Making It: Radical Home Ec for a Post-Consumer World (28 page)

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Grow Lights on the Cheap

PREPARATION:
1 hour

To start seeds or grow microgreens indoors, you’ll need light. If you’ve got a big south-facing window, you’re in business. No sunlight? All you need is a set of cheap fluorescent shop lights.

A caveat here: This project is for starting seedlings, not growing full-size plants. There’s a whole industry devoted to growing certain, shall we say, “cash crops” indoors. To grow full-size plants, like tomatoes or those cash crops, under artificial light requires a lot of powerful lights, fans, and other gadgets. It’s not worth it. But starting seedlings indoors with fluorescent shop lights is easy.

YOU’LL NEED

• 2 (4-foot) florescent shop light fixtures
  
• 2 (40-watt) cool white tubes
  
• 2 (40-watt) warm white tubes
  
• Chain (to suspend the fixtures)
  
• Timer for the lights (optional, but recommended)
  
• Adjustable shelving—utility shelves or kitchen shelves (optional)
  
• Screw hooks (if suspending the lights from a ceiling or wooden bookshelf)
  

PUTTING IT TOGETHER

At your local hardware store, pick up two 4-foot florescent shop light fixtures, two cool white tubes, and two warm white tubes. Combining the cool and warm tubes gives your plants a full spectrum of light without having to buy expensive “plant and aquarium” tubes. Buy enough chain to suspend the lights in your chosen location. Florescent bulbs don’t put out nearly as much light as indoor grow lights, so you’ll need to suspend the two light fixtures side by side and as close as possible to your baby plants, no more than 3 inches away. The seedling trays could sit on a shelf with the lights mounted directly above them. This is the most compact solution. If you have more space, the trays could sit on a table and the lights could hang from the ceiling.

Load each fixture with one cool bulb and one warm bulb.

You’ll see that the fixtures have hooks in them for attaching chain. Use the screw hooks or other suitable hardware to connect the chain to the ceiling or shelf. You’re going to have to improvise here, depending on your situation. Leave a little extra chain for adjustments.

You don’t need to turn on the lights until your seeds sprout. Once they’ve sprouted, keep the lights on for 14 to 16 hours a day. This is where an automatic timer comes in handy. As the plants grow, raise the lights. Keep the lights close to the plants but not touching the leaves.

The light quality of fluorescent tubes degrades, so consider replacing the tubes every 2 years, especially if you notice your seedlings getting leggy. When seedlings are tall and rangy, it indicates that they’re not getting enough light. At current average energy rates in the United States, it should cost around 25 cents a day to run four 40-watt fluorescent tubes.

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Free Fertilizer from Weeds

PREPARATION:
5 min

WAITING:
1 week

Elsewhere in this book, we’ve sung the praises of stinging nettle (
URTICA DIOICA
). It’s a nutritious edible green and an excellent tonic in tea form. One reason for this is that nettles pull up minerals from the soil in heroic quantities and store them in their leaves. These minerals are as good for plants as they are for people.

Studies have shown that liquid fertilizer made with nettles increases a plant’s ability to take up nitrogen, and nitrogen depletion is a common source of plant woes. Nettle fertilizer also contains magnesium, sulfur, and iron—all excellent soil amendments. Making this potent fertilizer is easy as pie and free as can be.

YOU’LL NEED

• 5-gallon bucket with a lid
  
• Pruning shears
  
• Rubber gloves
  
• Spray bottle or spray pump (optional)
  

PUTTING IT TOGETHER

Go out and find a big patch of stinging nettles. See Project 34, Foraging Feral Greens, for tips on finding them in the wild. They’re best young, so do this in the early spring. Nettles don’t joke around with their hairs and spines—you should wear long sleeves and pants as well as gloves so you don’t come home with battle wounds. Cut the stinging nettles rather than rip them up. You don’t need their roots, and if you leave them in the ground, along with a few inches of plant, the nettles will probably spring back for future harvests. Stuff the bucket full of cut nettles.

Take your bucket of nettles home and fill it with water. Put the lid on the bucket, because this is an anaerobic fermentation—you don’t want any air circulation. Like all anaerobic fermentation processes, it gets really stinky. Let the bucket sit outside for 2 weeks. During that time, give it a stir whenever you think about it.

When the 2 weeks are up, drain the liquid off the nettles into some sort of lidded storage container. The spent nettles can go on the compost pile.

