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Seed List

For some time now I’ve had a list of seeds I was offering to readers of this blog. Since last year I mostly only grew garlic, this list from two years ago is starting to get very out of date and so I’m going to take it down. Perhaps in the fall I will put another list together.

If there is anything you see on this blog and you would like to have some seeds, please send me an email and we’ll see if we can arrange something. If we have never traded seeds before, and you have nothing to offer in return in the way of seeds I usually ask that you pay a little bit to cover the cost of postage and packing materials. This is usually the equivalent of a couple of US dollars in cash sent in a letter, and I accept several different currencies.

In August or September I will probably have some garlic bulbs to share. I will post details then. If you don’t have anything to trade, shipping costs will be a little higher for this.

Sending anything like this to the US is always a bit of a problem. Most seeds can be sent to the US, but require you apply for a permit in advance, this is called the ‘Small Lots of Seed Permit’. Since I am not a US resident, I cannot apply for this permit, you must do this yourself. Imports of garlic are generally not allowed into the US. If you want to go to the trouble of getting a permit, I will try to cooperate with you on sending some seeds. Please send me an email for more details.

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Indicator Plants

What started out as a post on garlic rust a few days ago, has turned into a fascinating discussion on soil deficiencies and indicator plants.

Søren just made a great post on determining things about your soil health by looking at the weeds in your garden.  This is based on the idea that some weeds prefer nutrient imbalances or other conditions, so by looking at what’s growing in your garden you can get clues as to what problems you may have.

While Søren’s post focuses on weeds commonly found in Denmark, Chris pointed out a book on ‘weed reading’ that’s probably more general in scope.

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Garlic Rust and Manure Again – Some Conclusions

Almost a month ago I made a post on this topic, and I asked people to let me know what their personal experiences were. As well as making the post, I sent out some emails and I had some previous discussions with people on the subject. In total I got information from 10 garlic growers all over the world, including myself.

One of the first things I noticed was initially I didn’t get any response from anyone in the US growing garlic, and I had to send some emails and pose the question directly to some garlic growers there. It turns out the reason I didn’t get much reaction from them is garlic rust is just not much of an issue in that region. Rust is only present in a few parts of California and Arizona, and otherwise not in North America. The information I have suggests it is also not present in New Zealand.

It is not possible to draw solid conclusions from the information people sent me. Manure was used from a variety of different animals, at different times in the garden cycle, sometimes it was used fresh and sometimes composed or aged first for different amounts of time.

Under these circumstances, all it’s possible to do is try to look at everything everyone sent me in the broadest and hopefully open minded of ways, and give my opinion about what it all meant in a very unscientific way. In this spirit, what I can say is that with a few exceptions most people who lived in an area where rust was a problem and used manure on their garlic experienced serious rust, and those who didn’t use manure the rust was much less serious.

In addition, a garlic grower in the US send me a link to this publication from the Oregon State University that most importantly says too much nitrogen in your garden can stress the plants and make garlic rust worse.

Growing up in the US I have always been told most home gardens don’t need anything added to them except recycled plant material in the form of compost. You should always rotate your crops, but even the most poorly planned rotation schemes will generally keep nutrients balanced in your garden as long as you are also adding some compost.

It is possible, but not likely, that your garden is lacking some nutrient or combination of nutrients. Unless you know this from a soil test or some other way, you should not add any kind of fertilizer or soil conditioner, organic or otherwise, because you risk upsetting the natural balances in your garden and stressing your plants.

Adding fresh manure (or chemical fertilizers) can be a particular problem because the nitrogen it contains is primarily soluble nitrogen. Naturally occurring nitrogen is usually fixed. The main difference is soluble nitrogen is absorbed much more quickly by the plants (and in this way can easily kill them), whereas plants tend to absorb fixed nitrogen only as it’s needed. This quick absorption of the nitrogen can make the plants grow fast giving us the feeling we are feeding them and making them healthy, when in fact we can be damaging them. The same thing is true with phosphorus, because there are fast and slow acting versions of it. The fast acting versions of the phosphorus can give you similar problems as with soluble nitrogen.

This is what is sometimes referred to as feeding your plants instead of feeding your soil. It’s always better to feed your soil by adding things like compost or growing nitrogen fixing plants, then it is to think along the lines of vitamins and feed your plants NPK (nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium) fertilizers.

For farmers the situation is different, because they often have commercial reasons why they don’t rotate their crops, and they have to deal with economic realities requiring cosmetics and yield on a cost basis. Farmers also usually use commercial varieties of crops which often require special applications of fertilizers and pesticides. Farmers also often have animals and need a way to deal with the waste. We grow things differently and under different circumstances in our gardens.

This year I have purchased a Soil Testing Kit, and I hope to use it to get some information about my garden. I am certain soil testing will not be the end of the story. Nutrients in your garden can vary greatly from spot to spot and season to season, and is also very dependent on what fertilizers have been used in the past as well as what plants have been grown. At the same time, I hope testing the soil will give me an idea if there are any serious problems. I’ll be posting about my results.

Søren and I have been discussing this in email, and he has pointed out there are other ways besides chemical tests to determine if there are nutrient imbalances in your garden. Experienced gardeners can tell just by the way certain plants grow.

For example, you can tell by how brown your garlic gets if you have too much nitrogen in your garden!

Bare Bones Gardener posted not too long ago about using hydrangeas to tell if your soil is acidic or not.

I hope some more people do posts about these kinds of plants, because in the long run this is obviously a better solution than a chemical soil test.

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Garden Pictures: Growing Garlic and Water Containers

Garlic in January

Not much growing in the garden now. In the background you see some artichokes, and covered in straw is one of my two garlic beds. You can see little bits of green sticking through in a few places, where the garlic is growing through the straw.

