4 gallon crock
I have a crock now! I mentioned to my parents that fermenting/pickling crocks like these are now sold for nearly $100 and that price was keeping me from trying homemade sauerkraut. They remembered this old crock that had been in their garage the whole time I was growing up and said I could have it.
Awesome! Thanks Mom and Dad!
Now how do I clean up 30 years of dust and make this food-worthy again? Water and bleach, bleach and water?
Finally!
I planted the Kale seeds I received in the mail from Robin shortly after Christmas. I had a heck of a time with poor germination, but I finally have a tray of them rising up! Thank you again Robin! I am very much looking forward to trying these. I’m going to give them a little bit longer to get established before I throw them out in the cold greenhouse (gradually, I’m sure).
Today I updated my posts about January lettuce and regrowing green onions.
2009 Garden Challenge accepted!
I’m in! The challenge is:
“Plant at least one new crop from seed, grow it organically, and save the seed to plant next year.”
I’m going to let a couple plants of my favorite variety of broccoli (that I will have started from seed in March) go to seed this summer! Wish me luck.
I made my own mix of dishwasher detergent last weekend after reading about it on quite a few web sites. We have been testing the mix on every load of dishes we have run (daily) since Saturday and are quite pleased with the results.
I bought a big box of Borax powder, a big box of Baking Soda, and a small box of Cascade powdered dish detergent. I layered them together using ratios of approximately 25% Cascade, 40% Baking Soda and 40% Borax. Yeah, that’s 105%, but I said approximately. I had an extra set of plastic dollar-store measuring spoons lying around in the aquarium stand, so I have dedicated a tablespoon to live in the container and meter out the mixture.
I completely filled a 4.5 quart tall tupperware-like container and did not completely empty the three ingredient boxes. I could have made at least 5 quarts, maybe 5.5. The cost of the ingredients was right at $6.00. For that $6.00 I’ll get over 200 heaping tablespoons of my mixture, which will be enough to run the dishwasher 100 times. 17 cents per cycle.
But how does it do? Honestly there is no difference from the more expensive options.
Why not leave out the Cascade and just use the other two ingredients? Baby steps! Maybe next time. I was more comfortable with this as a first try at home-mixed product.
(Ok, technically this is a second step. I’ve been using straight white vinegar in the “Jet Dry” reservoir for a couple months now and I love it!)
I placed an order for some of my 2009 seeds from a company online that I had no experience with–Pinetree Garden Seeds.
I ordered on December 18th, they shipped my envelope on the 29th and I received it yesterday, January 7th. Fast enough for this time of year with the holiday times and all.
I can’t comment on shipping cost because they will be sending me strawberry plants later this spring. In other words, the amount I paid them for shipping is being used to send two different packages.
The seed packets I received did not have many seeds in them. A person could look at this as a good thing or a bad thing.
My Broccoli packets seem to have 20 or 25 seeds. I see now upon further reading on the site that they DID disclose “minimum 30 seeds per packet” and I missed it. My fault. I need to count a couple more because I really don’t know if I even got the 30 I was promised.
Tomato packets are promised a minimum of 20 seeds. Reasonable, I guess.
I’m going to chalk this one up to user error and needing to read the print on the screen better. Oops!
Update: I counted a couple packets thoroughly, including the seeds stuck way down in the corners and there were about 40 seeds in each broccoli, with “minimum 30″ promised. That’s service, if you ask me. I just wish the number of seeds on each packet was written on the individual product pages and not just on the category pages. In my case it led to confusion and a bit of false hope.
I think I’ll get to eat some of this lettuce this month. I started this bunch under lights indoors and then set it out in my attached greenhouse.
There was an incident that ruined half the lettuce in the container (melting ice, water, plastic roof, heavy, spill, mess) but it has been bouncing back.
Here is a shot of the biggest bunch, taken in noon-time sunlight today on my lunch break:
Lettuce in January!
It’s awesome!
Update:
Two weeks later...
Two weeks later . . .
Rapidly approaching the end of the month and I think I’ll have a fresh salad tonight! Brought to you by winter container gardening!
The kids enjoyed our week of snow. Which was followed immediately by almost a week of 50-60 degree days that melted it right away.
Here are pics of them enjoying an evening:
Five minutes before these pictures I almost herded them directly indoors and to bed. Like always. It was past bedtime when we arrived home. I don’t really know why I stopped and let them play in the cold night air, but I need to do things like that a bit more often.
Did you know that grocery store green onions will grow back the part you ate? Neither did I until about a week ago!
In the picture below you see the white part at the bottom of a set of grocery store green onions. I cooked a delicious recipe for Christmas dinner and ate the tops. I planted the roots in a pot under my grow lights.
I replanted the unused ends of my green onions.
After only 4 days, the greens were already growing back (below).
After 4 days
The picture is a bit blurry, but you get the idea. Already the tops were growing back about a centimeter on most of the onion root ends.
After 11 days
After 13 days
After 20 days (they were inside this week due to extreme cold)
Update: late February…
I harvested the greens again after 6 or 8 weeks. The bottom white part of the onion had grown weary. It was thin and lifeless and I knew they wouldn’t grow much for me if I tried them again. Some were barely hanging onto the soil and most hadn’t grown any new root length that wasn’t there already . I’m not sure if it was a need for fertilizer or a need for better lighting, or if this is just a trick that works once per set of onions. I chopped and dried mine and put them in a glass jar to use later in soup.