Dilute the nettle tea before you use it: The right proportion is 1 part nettle tea to 10 parts water.

Use the fertilizer to water container plants and young seedlings prior to transplanting. When using it on plants already established in the ground, it’s best to apply nettle tea as a foliar spray. This means misting the leaves of the plant with the fertilizer. The plants will absorb the nutrients through the leaves. Some research indicates that nettle liquid fertilizer applied as a spray repels insects, including aphids. It’s fine to use an ordinary spray bottle for small jobs. For big jobs, use a gallon spray pump with a wand (sold in nurseries). Be sure to mist the whole plant, including the underside of the leaves. It’s best to spray early in the morning, when temperatures are cool and the leaves have all day to dry.

Use the tea to water in-ground plants on a special needs basis only, rather than as a regular supplement. It’s better in the long run to build balanced, healthy soil with lots of compost, rather than rely on frequent applications of high-octane supplements. See Project 47 for details about how to build soil.

VARIATION

Instead of nettles, use another weed, comfrey
(Symphytum officinale).
Make the tea the same way but don’t dilute it. High in potash but relatively low in nitrogen, comfrey fertilizer is particularly good for fruiting plants—and that doesn’t mean just fruit itself but vegetables that
make
fruits, like squash, eggplant, tomatoes, cucumbers, etc. You can mix comfrey and nettle teas to make an organic liquid fertilizer cocktail. Don’t apply comfrey to plants that need acid soils, like hydrangeas and azaleas, because comfrey tea is somewhat alkaline. That’s not a big concern for a vegetable gardener, because vegetables don’t need acid soil. Be careful around berries, though. Many of them are acid lovers. They’re just decadent that way, we guess.

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Saving Seed

Saving seed from your garden and replanting it the next year is an admirable practice. If you save seed from the best performers in your garden, you’ll be selectively breeding plants adapted to the unique soil and microclimate of your garden. Saving seeds from rare heirloom varieties also ensures biodiversity and preserves our agricultural, culinary, and cultural heritage for future generations.

However—and this is a big however—to save seeds you need to do some homework. You have to read up on the sex life of each plant you’re interested in reproducing. The mechanics of pollination vary, and if you don’t know what you’re doing, you’ll end up collecting seeds from cross-bred vegetables that will yield unpredictable offspring, like bizarre squash-melon crosses or tomatoes that taste nothing like the fruit of the parent plant. The best resource we know on this topic is
Seed to Seed: Seed Saving and Growing Techniques for Vegetable Gardeners
by Suzanne Ashworth, which we recommend you read if you want to become an expert seed saver. In the meanwhile, we’ll give you instructions for saving seed from a few popular vegetables that lend themselves well to this practice.

The three most common devices used by seed savers to ensure the purity of the seed they collect are distance, timing, and barriers.

ABOUT ROW COVERS

Row cover can be purchased online from organic gardening suppliers. It’s a superlight nonwoven polyester fabric designed to keep bugs off plants but let sun in. Heavier weights of row cover (sometimes called garden blankets) protect plants from frost. Row covers are a staple of commercial organic gardening, but we actually use them in our little garden to protect our veggies from flying insects. We erect wire hoops over our garden beds and drape light row cover material over them. It’s an easy way to manage pests without chemical intervention.

DISTANCE
refers to the distance between the plant you’d like to save seeds from and all other plants in the same family that might cross-pollinate it. Different plants have different distance requirements.

TIMING
refers to the window between the blossoming of your intended seed-producing plant and the blossoming of other plants in the same family that might cross-pollinate it. If you grow two varieties of the same plant in your garden, for instance, and one is blooming and forming fruit while the other is still a seedling, you don’t have to worry about the two varieties crossing.

BARRIERS
can be used to ensure that pollinating insects don’t visit a blooming plant, thereby protecting it from accidental cross-pollination. Enthusiastic seed savers will lock up entire plants in mesh cages. On a small scale, you can save seed by “bagging blossoms”—that is, by enveloping a few blossoms of the plant with either a nylon stocking or a piece of row cover fabric, like Reemay or Agribon.

