The decline of bee populations has been a hot topic for quite some time now. While the decline has been slowing slightly, bee colonies are still being decimated by causes that are not fully understood yet. Bees are the most important pollinators for many fruit bearing plants, so it is important to attract bees to your vegetable garden.
Bees are constantly searching for nectar and pollen, so make sure they can find plenty of flowering plants in your garden. Plant many different kinds of flowering plants, so the bees will find something in bloom from early spring until autumn.
You can also provide them with housing. A chunk of wood with holes drilled into it makes the perfect home for mason bees. If you want something that is better looking, you could get a ready made bee house
In addition to housing and flowers, bees need water. A nearby pond or bird bath is not a safe water source for bees: they can get trapped in the water’s surface tension. A small container filled with sand and water is preferred. Keep the sand wet and the bees will be able to drink from it.
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I have been doing quite a bit of testing with aquaponics over the last year. One of my aquaponics systems is growing herbs and lettuce right in my kitchen. The distance to the stovetop is about 80 cm, how’s that for reducing food miles!
This system is a small aquarium with some NFT channels on top. I made the channels from rectangular plastic air duct, the ones that you can buy at any home improvement shop, they are normally used for kitchen and bathroom ventilation. Water gets pulled through the black filter box on the right and pumped into the channels where the plant roots can take up the nutrient rich water. One channel has 7 planting sites for herbs and the other one has 3, which are spaced further apart to grow lettuce. Since the plants don’t receive any direct sunlight, I had to provide them with some artificial light. Things are growing quite nicely and I often use fresh herbs from this indoor garden.
The fish are growing pretty fast as well, but they will take some while until they are big enough to eat.
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Earlier this week we had our first harvest apart from the occasional strawberry, raspberry and herbs that I use regularly for cooking. We harvested some potatoes, just enough for one good meal, about 900 grams. The next day I decided to dig up the rest of the row to make room for some new plants. I did all of the digging and the girls had a blast taking all the potatoes out. The total harvest was 5.5 kg from a 4 meter row. A little less than I had expected, but a pretty good harvest none the less!
We are going to try to get a bit more next time by going vertically. I have read some good things about growing potatoes in stacked car tires, so we are going to give that a try. I went down to the local car tire shop to ask about getting some old tires and they told me to take all the tires I could carry. I could fit about 14 in my car which should be more than enough for starters.
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The mailman was just here to drop of my first copy of Urban Garden Magazine. UGM is a bi-monthly magazine focusing on hydroponics and indoor growing. I hadn’t heard of this magazine before, since it is distributed through hydro- and grow-shops in the US, Canada and the UK. That is until Dan, one of the magazines editors contacted me and asked me if I wanted to write something for the magazine.
So, I wrote a piece on greenhouse temperature control and the people at UGM loved it, in fact, they already have me booked for another gig in their next issue!
If you don’t know UGM yet you should check out their website at www.urbangardenmagazine.com, they normally have a few of their articles published on their site, or pick up a copy at your local hydro-store.
If any of you already have a copy, I would love to get some feedback on the article!
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My goldfish have been polluting the water for a little while now and all the plants I have transplanted into the aquaponics grow bed are doing good. A few days ago I decided to add the NFT channel, that I made a while ago, to the system and pop some basil seeds in. The seed packet says that germination takes 15 to 20 days, the seeds I put in started sprouting after 3 days! The picture was taken this morning, 4 days after sowing.
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Spring has really started and everything is starting to grow, but not every plant is wanted in our garden. We have a lot of stinging nettles in our garden and getting rid of them can be quite a challenge. This plant, however, can be put to good use in our garden by using it to brew a natural, highly effective, fertilizer. You can use the whole plant to create fertilizer: leafs, stems and roots.
Roughly cut up the plants and dump them into a barrel with water. You’ll want to add about 1 kg of plant matter to 10 liters of water (about 1 pound to a gallon) After 24 hours you will have a plant strengthener that is very high on silicic acid, a substance that will strengthen your plants cells and protect them from stinging and sucking insects.
Letting your nettles stay in the water a little longer will break down the contained nutrients and leave you with a fertilizer that is very rich in nitrogen and trace elements. Place your barrel in a sunny spot, but think about where you place it as the process of breaking down the plant matter into its elements will release a very bad smell. Give it a daily stir with a shovel and after two to three weeks your fertilizer is ready to be used. All the plant matter that hasn’t been broken down can be added to your compost pile.
The liquid fertilizer can be sprayed directly onto your plants, in which case it should be diluted: 1 part fertilizer to ten parts water. Or you can water the plants with it. One treatment a week will give you noticeable better growing, healthier plants.
