Heating Mat

In an attempt to improve germination and growth in our basement we purchased a Heating Mat. The idea is you put it under plant pots and it evenly warm up the soil, in this case ours advertised ten to twenty degrees above the ambient temperature. Upon first plugging it in I became a bit skeptical of it as it didn't seem to be heating up to much but nevertheless I still kept it plugged in all night and low and behold by morning it had finally gotten warm. From there it was only a few days until the results began to appear and they were great. Using one of those infrared thermometers we measure the temperature of the soil in the pots on the lower shelf to be in the mid-fifties while the pots under the mat in the high sixties to low seventies.

To Be Continued...

Onion Seeds

So as promised I did a germination test to get some quantitative results on the germination rates of some of the older seeds in our fridge. I hadn't been planning on doing one just yet but when I tried planted onion seeds and none sprouted it seemed like a perfect time to do so as I wouldn't be wasting any seeds that otherwise could have been used. The onions were more specifically Evergreen Long White Onions (apparently similar to scallions) that were packaged in 1990. I placed them in a damp paper towel on a plate, covered it with saran-wrap and left it out to find out how the seeds would fare. It was left at approximately 65 degrees for about 15 days before we began to count them up. The counting took forever and although the package advertised it containing approximately 700 seeds it most have been a very rough approximation for there was much more. After well over an hour of tediously separating the sprouted seeds from the dead ones with tweezers, we added it all up and got the results. In total their were a whopping 1485 seeds 390 of which sprouted creating a (drum-roll) 26.263 percent germination rate. This is a surprisingly large successes rate considering they were not only 20 years old but that the package had been open for all twenty years. After doing some looking around on the internet I found out that onions seeds have one of the shortest shelf lives of all vegetables, all sites agreeing that they are good for only 1 year. All things considered the results amazing me as I was expecting a much smaller number especial after having had no success earlier in soil. Now you may be asking yourself how can seeds that have a 26.263 % germination rate have utterly none sprout in my previous attempt. There are most likely a few contributing factors to this but almost certainly the largest one was the temperature. My first go at growing them had been under the grow lights in our basement (the ones mentioned earlier) and being unfinished, the basement can get quite chilly in the winter. Seeds like warm soil when germinating and will fail to do so if it is below a certain temperature, causing the seeds to rot in the dirt. Doing a bit more looking around I found out that the ideal germination temperature for these particular seeds is anywhere from 60 to 70 degrees, a good deal warmer then the 54 of the soil in our basement. In conclusion the failure to germinate the onion seeds in the basement was almost without doubt due to the cold temperatures and therefore it is not surprising that when the seeds were tried out in the warmer up stairs that the rate correspondingly went up. But this isn't the first time I have had a difficult time getting many seeds to sprout or not even any at all and so this experience was what finally spurred us into getting a heating mat to put under the seed trays. This was something that we had been meaning to get for a while now but had never really got around to and in the short time I have had it, it has already proven to be a great purchase (more on the mat is above).

Winter Garden

In an attempt to use up some of the older seeds I decided to try out an indoor garden this winter. I planted butterhead and loosehead lettuce, radishes, arugula and basil in late September for a January harvest. They grew under the fluorescent lights in our basement and despite all the work it took it was really fun! It gave me something to do the winter months in which there typically isn't to much gardening going on and it was really fun getting to eat some fresh homegrown greens in the winter. It also gave me a sense of what to plant in the the vegetable bed in the spring. My favorite plant out of the five I tried was the Butterhead lettuce. It has a fantastic crunch to it, beautiful ruffled leaves with deep purplish highlights and compact growth. I would advise against growing Loosehead lettuce, for at least in my hybrid it had next to no crunch, its growth was not at all compact and was really slow growing. I currently still have one Butterhead lettuce plant left and am planning on eating it some time in February to give it some more time to grow. As a whole I had great success with the older seeds with the one exception being onions. I tried planting them from seed in January to give them the 8-10 weeks they need before transplanting outside and did not get any to sprout. So I took this opportunity to do my first official germination test of the old seeds! More about this is above.

