Update on Growing Cranberries from Seed

My experiment of growing cranberries from seed was very successful--all of my seeds germinated. This was back at the end of April. Once I saw those tiny leaves poking out of the soil, I took off the plastic bag and made sure to keep the pot well watered. In May, I transplanted them to a larger bed.

The larger bed was about 5 feet by 5 feet. I lined the bottom with contractor-grade plastic, poked some holes in it for drainage, then filled it with two bales of peat moss. It took a long time to get all that peat moss wet--for some reason, dry peat moss actually repels water. I had to get in there and knead the water in with my hands, and keep watering.

I transplanted all the seedlings into that bed. Here's a closeup of what a couple of them look like now:

Commercial cranberry growers propagate their cranberries from cuttings, so in any commercial planting of cranberries, they are probably all genetically identical. When you grow from seeds, each seed has different genetic material, just like all children, even those from the same parents, are different from each other. I am very curious about how these differences will show up in my plants once they start making berries. Different berry size? Different color? Different taste? Every year I will save a few more seeds from our holiday cranberry bag and add to my this project--eventually I'll have a really diverse bed of cranberries, and that should be interesting!

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Make a Garden in an Hour or Less

You don't have to dig up an area or worry about weeds to have a garden. In fact, you can create a garden in about an hour, and never have to weed, till, or dig it again. Here's how.

Get some boards and some big cardboard boxes or newspapers, and find a flat space where you want a garden. The boards don't have to be fancy--I use scrap lumber that I find washed up on the beach after storms. If you're very particular about the way things look, then stop by the hardware store or lumberyard and pick up some 2 x 6s or 2 x 10s.

These are 2 x 6 boards. (This means they are about 5 1/2 inches wide, and 1/1/2 inches thick). This garden is going to be 4 ft by 5 ft, because that's the length of the boards I happened to have on hand from my last after-storm-scavenging session.

If you need cardboard, stop by any bike shop. They have big, flat cardboard boxes and they are always looking for people to take them away.

Cut your boards to length if you need to, and screw them together at the corners:

The rusty screw was already in the board from before--this is scavenged wood. I added two more. You can nail the boards together if you want, but they are more likely to come apart eventually.

Basically you are making a box with no bottom, like this:

Lay cardboard and/or newspaper over the entire bottom of the box. It's a good idea to have the cardboard  extend beyond the edges of the box--it keeps the weeds at bay a little longer:

Watch out for cracks where the boxes had flaps, like this:

Weeds will find that crack and grow right up into your garden. Cover the crack with more cardboard or newspaper--if you use newspaper, make it at least 6 pages thick. Try not to use pages with a lot of colored pictures, as the chemicals in the ink may get taken up by your plants. If it's a flower garden you might not care about this, but if you're going to grow vegetables to eat, it's good to be careful.

Fill up your garden box with layers of compost, manure, topsoil, straw, peat moss, seaweed, sawdust, bone meal, fireplace ashes, leaves, grass clippings, or any other organic matter you have access to. Top it all off with a layer of straw:

Water it all really well. If you want to plant in it right away, make sure the top layer is something finished and ready to plant in, like topsoil or finished compost. If you don't need to plant right away, cover it with straw or beach grass to prevent weeds from growing in your garden bed.

If you don't have "finished" materials and all you have is grass clippings, leaves, etc., then just let it sit til next season and by then everything in it will have composted down into soil--you're ready to go.

When you do plant, mulch around your planting with more straw or beach grass. This will prevent weeds from growing and it will also keep the garden from drying out. The plants will stay evenly moist, you won't have to water very often, and best of all, you will have NO WEEDS.

Here's a photo of some tomato plants growing in this type of garden:

Notice, no weeds, no work, no problem! The only work you ever need to do with this kind of garden is at the end of the season, you need to bring in more materials to build up the bed. More old leaves, grass clippings, compost, seaweed, straw, etc. That's it.

If weeds ever do sneak in, they should be easy to pull out because the thick mulch prevents them from really getting a grip on the soil. If they manage to take over anyway, just smother them with another layer of cardboard and put more organic materials on top of that. Bye bye weeds!

Warning: this method is so easy, it can be addictive. You may find yourself looking at corners of your yard and thinking, Hmm, I could put a garden there...

