Indoor Gardening on A Rainy Day

Early this morning yesterday’s balmy 75º weather gave way to a massive cold front, whose arrival was announced at 3:00 A.M. by a crashing thunderstorm. That dramatic event has settled into a slow, steady rain, for which we are thankful. Spinach and lettuce in the cold frame are getting a good drink, and in the garden the newly-planted potatoes, onions, arugula, spinach and kale are soaking up the moisture, preparing to spring to life.

It’s not a day to work outside, but indoors there’s garden action. A week ago I planted tomato, pepper, parsley and basil seeds in 4-inch pots in an old baking pan. I set the pan on the heated bathroom floor and have kept them well-watered. Yesterday the Roma tomatoes popped up and today the Old German and Abraham Lincoln tomatoes are emerging. Basil also appeared overnight. Now they need light, so they've moved to the kitchen counter where they sit under a fluorescent light. The peppers will need a few more days to emerge and the parsley seeds won’t germinate for another two weeks.

Every time I pass by the seedling tray I stroke the tiny tomato plants to simulate the breeze they would experience if they had germinated outdoors. This will strengthen their stems and help prepare them for moving outdoors.

Each 4-inch pot contains at least nine seeds. The pots are filled with special seed starting mix. When the seedlings develop their first true leaves, I will transplant them into individual pots filled with regular potting soil.

Meanwhile my sweet potato experiment is going great guns. This morning I pulled four more large slips from their mother potatoes and put them in water to root. To separate a slip from its mother, I grasp the base of its stem and gently pull down. The slip comes off with just a tiny bit of the mother potato attached.

The two slips I pulled off last week already are developing healthy root systems. That they manage to develop roots and grow new leaves without soil or fertilizer seems like a miracle.

Even the recalcitrant Japanese yam is showing signs of developing a couple of sprouts. The Garnet yam has a dozen little sprouts with new ones showing up almost every day. By the time this experiment ends I expect to have at least three dozen sweet potato slips. That’s more than we will need, so I’ll have some to give away.

Now, since this lovely rain continues to fall, I’m going outside to throw some grass seed around.

Copyright 2013 by Shirley Domer

Sweet Potato Experiment

 In the garden sweet potatoes are started from “slips.” Slips are long sprouts that come out of a sweet potato and that have been pulled off the sweet potato mother and put in water until they have developed a good root system. Then the slips are ready to go into the garden, where they vine off in every direction and, subterraneously, develop new sweet potatoes.

Sweet potato slips cost $8 per dozen at our local nursery. Last summer we replanted sweet potatoes twice, spending altogether $24 for a crop that failed to produce. Being a frugal soul, I decided to start my own slips this year.

I’m learning a lot about sweet potatoes and about different methods of starting them. I’d only seen people start them by sticking them in a jar of water where they put out roots and slips. I thought I was being inventive when I laid one already-sprouting sweet potato on its side supported by pebbles in a dish of water. Then I watched a YouTube video and saw a fellow put sweet potatoes on their sides in an aluminum pan with potting soil. Another guy cut a sweet potato in half and stuck the two cut ends in water to root.

My own experiment is going pretty well.

The two Beauregards (back row left and center), saved from previous crops are doing the best of any. They were already beginning to sprout when I put them in water. This morning I pulled off two slips (front row right) and put them in water to root.

Second best is the Garnet Yam (front row left) that I bought at the Merc. I believe I put the wrong end in water. (I’ve since learned that the stem end should be at the top and the root end in the water.) I had it in a narrow-mouthed quart jar until I discovered that all the sprouts were developing below the jar opening. Now it’s in a bowl wide enough to allow the sprouts to grow up.

Finally there’s the poor old Japanese Yam (back row right), which has just two tiny roots and no sprouts at all. I’m not giving up on it yet, though. Potatoes that have been in cold storage are slower to sprout.

Isn’t it great that a simple horticultural experiment can make a simple person happy?

Copyright 2013 by Shirley Domer

Things Are Looking Up

It’s 63º. Almost all of the snow has melted. The air feels balmy to us and Dennis is sitting on the deck with a lapful of paperwork and a bottle of beer.

In the cold frame spinach and lettuce are going to town, but the arugula is putting up seed stalks. There’s a good reason it’s also called “rocket.”

Leaves on the 18-month-old sweet potato I discovered sprouting in the basement last week are growing and turning from maroon to green. Meanwhile the garnet yam is showing a few sprouts but the Japanese yam has only one tiny root.

