Cauliflower
Red and Green Cabbage and Tomato
Beginnings of raised beds - 4'X25' with 2' paths
Despite all my kvetching, the seedlings are doing great and the garden is coming along. Today I will be repotting tomatoes one last time so they can get REALLY BIG before we put them out. The weather is very cool, so we will probably wait a while (until nights stay about 60) to put out the heat-loving crops - tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, melon, etc. However, that is good news for the cool-loving plants that we planted a bit late - spinach, kale, pac choi, mesclun, beets, carrots, mache and claytonia. They are all up, and most have gotten their first set of true leaves.
All in all, starting seeds has been a great experience this year. My intention is to become as self-sufficient as possible, and saving seeds and starting plants from seeds are keys to that goal. If I can get to the point of growing all my own seeds and never buying seedlings, my reliance on external inputs will be reduced. The electricity for the grow lights is an external input that cannot be eliminated immediately, but hopefully in a few years we can look into alternative sources of energy.
Today I will be adding epsom salts to the garden beds to provide magnesium, and then we have to wait 2 weeks to plant so it doesn't burn the plants. I will also add lime for calcium, and borax for boron.
Isn't it fascinating that the minerals behave similarly in the soil to the way they behave in our bodies?
Calcium, magnesium and boron work synergistically and must be in balance in the body, and the same holds true in the soil. Feeding the soil so the plants feed us seems like a much bigger-picture approach to health than taking chemical or rock forms of vitamins and minerals. Plants CAN eat rocks (unlike people, although some people take calcium supplements made from rocks), so I will employ the plants to do the work for me. When I worked as an account executive (fancy term for sales rep) for New Chapter, I told this story all the time to my customers who were all medical professionals (and to friends, family, neighbors, and anyone who seemed at least vaguely interested). It is the same reason that New Chapter make their calcium supplements from seaweed containing lots of trace minerals biotransformed by nature, and the same reason the seaweed meal nourishes Audrey Hacker's goats so beautifully, and the same reason seaweed meal is good to feed to plants. Seaweed in the form of kelp tablets is even being used to provide an organic form of iodine to help prevent uptake of radioactive iodine into the thyroid gland in the fallout of the Japan nuclear reactor meltdown.
PLANTS DO MAGIC!
I love your blog! Very informative and insightful!
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