Helpful books:

Lasagna Gardening, by Patricia Lanza

The Postage Stamp Garden Book, by Duane Newcomb--absolutely the best and most useful garden book I've ever read. In simple, easy to understand language, he explains how to "fix your dirt" in simple, easy-to-understand ways, and make things grow like crazy. This is something no other garden book had ever done for me--this is the book that really made me a gardener.

Make a Quilt from Old Fleeces

Ever since my son was born, I've saved many of his fleece sweatshirts, thinking one day I could make a quilt out of them--a nice reminder of all the times I hugged him when he was wearing those warm, cozy fleeces. I finally got out my pile of fleeces and started working.

I decided to make each quilt piece about 6 1/2 inches square, and I made a template out of some stiff cardboard so I wouldn't have to measure each one--just lay the template on the fabric, go around it with a sharpie marker, and cut.

It's easier if you put the fleece over the end of an ironing board, then lay the template on and trace.

If the fleece has an image on it that you like, the template makes it easy to make that the center of your square:

And if the fleece has stripes or other designs, you can cut your square to include them:

You can cut the sleeves open along the seam; most of the time you can get at least one square from them.

I also cut some squares that included pockets: who says you can't have a pocket in a quilt?

Next phase: sew them all together, and find something to use for backing.

Growing Cranberries from Seed

I love cranberries, and last year I got curious about how they grow. I decided to save some berries out of the bag I bought to make Thanksgiving cranberry sauce. I cut them open and picked out all the tiny seeds. Then I put the seeds in a prescription vial that was filled with damp peat moss, and left the vial in the refrigerator all winter so that the seeds could "stratify." This exposure to cold and damp is necessary before most seeds of cold-climate plants will sprout.

Over the winter, I looked around the Internet for info on growing cranberries from seed. There isn't very much, since most people who want to grow them simply buy plants that have been propagated from existing varieties. But seeds, like people, are a genetic mixup and plants grown from seed would be different from the parents as well as different from each other. I thought it would be interesting to see what variations I would find in a batch of plants grown from seed.

I found conflicting information about the temperatures the seeds needed to sprout. Some sources said they needed warm temperatures and other said to keep them cool. Another source said that variation in temperature was important. Every source said they needed acidic, sandy soil, and the professional database I consulted noted that the seeds must be exposed to light in order to sprout--so they should not be buried, but left on the surface.

I mixed equal parts of sand and peat moss, put it in a pot, and sprinkled the seeds on top:

This seemed like it would make the seeds dry out too much, so I enclosed the entire pot in a plastic bag to keep in the moisture, and put it out in the yard, where it would go through a variety of temperatures.

Now it's time to wait. If this doesn't work, then I'll keep researching it and try again next year. My yard is not exactly great cranberry habitate, so If I get any plants, I'll plant them upstate on some land owned by my family.

For more info on growing cranberries, go to http://www.mofga.org/Publications/MaineOrganicFarmerGardener/Winter20042005/Cranberries/tabid/1278/Default.aspx

Growing Beach Plums and Other Plants from Seed

Buying plants in pots is expensive, but collecting seeds is free, so last fall I decided to save seeds from a variety of plants so I could try growing them. Most seeds from plants that grow wild in our climate need a period of "stratification." This means exposure to moisture and cold, and it simulates the environment a seed would encounter in nature, once it fell off the mother plant and went through winter. Most seeds will not sprout until after this, which makes sense: if a seed sprouted without stratification, it would sprout in the fall and then the young plant would be killed by the arrival of winter. Much better to wait until spring, then sprout.

I looked up ways to stratify seeds at home. Most of the info I found mentioned putting the seed into moist peat moss in a ziploc and leaving it in the refrigerator for a month or more. Other sources said you could use paper towels, but I was afraid the bleach or other chemicals in the paper towels would affect the seeds, so I used peat moss.

I collected seeds from beach plums, beach roses, and elderberry bushes that were growing in the wild. (I also collected seed from goji berries and seed from cranberries I bought at the grocery store, but I'll describe those in another post).

I put it in bags of peat moss last October, and stuck it in my fridge.

