was the plan to begin with. I did it in pencil, but then I lost the pencil (I am sooo awesome), so I am writing in what actually got planted in pen over the top of it.


I decided to take advantage of some of the egg cartons I had been saving to take back to our co-op. Some people LOVE using egg cartons because they are simple, small, and easy to move around. Also, if you use the cardboard ones they hold in moisture and you can just cut them up and plant them cups and all into the soil. Those who don't like them argue that there is not enough soil depth to really get good starts. I compromise on this issue by planting things in my egg cartons that I will transplant pretty quickly.

I also love that they are stackable and easy to carry around!


I planted spinach, kale, chard, and basil in my egg cartons. Most of them i put only one seed per unit, but with the basil I put two because I had some trouble last year with my basil seeds sprouting. I chose these plants because I will put them in the soil as soon as I am confident they won't be taken out by heavy rains...at least the kale, chard, and spinach. I may hold the basil inside a bit longer because it likes a little more heat than the others.

I am really loving the starts shelf I made. The one downer is that the screens have stretched a bit where the containers are so they don't sit totally level. Fortunately for me that does not affect the plants' growth, and only really causes issue if one is anal retentive enough to care that things are a bit lopsided (I am not).

Sheet Mulch

So its time for us to actually start that whole gardening thing. We spent some time talking, dreaming, scheming about it about 2 weeks ago, and now we are finally getting it to action.

We decided to put in 4 framed beds out back - each is 8'x3' and made out of reclaimed lumber we got from the Benton Habitat for Humanity ReStore. Jason worked this week getting the frames built, and we are going to spend some time this weekend turning the ground and starting to get things ready for seeds.

Upon digging into the yard (thanks to our landlady who is OK with this!) we found that the soil is mostly clay. This is great when we are talking about making plasters or cob, but for gardening it worried us a bit, hence the framed beds so we can import some other materials without having to till up the whole yard.

We looked into ways to get ahold of good soil. This included all kinds of ideas from going to the woods and getting some to purchasing it at a local store. We decided hauling soil seemed pretty energy inefficient and labor intensive, and discovered the route of buying soil would put us out over $200 minimum (ouch). So Jason got on the horn and started researching other options.

What he landed on was sheet mulching. This was an idea he'd originally had, but rejected because he did not think it was feasible for immediate planting. Sheet mulching is an incredible soil-building technique, especially if you have 6 months to let it break down. Fortunately, Jason pursued this idea deeply enough to discover that it is possible to plant almost immediately if one takes certain steps.

Lets take a moment and talk about what sheet mulching actually is. It is rooted in the concept that tilling is actually not beneficial for sustainable gardening (or agriculture for that matter) in that it will initially promote plant growth, but in the long run leeches nutrients out of the soil and leaves in barren (anybody remember the dust bowl?). It is essentially composting in place. To do this we are going to:

• Trim the grass short, leaving it in place.
• Covering the grass with newspaper and cardboard to prevent grass growth.
• Layering on top of the paper and cardboard from the bottom up, these four layers: partially composted goat manure and straw from a local farm, completed compost from the local municipality, straw, and dead leaves.

The net result is a striated combination of materials that will break down into fluffy, humus-rich, healthy soil. This process would have been best started back in October of last year. Of course last October Jason was living in a tent at an earth-building worksite, and I was watching football and drinking beer in Flagstaff. So, we are starting a bit behind, but developing a plan for being able move forward nonetheless.

While Jason builds his 5-layer dip of poop and other organic material in the backyard, I have been saving old containers to get our starts going. The plan is to get the sheet mulch up and decomposing while the plants get rolling indoors. Stay tuned for an article on starting plants as well as updates on the backyard beds. We are slated to get our plants into the ground on April 15, thus turning tax day into happy-gardening-fun-plant-dirt-day.

We must certainly give a nod to Toby Hemenway, author of "Gaia's Garden" for inspiration, ideas, plans, and instruction.