Making It: Radical Home Ec for a Post-Consumer World (33 page)

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Seedling Flats

PREPARATION:
1 hour

Over the years, we’ve started seeds in everything from egg cartons to plastic flats to expensive peat pots. Usually the seeds sprouted, but sometimes they’d be sickly and slow to grow, or we’d lose an entire flat to some mysterious malaise. This no longer happens now that we start our seeds in wooden boxes, as recommended by John Jeavons in
HOW TO GROW MORE VEGETABLES.

Wood provides the seedlings with the perfect balance of insulation, drainage, and ventilation. Fill one of these with seeds and soil and water gently, and your seedlings will grow like gangbusters.

YOU’LL NEED

• Side pieces: Use scrap pieces of 2x4 or 2x6 lumber. Any kind of wood is fine, as long as it’s not chemically treated or painted. Ballpark measurements for a flat made with 2x4 lumber would be 16 x 24 inches, and one made of 2x6 lumber would be 12 x 12 inches.
  
• Bottom boards: Use bender board (landscape edging), paneling, or slats liberated from a shipping pallet. Thinner wood on the bottom reduces the weight of the boxes and looks nicer.
  
• Saw
  
• Electric drill or hammer
  
• 3½-inch-long wood screws or nails, marked as suitable for outdoor use
  
• Chicken wire (optional)
  
• PUTTING IT TOGETHER
  

Cut the side pieces of the box to length and use two nails or screws to secure each corner. Then measure the dimensions of the assembled frame. Cut the bottom boards to match the bottom of the box. The bottom slats can run lengthwise or crosswise, whichever you prefer. Place them as close to one another as you can and attach them to the frame using one nail or screw at both ends of each slat. Predrill your lumber to prevent splitting, especially when working with thinner wood.

For general purposes, a box constructed from 2x4s is plenty deep for seedlings. Sometimes, though, gardeners like to let seedlings mature a bit more in their flats prior to transplanting. A box constructed out of 2x6s allows for the additional root room plants need if they stay in the flat for more than 4 weeks. Once filled with wet soil, these boxes get heavy, so don’t make the standard flats larger than 18 x 24 inches and limit the ones made with 2x6 lumber to about a foot square.

Don’t paint, stain, or seal your finished boxes. They’re best left as raw wood so that the wood can breathe and the seedlings aren’t exposed to any chemicals.

Tip:
Curl a piece of chicken wire over your finished box once it is planted to keep birds and squirrels out of your seedlings. Tack down the wire if the critters seem ambitious.

How to Compost

Compost is the life force of your vegetable garden. When you compost, you assist nature in an alchemical transformation by taking “dead” things such as kitchen scraps, yard waste, and manure and magically turning them back into living matter. A compost pile teems with life: fungi, nematodes, microbes, and worms, just to name a few. These critters form mutually beneficial relationships with the roots of plants. As a vegetable gardener, you foster these beneficial relationships and thus the life of the soil. Active soil grows healthy vegetables. In fact, you could say that your primary duty is to the soil, and the vegetables are the fruit of this labor.

The compost pile is the beginning of a chain of life that stretches from what you add to the pile, to the soil you enliven with it, to the plants that thrive in that soil, to the moment those veggies nourish you. Healthy, pest-free vegetables come from a compost pile built with care and love. Need more reasons to compost? There are almost too many to list. Compost raises soil fertility, increases water retention, corrects soil imbalances, and reduces toxic heavy metals, to name just a few.

The different composting methods depend on such factors as how much green waste you generate, your climate, and the types of plants you’re growing. In our own yard, we maintain two different piles. One is a slow pile that heats up only slightly and takes a year to be ready for use. The slow pile is where the majority of our kitchen scraps and some of our yard waste goes. We also build “fast” piles from time to time, when we need a lot of compost. Fast compost piles are built all at once, rather than accumulated, and they are ready to use in just a couple of months. The kind you build will depend on your situation, so we provide instructions for both (Project 58 and Project 59), though they are similar in principle.

THE ART OF COMPOSTING

When it comes to building a compost pile, the process is more art than science. We like to use alchemical metaphors for composting, describing a healthy pile as a balanced combination of earth, air, fire, and water. Strike the right balance between these elements and a magical transformation begins.

EARTH.
The “earth” part of the pile is the carbon-rich material—usually brown in color—like dried leaves, straw, wood chips, etc. Carbon provides the food that the critters in the pile will break down.

AIR.
Since a compost pile is a living thing, it needs air. This is why a compost bin needs to have holes. It’s also important to include bulking materials, like straw and dead leaves that, in addition to supplying carbon, will help air get into the center of the pile.