Seed storage

We have had a container (two actually) full of seeds that has been lurking in the back of our fridge for years. This is where we store our seed packets and there must be dozens of them, many dating as far back as 21 years old. In an attempt to try and make room for new seed packets in the already bursting Tupperware container we went through the seeds picking out the more recent seeds, making a pile of the old ones to get rid of. But in the end I could not bear to get rid of any seeds and ended up saving them, forming the second container of seeds. In an attempt to keep the older seeds moving along their way though, I decided to try out an indoors winter garden (I will write more about this soon). As it turns out, not throwing out the seeds was a great move for as I soon found, the seeds were incredibly viable despite their age. I regret that I did not record the amount of seeds that I planted (I plan on doing so in the future through!) but a vast majority of them sprouted without any lack in vigor noticeable to me. Intrigued I looked up the estimated date at which these seeds were supposed to have lost enough of their vigor to be deemed useless and the results were amazing. We had great success with these 21 year old Burpee seeds that according to multiple resources should have expired many years ago. Here is a list of the successful of 21 year old seeds I have tried:

• Basil
• Parsley
• Lavender
• Radish
• Peas
• Swiss chard
  

This says a bunch of things: that by storing your seeds in your fridge will greatly improve their viability, that the estimated dates that mark the limit of the seeds shelf life are under exaggerated and that Burpee sells high quality, long lasting seeds.

Fluorescent Lights

In our basement we have a stand with fluorescent grow lights. They're kept on nearly all year except for a two or so months in the summer and have been fantastic. I use them for just about everything from starting seeds to reviving any unhappy plants elsewhere in the house. Just yesterday we went out to the hardware store to get some new lights for the upper tier of the lighting system which we just opened up the other day after totally running out of room with just the bottom one. The shelf was made so that a second level of grow lights could be installed but we had never needed to use it before. When the upper lights were turned on we noticed the lights were the kind of you would find in an office and were not as suited for plants as the ones made for "plants and Aquariums". Upon doing a little researching I found that the only kinds of light plants really need is blue and red. Blue promotes leaf growth and vegetation while red combined with the blue promotes flowering. The special tube fluorescent lights defiantly have a noticeably redder, warmer and in general much more pleasant hue to them. We got these kind of lights for the bottom level of lights a few months earlier and while I don't have any real evidence that they helped the plants I highly suggest switching to this kind of lights if you haven't already.

Raised Bed

This past summer we did a lot of work in our backyard. We built a patio, constructed a grape arbor, made a composer for vegetable matter and most exciting of all, built a raised bed. It's around 4 feet wide, 8 feet long, 1 foot high and made of large boards of wood. For its dirt we ordered 1 cubic yard of soil and when that was not enough an additional half cubic yard, arriving shortly after ordering it in a truck. Upon inspecting it we found its quality to be a little disappointing. It was heavy, darkly colored and bordering on septic. To improve the soil we spread it out thinly over a tarp to give it a chance to absorb some much needed oxygen and dry it out a little. This helped a bit but as a step to further improve it we mixed in a good amount of dried, milled sphagnum moss. This seemed to improve its overall quality and satisfied we went ahead and put it in the bed. Upon doing so we found that we had a bit extra so we spread the bonus soil over our flower garden. I am unsure of how soil is going to turn out next year, but will be sure update this with the results come spring.

Padio Hybrid

I am new to growing tomatoes as this past season was my first so when I visited our local nursery I was unsure of what to look for. After inspecting various packets of tomato seeds I ended up choosing a Patio hybrid based on the brief paragraph on its back. As it turned out my choice was a great one and while as I mentioned I don't have the experience with tomatoes to compare this hybrid to past ones I can say with some confidence that this is one of the best! Throughout the summer it managed to stayed very compact, never growing more that a foot and a half tall and instead of growing viney and leggy like other tomatoes plants I have seen, it simple grew bushier. Yet dispite of its small size it was surprisingly productive, giving off 14 tomatoes between our two plants and due to its compact nature it didn't need to be staked or caged. Because of this positive experience I this past year with the Padio hybrid I'm definitely going to use it again in this upcoming year's garden. I have collected around 20 seeds from its tomatoes and plan on planting them so that with each passing year the plants become more and more productive. I am unsure if this technique will actually work with tomatoes though and if the seeds I have collected are going to grow true and produce plants like the ones I had last year. If you know anything about this I would love to get some feedback from you to help me answer this question. In any case I'm certainly going to try it out and I'll be sure update this in a few months with the results!