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  • From: "Dori Green" <dorigreen00 AT hotmail.com>
  • To: market-farming AT franklin.oit.unc.edu
  • Subject: Re: market-farming Seed Starting
  • Date: Tue, 20 Mar 2001 14:08:34 -0500


Uh oh, I'm taking too many breaks today.

Just brought home five 512 flats of lettuce started by my commercial greenhouse buddy. They look terrific! I've potted up five flats of six-packs so far, and a day later the transplants are all doing beautifully on my back porch.

I experimented with direct-seeding some flats here at home. Same mix, just on the unheated back porch. The 512s are much more robust, maybe just from the slightly warmer temperatures in Dan's houses but also probably because the roots have more room in the 512 plug flats than wrapped around each other in plain flats.

Dan has an automatic 512 seeder and about 30 30' x 96' greenhouses. He charges me $6 per flat to run my seed through his machine and keep the 512s for up to six weeks in his houses. I swear by Fedco and Johnny's, at least for my cold hardscrabble hilltop conditions.

I take some Motrin for my tendonitis and bursitis and pot up seedlings while I watch TV. Sometimes I have some friends over and we have some good clean fun playing in the dirt, and I offer cheap Sunday afternoon seed-starting workshops in which participants get to practice potting up babies. Each attendee pots up about four hundred babies and goes home with a couple of six-packs of their own.

These five flats will pretty much fill my glassed-in back porch. The weather should improve within a couple of weeks to the point that I can move the lettuce outside into cold frames and bring the herbs home from Dan's -- while I give him some more seed for the next batch.

This system allows me to handle thousands more seedlings than I could with a small home greenhouse, and frees my early-season time to concentrate on the care of the winter-weary animals and recruit the coming season's garden co-op members. I'm now on baby watch for the pygmy goats and some of the packers have developed long toes and winter itch that needs some work and I'm still making lots of cheese now that Cricket has freshened -- there's always something to do around here.

I buy seed-starting mix from Dan, about $12 per 50-pound bag, less than half of the retail price. He uses a mix of coir, peat moss, and vermiculite without any fertilizers or wetting agents -- and I love it! He gets it in by the 18-wheeler pallet load of huge plastic-bag bales.

I use this mix plain for starting seeds, mixed with some of my sifted compost and a small amount of potting soil and some Alaska fish fertilizer or some powdered kelp in the water when I pot up babies into six-packs. For plants that are going to be expected to live for a while in larger pots for nursery sales, I add more potting soil and ground limestone and crushed oyster shell and greensand and bone meal according to their individual requirements.

And now it's time to check the 512s on the back porch. The one downside is that they can dry out very quickly so they need a lot of supervision and have to be turned at least once every couple of days. I bottom-water all of the seedlings by setting them into an old picnic cooler with an inch of lukewarm water. I'm now up to four old coolers and I'm waiting for K-Mart's plastic pools to be restocked -- bought one last year but cracked it on the way home. This year I'll buy two smaller ones so they'll fit in the station wagon without having to be smushed. We live and learn to do things within our limitations.

By late April I won't be giving the goats grain any more (they'll be on all-day pasture and browse). I'll then plug the 10-foot fiberglass feeding trough with duct tape and put it to work in the green room nursery where shade from the trees protects babies from too-sunny days. At that point I expect to have about 50,000 seedlings.

This is one way to do it when we're doing it alone and with a full-time off-farm job 200 miles from home.

Dori Green, Crazy Rescue Woman & Facilitator
Ash Grove Community Farm & Center for Sustainable Living
Corning, NY

http://www.ic.org/agrove/index.htm

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  • Re: market-farming Seed Starting, Dori Green, 03/20/2001

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