Best of all is the Lucy news. Yesterday morning Dennis came in from the chicken house to announce that Lucy had died overnight, but when he went back to dispose of her body, she jumped up and ran out into the yard. 

I have been watching Lucy closely from the kitchen window. She has spent all her days since the attack 13 days ago standing in one or the other of the far corners of the chicken yard. She even trudged through deep snow to reach a refuge. She didn’t seem to be eating and we were sure she would starve to death. Then, when Dennis took a bowl of vegetable scraps to the hens, Lucy came running but didn’t get any of the scraps because she was afraid to approach the other hens, who were gobbling up the scraps. 

Chickens are very mean-spirited birds toward one another. That’s what the term “pecking order” is all about. They seem to have no tolerance for disability and will drive off a wounded or sick member of their flock. Once, back when we still kept a rooster, a hen sat on a clutch of eggs. When the eggs hatched one of the chicks was slightly deformed. The mother hen shoved it out of the nest! I put it back and she shoved it out again. She had no intention of raising a deformed chick. So, none of the hens has cared a hoot whether Lucy lived or died and they didn’t want to associate with her.

Realizing that the other hens were keeping Lucy away from food, I crumbled a leftover biscuit in one of her safety corners (chickens love any kind of bread) and some “scratch” in her other safety corner. She ate and she revived. By evening of the day we thought she had died, she was, as Dennis said, “almost a new person.” Today Lucy has been out and about, eating, but avoiding her flockmates. She, of course, is the one on the far left.

Yep, now that we’ve made it through the winter, things are looking up.

Copyright 2013 by Shirley Domer

An Odd Day

Some days are filled with little oddities. This was one for me.

This morning when I carried some empty canning jars to the basement I noticed again the basket of 18-month-old sweet potatoes waiting to be thrown on the compost pile. I noticed a detail I’d missed before: a couple of these small, ancient tubers had put out sprouts. Since the basket receives little light, the sprouts are pink with maroon leaves.

The sweet potatoes I bought at the grocery store and stuck in water haven’t done diddly-squat, so I brought up one of the ancient sprouted potatoes, laid it in a bowl of water, supported it with pebbles from the Biloxi beach, and set it in the south window. I laid the potato on its side because it has sprouts on both ends and I don't want to sacrifice any sprouts. This is not the traditional way of starting sweet potatoes. Usually they are suspended lengthwise in a jar of water. Mine is an odd experiment.

The next odd thing was the snowstorm. Here it is, the last day of winter, and I was driving to town in what seemed like a blizzard. The sky was white with big clumps of wet snow that melted on the windshield, but blanketed the farm fields in white. It didn’t amount to anything in the end, but snow is forecast for the second and third days of spring, an oddity indeed.

The final oddity is this organic object I found when cleaning out the vegetable drawer of our refrigerator. It's two inches long and weighs practically nothing.

I’ve been gone for two months and have no idea what Dennis put in that drawer. He doesn’t recognize it either. I wish someone would identify it before I throw it in the compost. Don’t you just hate not knowing? It’s the curse of an inquiring mind, another oddity these days.

P.S. The dictionary that is part of my MacBook Pro is far superior to Microsoft Word’s spell checker. Word thinks I spelled “diddly-squat” incorrectly, but my Mac dictionary knows it well. In face it shows three different spellings.

Copyright 2013 by Shirley Domer

Tough Guys and Wimps

Over the weekend when the snow began to melt Dennis went out to open the cold frame.

Inside, despite bitter cold days and deep snow cover, all is well with the spinach, lettuce and arugula. These tough guys just need a good drink of water.

Now the covers are down again, free of snow so the sun can shine in.

Inside the house, where we wimps live, a hot weather crop is about to get started. No tough guy when it comes to cold, the sweet potato faints and dies when touched by frost. Starting sweet potato “slips” is as easy as putting a sweet potato in water and setting it in a sunny window. Tiny buds are already forming on the little one, which is a Beauregard. The big ones are a garnet yam on the left and a Japanese yam on the right.

Who says you can’t garden the year around? You just have to know the tough guys from the wimps and treat them accordingly.

To be fair, when hot weather comes the tough guys will become wimps. As the dys grow warmer they will start going to seed to secure their posterity. That's when the wimpy sweet potatoes come into their own, growing vines that criss-cross in a tangled mass and head off in all directions.

Copyright 2013 by Shirley Domer