Several bloggers have recently been talking about collecting rainwater. I don’t have any other source of water, and I have to collect all I use.  Here’s what I inherited from the previous gardener in the way of rainwater collection systems.

Water Barrel

Please ignore the trash piled next to it… You can’t really see but this is connected to the greenhouse gutter with a piece of cut garden hose connected with a clamp. It sits about 30cm off the ground on a small platform. At the bottom of the barrel is a tap, which unfortunately won’t connect to a hose so I can only use it to fill buckets or watering cans.

At the left, near the top, bent at a 90 degree angle, you can see an overflow pipe. An overflow pipe is something not everyone thinks of with a water barrel, but it’s very useful. If you don’t have one, the barrel will fill absolutely all the way to the top, which is usually not desirable. It can be hard to get water out of it or move it slightly without getting yourself wet if it’s filled all the way up. In addition, if you have more than one barrel connected in a cascade fashion, it’s normal they are connected via the overflow pipe(s) and each have their own tap.

In this case the barrel is an old plastic industrial barrel that probably had some chemical in it. It’s closed at both top and bottom, which will make it hard to clean if that’s ever necessary.

This barrel seems to work well enough, and I’ll use it for the time being.

On the other garden structure, the shed, there’s this prize winning setup:

Water Bin

This is just a garbage can on wheels sitting under the gutter pipe. You can’t really see it in the picture, but there is an overflow pipe in the middle near the top. There is no tap, which means the water has to be taken out of the top, and it will have to be cleaned more often because crud will accumulate on the bottom. I would like to have a barrel with a hose connection on it, so I’ll probably replace this with something a little higher tech when I get a chance.

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Chlorine in the Garden

Kelly of Future House recently did a great series of posts about the rain water collection system they built. He mentioned he used PVC pipes to build the system, which is what gave me the idea for this post.

Two Kinds of Chlorine

There are two kinds of chlorine, and the difference between them is very important.

The first kind is ordinary pure chlorine, sometimes called household chlorine, and is what common bleach is made from. This is also sometimes used in swimming pools, or added to drinking water. While there can be health issues with this type of chlorine, in particular both high concentrations and chlorine gas can be toxic and some people can have allergies to it, but overall it is considered very safe both for people and the environment. This type of chlorine occurs naturally in the environment, so moderate use is generally considered to be 100% biodegradable.

The other kind of chlorine is what is used in manufacturing processes. This is also sometimes called elemental chlorine, and this is what happens when atoms of chlorine are combined with other elements. One of the most important characteristics of these compounds is they are usually very long lived in the environment, and sometimes very toxic. Some common examples we are probably all familiar with are ozone depleting CFCs, PCBs which are very toxic, DDT as well as a number of other pesticides that have now been mostly banned (these are sometimes referred to as POPs or Persistent Organic Pesticides) and also PVC plastic.

These chlorine based compounds are so damaging to the environment, they have frequently been the focus of Greenpeace actions. Together with nuclear waste and heavy metals, chlorine compounds are some of the most serious environmental contaminants in the world now.

The Good

Household bleach really has many uses in the garden as well as in the house. Many people think of it as a harsh cleaner, because it smells so strong, but this is not actually the case. It’s a great environmentally friendly cleaner to use for the toilet, and is perfectly safe for septic tanks or for grey water collection systems to be used for plant irrigation. It is a much better alternative to bathroom scrubbing powders or creams, which are mostly very bad for the environment.

While you should never apply it in any way to plants or your garden, it’s very useful to clean greenhouses, tools, pots, seed trays and so on. It’s a very good disinfectant and can be very important in preventing the spreading of plant diseases. When you are done using it, it can be poured down the drain or on an unused spot in the garden. Within 48 hours it will completely break down into the environment.

The Not So Good

Most of us have something made from PVC plastic in the garden. Plastic coated fence or tools, maybe irrigation pipes. It can be really great stuff because, by design, it really does stand up to sunlight and last forever.

If you ever look into alternatives, you will see there aren’t many. Galvanized steel is sometimes used, but it contains trace amounts of heavy metals that will stay in your garden after the original material decomposes.

The main problem with using PVC in the garden is that it will be around long after you throw it away. It’s a very difficult plastic to recycle, if it’s incinerated or heated to a high temperature it will decompose into PCBs and if it is put into a landfill it will stay a very, very long time. While other kinds of plastics may be around for decades or maybe even centuries, PVC will likely be around a lot longer. When you think it will probably stay in your garden for 10-20 years, that’s a small percentage of it’s total lifespan.

Kelly of Future House asked the question if there were environmental problems with the manufacture of PVC. As far as I’m aware, there is no harmful waste created in the manufacture of it, but this is only half the equation! You should consider how what you buy will be disposed of, and if there are more environmentally friendly alternatives. Until now we have all been taught not to worry about what you throw away, and that what can be disposed of now can be dealt with by some future technology that will be soon developed. Not all of these technologies are emerging, and toxic waste and landfill space are already becoming serious problems.

Specifically addressing Kelly’s rain harvester system, what they might have used instead of PVC were metal fittings connected with rubber or plastic hose. Yes, it almost certainly would have leaked from time to time, and not worked as well, but it would have been easier to dispose of or recycle the individual components. It may also be possible to design a system where a single leak wouldn’t be as catastrophic as it would be in their system, perhaps top filling the barrels and having a separate tap on each one, maybe connecting the barrels in pairs or groups instead of all together. Another possibility might have been to try to use second hand PVC fittings, but I guess this would have been very difficult to do.