Do you find that when you plant your vegetables from seed directly into the garden, you get too many plants come up and you have to cull them? Isn’t it difficult to throw those young seedlings away? I find that I am always looking for a spot to transplant them to.
Those little seedlings are just getting started when you are supposed to euthenise them. What started as a small job ends up taking a couple of hours.
The solution to the problem.
The Permaculture Home Garden Book by Linda Woodrow
The solution comes from a book titled “The Permaculture Home Garden”. Ordinarily I don’t read books about Permaculture because the ones I have looked at are mostly about design. I am more interested in what to do. I know design is important, but I just want to grow stuff.
Well this book is brilliant and what’s more it is written by a woman. Now don’t take that sentence the wrong way. I have tried reading numerous books by female authors and for the life of me I usually can’t get interested in them. There have been a few exceptions and this is one of them. It is full of down to earth information from building chook domes to making a seed raising mix.
Seed raising mix recipe
Materials for the seed raising mix
The simple recipe is a 50/50 mix of compost and coarse river sand. If you have read my posts on Calcium, you will know that I am a big fan of getting calcium into the soil. I also like to put it into my seed raising mix.
My formula is 3 cups of sieved compost, 3 cups of coarse river sand and 1 cup of lime. The seeds sprout a treat in this mix.
Part 2 of the equation
The second trick is to grow your seedlings in a bottomless container so that you can direct plant the advanced seedlings and pull the container up for protection for the seedling as it settles in.
Pots to raise advanced seedlings in.
It settles in much quicker than if you grow a seedling in a punnet and have to remove it to transplant. The seedling suffers from transplant shock and takes a minimum of two to four weeks to recover.
The cheapest and easiest way to create bottomless containers is to cut the tops and bottoms off two litre milk containers.
By raising your seedlings this way, you don’t grow too many and you have an inexpensive supply of pots so you can be raising your advanced seedlings when your existing crop is half finished.
It also solves the other problem of having too much of the same vegetable at once and then not having any. Your planning is much easier