Getting Fresh

Another Northern winter, and I’m still growing food. With actual dirt/compost. Mainly indoors. With the entirely well-meaning but nevertheless spastic help of a toddler. It usually turns out to be the absolute picture of (1) dirty and (2) hopeless. Yet, despite the mess that I despise cleaning up, and the myriad frustrations of coaxing green from tiny, salvaged containers, I am compelled, again and again, to farm my few precious square inches.

The quintuple-barreled goal that keeps me going: a practical, inexpensive indoor garden that I enjoy tending, harvesting, and looking at. So many virtues, so little time.

My latest endeavor involves quart jars, kraft paper, twine, and the aforementioned homemade dirt. During their construction, Freya called them “seed bottles,” and the name has stuck. I like to think they say “Martha Stewart” and “recycling bin” in the same breath. They’re now hanging (I assume, since I haven’t heard them crashing down) in one of our window bays, planted with Mâche and arugula, and soaking up the noonday reflections off the deeply bedded snow. It’s January in New Hampshire, and the condo farm persists. Grow.

Another one of our projects has been collecting seeds from last season’s marigolds. The plants are Tangerine Gem Signet marigolds — bushy, low-growing beauties with bright orange blossoms that tasted like citrus peel. At the end of the season I yanked up two dozen or so and shoved them into a paper bag, where they stayed until I was ready to concentrate on them yesterday. As I mangled the dried blooms, mining the tiny, black-and-tan seeds that look for all the world like porcupine quills, they released their last scent of orange peel. Anything worth doing is worth doing well — that’s how my fiancé lives, anyway, and constantly inspires me — and so it was that I could learn to pick out the promising blossoms from the duds full of unripened seeds. So often while I’m deeply engaged in these throwback gardening tasks, I come up for a breath and wonder what the hell it’s all good for. And, almost always, the only, the most comforting answer is: it’s profoundly good for me.

…room, board, and charming lighting will be provided. The air is chill this evening, snow has been sighted, and it was time to treat those seed flats to a little something extra. It’s not much, but a strategically placed string of Christmas lights and a plain cotton sheet is all I have to inspire them, at this point. (Works in college, right?)

I suspect that the real challenge the seedlings will face, however, is not so much cold as wildly fluctuating temperatures. The greenhouse easily warms to 70 degrees F in its four-plus hours of direct sunlight, but rapidly cools to near outside temps as soon as dusk hits — a 35 degree difference, on average. Here’s hoping the radishes, mache, and other greens will rise to meet the challenge.

The moisture level, on the other hand, seems more consistent. This evening marked the first time in days that I’ve had to treat the as-yet-barren seed flat to some warm water. And then it was off to bed with ‘em. Early to bed and early to rise always go hand-in-hand, don’t they? Sprout, litte effers, sprout.

If you like making cake, then you’ll love making your own dirt! Take that old colander where it never imagined it would go — into the compost heap — and whip up a batch of dark, superfine, crumbly potting soil — or what I like to call “chocolate earth.” My latest video shows you the simple ingredients and repurposed kitchen tools for making your own potting soil and seed starting mix.

Try this DIY method if you, like me, would like to make organic fertilizer on a small scale without the stink. Since suggesting that thrifty small-space gardeners hang on to empty detergent containers for just this purpose, I have tested the idea with good results: rich tea, smell-free, on the balcony, happy family — and even happier vegetables.

You’ll need:

• a detergent container with a pour spout,
• an old pair of pantyhose or some other semi-porous sack,
• a good handful of compost (such as worm castings),
• water,

…and gloves. First, don those gloves and shut yourself in the bathroom, utility room, or wherever you have access to a tap and permission to make a foul mess for a brief period. Shovel that handful of compost into the foot of the pantyhose and tie it off. Squeeze the whole shebang into the container’s (non-spout) opening.  Keep a hold of the pantyhose — you’ll want to tie them onto the container’s handle so you can more easily refill and reuse this contraption as you wish. Finally, fill the container with water, cap it off, and set it outdoors (or out of the way) to brew. Shake it/kick it every couple days, and within a week or two, you’ll have a dark, nutritious concoction for your plants. Pour some from the spout and water it down until it doesn’t smell (that’s my rule of thumb) to ensure that it doesn’t burn your plants.

Easy as that, and better for everybody. Dull as it might sound, a fair percentage of condo container gardening goes into keeping the mess to a minimum; in my case, this means maintaining some amount of order and cleanliness so that my toddler doesn’t get into something particularly nasty and so that none of us feel crowded in close quarters. This was daunting at first, but now it’s become routine — and, besides, we’re all about progress, not perfection!

This movie demonstrates a simple technique for making pots for seedlings out of newspaper. I use them for potting up seedlings and hardening them off before transplanting into the garden. I’ve found that the newspaper holds up well to repeated waterings — indoors or out — without any added tape or staples. If you want something sturdier, brown paper grocery bags cut to size work well, too.

There are a couple reasons you might be convinced to spend your evenings doing origami: It produces multiple pots for no more than your local paper or grocery bag costs you, and you can plant them into your garden plot or container, where they will break down quickly and add carbon to the soil. This is why I prefer them to peat pots that take longer to break down in my garden bed.