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I got my ordered copy of Growing Under Glass
, a book by Kenneth A. Beckett in the mail yesterday. It contains a big section about different types of greenhouses, finding the best location for your greenhouse and how to build your own. All information I obviously don’t need, since we already have our greenhouses. Still, it was a very interesting read!
The book covers about everything you need to know about building a greenhouse, equipping it and growing plants in it. It teaches you how to prepare your soil as well as less known planting methods like growing in straw bales. Growing plants from seeds as well as propagating cuttings are extensively covered and everything is accompanied by clear, step by step, illustrations.
I own quite a few gardening books, but if I had to pick my favorite one, Growing Under Glass
Melinda, over at One Green Generation, has started a new round of The Growing Challenge. The goal of the challenge is simple: grow a new crop from seed, organically of course, and save its produced seeds for a new round of planting next year. Sounds simple, and it is, if you pick the right crop to plant.
I planted a lot of seeds yesterday: kohlrabi, strawberry, tomato, cauliflower, bell pepper and lettuce from seed packs that we already had. I also planted broccoli and basil from seeds that I saved from last years crops. I’ve planted tomatoes and basil from saved seeds before and they grew very nicely. If you’re new to seed saving, tomatoes and basil are probably the easiest to start with.
While waiting for the seeds to sprout, we are getting the greenhouse ready for planting.
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These past few weeks we have had snow and freezing nights, but also a couple of very sunny days that warmed our greenhouse up to 30 degrees. Spring is just around the corner, it’s still 3 weeks before it officially starts on March 20th but we’re close enough to start planning for planting. April and May are the preferred sowing months for most vegetable crops when growing outside, but we can start a lot earlier in the greenhouse.
Last year we had quite some weeds growing in our seed trays. Some where so badly infested that it was impossible to tell the weeds from the planted seeds, so I decided to try to sterilize the compost this time. After a little digging and sifting in our compost heap I got more than enough material to mix some seed starting soil. I mixed in about 30% peat and 5% coarse sand.
To sterilize the mixture it should be baked in the oven, the first try didn’t work out too well though. After sitting in the oven for well over 4 hours the center of my soil mixture was still pretty cold. This shows the great insulating capability of soil, a trade that is much appreciated by people building earth sheltered homes. What I did wrong was compacting the soil in the deep oven tray by pressing it down with my hands. By doing this I could fit al the soil I had mixed into the tray, wrongly assuming that this would be the way to sterilize double the amount of soil in the same time. The compacted soil, however, has a greater mass per volume unit and thus has a far better insulating and heat absorbing capability.
The mixed soil was far more than I needed anyways, so I gave it another try today. This time I made sure the soil in the baking tray was nice and loose. The soil should be a little damp and covered tightly with aluminum foil. A meat or candy thermometer will show you the temperature in the center of the soil. With the oven set to 90C (195F) It took about 4 hours for the soil to completely heat up to about 85C (185F) Maintain this temperature for another 30 minutes and the soil sterilization should be all done.
Be careful not to let the soil heat up beyond 95C (200F) or it will form toxins that will not be appreciated by your plants. Allow the soil to cool down and keep the foil on until you are ready to use it.
]]>The best place to start saving precious tap water would probably be the toilet. A few gallons of water are washed down every time you flush the toilet, often needlessly. Saving water and money can easily be achieved by reducing the amount of water that it flushed down the toilet.
A standard toilet will empty it’s water reservoir each time you push down on the lever or yank the chain. All we have to do is modify the internals of the reservoir a bit to let the toilet flapper cut off the water flow as soon as you let go of the handle. The exact modification needed depends on the type of flapper installed in your toilet.
Some flush systems have a floater that keeps the toilet flapper open. If the floater is attached to the flapper, you might be able to remove the floatation device altogether. When the floater is integrated into the flapper, drilling a hole into the float will disable it. You could also add some steel washers or other weight to counteract the floatation device.
The flapper in our toilet is the float and it couldn’t be drilled without making the flapper leak, so I had to add some weights to it. The toilet now only lets the water flow as long as you hold down the handle, as soon as you let go the water stops. This saves a lot of water and still leaves you with enough flushing power for the big boys.
Some companies sell special weights or other devices to achieve the same effect, but I think it is ridiculous to buy these if you can simply use some old junk to accomplish the same. The reason you want to use less water to flush your toilet is either because you want to save money, live a little greener or both. Not buying a commercial device for this purpose will save you money and save the environment because you will not have the packaging to dispose of.
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