SAVING TOMATO SEEDS

Tomato plants aren’t particularly promiscuous. Often you can get away with doing nothing but collect seeds from the fruit, but we’ve had tomatoes cross-pollinate. To be absolutely sure that the seed you’re collecting will produce plants identical to the parent, you can bag a few blossoms. Tomatoes often have several blossoms on a single stem. Choose a stem with a grouping of flowers that have
not yet opened.
Envelop them in the toe of a nylon stocking or a square of row cover material, then use twine or a twist tie to secure the material to the stem. It’s not necessary to cover more than two or three flowers at a time, because each tomato holds many seeds. Once the fruit begins to form, remove the barrier and mark the stem with a piece of colored ribbon so that you remember which tomatoes to save the seeds from.

To collect the seeds, wait until the tomatoes are fully ripe. Then squeeze out the juicy inner core that contains the seeds into a jar and cover it with a few inches of water. Tie a piece of cheesecloth over the mouth of the jar to keep insects out but let air in, store the jar at room temperature, and stir once a day. After about 3 days, a layer of fungus will form on the surface and the viable seeds will sink to the bottom of the jar. Pour off the excess water and any floating seeds. Using a colander, strain the remaining seeds and rinse them well. Spread the seeds on a sheet of newspaper, a paper towel, or a piece of screening and let them dry indoors. Store in a labeled paper envelope.

SAVING PEPPER SEEDS

Bees can easily cross-pollinate peppers, so you can’t leave them unprotected if you want to save seed. Bag a few blossoms, exactly as described above for tomatoes, and removed the bag as soon as fruit sets. Be sure to mark the stems so that you know which peppers to save seeds from. Scrape the seeds out of the mature fruit and let them air-dry, then store in a labeled paper envelope.

SAVING EGGPLANT SEEDS

If you’re growing only one variety of eggplant, and none of your neighbors within 50 feet are growing eggplant, you’re safe to save the seeds without making any interventions. If there is a chance of cross-pollination, bag a few blossoms as described under tomatoes.

Let the eggplants designated for seed mature well past the point you would normally pick them—to the point that they begin to rot, in fact. The bottom of the eggplant is where you will find most of the seeds. Using a hand grater, grate the bottom half into a bowl of water. Squeeze the gratings to separate the seeds from the flesh. Dry the seeds and store in a paper envelope.

SAVING LETTUCE SEEDS

Let the plant bolt, which means let it grow until it throws up a central stalk and starts to form flowers. Bag several of those flowers before they open, as described for tomatoes. Once the flowers finish blooming and wilt, remove the barrier and mark the stems. In 12 to 24 days, depending on variety, the seed heads will be dry, which means they’re ready to harvest. Shake the seed heads into a paper bag to collect the dried seed. Store in a labeled paper envelope. Lettuce seeds don’t keep long, so be sure to plant them the next season.

SAVING PEAS

Cross-pollination is rare in peas, but sometimes a bumblebee makes its way into a bloom. More than likely, you can get away without making any interventions. If you want to be extra careful, keep different varieties of peas separated by at least 50 feet or simply grow one variety. If you’ve got several varieties of peas going at once and want to be absolutely sure about seed purity, bag the flowers before they open. Remove the bags once the fruit sets and mark the stems that have been bagged. Let the peas mature on the vine, until the pods dry out. Then open them and gather the seeds (peas). Make sure the pods don’t pop open on their own before you get to them! Store the seeds in labeled paper envelopes.

SAVING BEANS

Some experts say you need to have a minimum of 150 feet between varieties to prevent cross-pollination, though this claim is under debate. We’ve never encountered crossed beans ourselves. Like peas, you simply let the bean pods dry on the plant, then gather the dry beans. To be extra certain, you could opt to bag the blossoms.

STORING SEEDS

The magic words for seed storage are
dry, dark, cool,
and
airtight,
with the emphasis on
dry.
Envelopes keep seeds in the dark but are not airtight. This is a good thing in one way. If your seeds aren’t quite dry when you store them, they’ll continue to dry in the envelopes. Canning jars sealed tightly make great seed storage containers, but they do let in light, and because they’re airtight, improperly dried seeds will turn moldy. Get the best of both worlds by storing your seeds in envelopes (little manila envelopes from an office supply store work well) for a month or so to be sure they’re absolutely dry, then tuck the envelopes in a canning jar for the winter. Seeds stored in airtight containers in the freezer will last considerably longer than those stored at room temperature. As seeds get older, their germination rates decline, but that doesn’t mean they’re not usable—you just have to plant more seeds. Most vegetable seeds last 2 to 6 years, depending on storage conditions.