FIRE.
The metabolic activity generated by microorganisms heats the pile up. To start this process, you need materials containing nitrogen. Microorganisms use nitrogen to generate enzymes that break down the carbon. Some common sources of nitrogen-rich material are kitchen scraps, lawn clippings, and manure. Using insufficient nitrogen materials is one of the most common novice composting mistakes. No nitrogen, no fire.

WATER.
The life forms in your compost pile need water to survive. Aim to keep the pile as moist as a wrung-out sponge.

FIRE (NITROGEN)

Alfalfa meal

Blood meal

Brewery wastes (hops, spent grains)

Coffee grounds and tea leaves

Fresh grass clippings

Fruit

Hair

Hay

Leaves and trimmings (fresh)

Manure

Potato tubers

Seaweed (dried and fresh)

Urine (human)

Weeds (green)

EARTH (CARBON)

Corncobs (ground)

Dry leaves

Dry grass clippings

Garden waste (dried)

Sawdust (use sparingly—very, very high in carbon)

Straw

Wood chips (finely ground)

Wood shavings

SOME OTHER CONSIDERATIONS

VARIETY:
The greater variety of items you put in the pile, the higher quality the compost will be in the end. It’s kind of like eating—you wouldn’t want to just subsist on mac and cheese alone, would you? Organic materials all contain different nutrients. Make your compost pile a smorgasbord, and your garden will reap the benefits of that diversity.

CHOPPING:
The more finely chopped your materials, the faster their decomposition. We use a machete and shovels to chop incoming items; you can also run a lawn mower over materials, such as dry leaves, to chop them finely.

WEEDS
contain many valuable nutrients and can make a great addition to a compost pile. A hot pile will kill weed seeds, but if you want to be conservative, add weed materials before they go to seed. The exception here is any pernicious weed (like Bermuda grass) that spreads via rhizomes. If one little piece of rhizome ends up in your compost, you’ve got more Bermuda grass.

MANURE
speeds up any compost pile. The most accessible source in most urban and suburban areas is horse manure. Make friends with horse folks. They’ll be more than happy to have you haul off their waste. Just be sure their horses are well cared for and not full of drugs. Most of the time, you’ll be getting horse bedding, a combination of manure and wood shavings that line the stables. The wood shavings bring carbon along with the nitrogen-rich manure, so balance the rest of your pile accordingly, adding a little more nitrogen in the form of green plant materials. Chicken manure mixed with coop bedding works much the same way. Since animal manure can contain pathogens, like
E. coli,
it’s important to get the pile hot, let it fully mature before use, and, for extra safety, wash root vegetables grown with it. Alternatively, you can use alfalfa meal as a nitrogen source instead of manure.

COMPOSTING IS A BALANCING ACT
between earth, air, fire, and water. Get the balance right, and the pile will heat up and turn into rich, dark, garden gold. Don’t worry about screwing it up. You can’t fail. Eventually
everything
breaks down, it’s just a matter of how fast that happens. If you always cover green matter (fire) with carbon matter (earth), you’ll balance them. If you keep the pile moist but not soggy, it won’t smell, and everything in it will break down more quickly than if it were dry. If your pile has enough air to breathe, but not so much that it’s dried out by wind and sun, all the tiny creatures in it will flourish and work to your benefit. Know your pile. Trust your intuition. If you look at the pile and your first reaction is that it’s a little dry, it probably is. If it looks soggy, maybe you should turn in something dry and airy, like dead leaves. Or maybe you should take off the cover and let it dry out for a day. Both would work. There are many paths to good compost.

CHOOSING A CONTAINER: MASS MATTERS

Compost organisms do best when the pile reaches the mass of 1 cubic yard. While composting can be done in an open pile, in most situations it’s best to keep the pile in some sort of container, such as an extralarge garbage can, a store-bought compost container, or a cube made from old shipping pallets. (See the next project for pallet instructions.) Stay away from gimmicky, expensive compost containers. Most are too small to give you the volume you need, and anyway, composting should be cheap.

WHAT DOESN’T GO IN COMPOST?

This is a more complicated question than most compost pundits would have you believe. The truth is that you can compost almost any organic material, but a pile of rotten fish, for instance, smells really bad and attracts rats. But thanks to the miracle of nature, compost piles can break down just about anything, including a lot of bad pesticides, herbicides, and diseased plant materials. If the compost is intended for an edible garden, though, be careful about what goes in the pile. Use your judgment and think about the chain of life that stretches from what you add to the pile to the plants you grow with the compost to the moment those veggies end up on your dinner plate.