Today I took out the packages of seeds. The seeds had grown much plumper, and some of the beach plum seeds had begun to sprout:

One difficulty with the "peat moss in a bag" system is that with smaller seeds, it can be difficult to find the seeds when it's time to plant. If the seeds are small, it's easier to fill a prescription bottle with dampened peat moss and put the seeds in that:

Then you have far less material to go picking through, looking for tiny seeds.

Today I mixed equal amounts of sand (free, from the beach) and topsoil, filled pots with the mix, and planted several seeds in each pot. Then I put them outside, since it's warming up now. And now I'll wait to see what happens. If they grow, I'll plant some in my yard, and plant the others in random places around town: part of my "stealth wild edible plants" program. I plant native edible plants in places where they belong, or won't be noticed: scrubby woods, edges of roads, the back ends of parks where things have been allowed to grow wild and no one cuts the grass. Maybe other foragers will find them, or the birds might like the fruits; it's just a way of creating a little bit more nature here on the Island.

Update: This is for Bill, who asked what the bush looks like:

The easiest way to find beach plums is to go around in spring and look for them when they're flowering; then later in the summer you can come back and look for the fruit. This year (2013) I'll take some photos of the flowering bushes to help you know what to look for.

Forsythia Is Evil!

Today was a bright, clear day, the kind of day before things leaf out, when you can go out in the yard and see how all the bushes are doing. Every year, around this time, I consider ripping out the forsythia hedge and replacing it with something else, even though it hasn't even bloomed yet. Maybe a hedge of some kind of bush that makes edible berries. Blueberry hedge! How great that would be.

I love forsythia in other people's yards. I love when I'm driving around, or running, and I go past a fence and see long wands of bright yellow waving over the top of it. It's as if the forsythia is saying, "You can't contain me! Whee, I'm free!" It's like hot yellow fireworks and it always makes me happy.

Except when it's in my yard. The blossoms are still pretty, but they don't last long and the bush itself is a pain. It still says "You can't contain me!" and I can't. It seems like every time I'm not looking at it, which is most of the year, it sneakily grows a few more feet. Then suddenly one day I realize that my tomatoes and beans are in deep shade: there is a 20-foot-high forsythia hedge looming over them and stealing all the sunlight.

In addition to shading my entire yard if I let it, it's also a terrorist haven for the most evil of plants. Poison ivy loves to hide among the forsythia branches, and I can never find it all to get rid of it, so every time I prune I end up itching all over, pus running down my arm or leg from a massive poison ivy blister. Next time I go near that hedge, I'm wearing a biohazard suit.

A couple of months ago the renters next door moved, and the landlords brought over a landscaping crew to decimate the yard while the house was empty. They launched a full-scale assault on the half of my forsythia that had grown up on their side of the fence. They really whacked it. I was thrilled!
Now it's actually under control, and my garden will have full sun this summer--until it grows back.

Free Mulch!

Here on the Island, we have free mulch, but no one knows about it.

All you have to do is go to a local beach, preferably one near a marsh, in the spring. In springtime all of last year's salt hay, or marsh grass, breaks off and floats around in the water. After a storm, it washes up in huge piles on the beach. In the old days, people collected it for mulch.

The marsh without the marsh grass: it's all broken off and floated away to a nearby beach. In the summer it will grow back and this will be a sea of tall green grass that ripples in the wind.

You can buy salt hay, or straw that companies call salt hay (even though it isn't--it's usually oat straw), and it is expensive. But there's no reason to pay for it, since it's free on our beaches--you just have to do the work of picking it up and hauling it home.

I'm sure that if it was left lying on the beach, it would fulfill some role in the ecosystem: as it decomposed, it would provide nutrients to the marsh, or food for tiny water creatures. It's not left lying on the beach, though, because the town sends guys with trucks to clean the beach every spring, and they gather it up and throw it into huge dumpsters. So, I don't feel bad taking some, since they're only going to use it to add to a landfill.

I use it as a mulch, layering six inches or more around all my plants, using the "lasagna gardening" system. Last year I had huge tomato plants and not one weed--none of them could come up through the layers of marsh hay. I also didn't have to water much, because the mulch kept the soil evenly moist.

This year I just missed the gathering time--the town workers beat me to it, and one day when I drove by the beach I saw those huge dumpsters loaded with salt hay. The next day, they were gone. Today I went to that beach and saw that the guys had left a few piles behind--and you can bet I'll be over there with my giant plastic bags as soon as I'm off work!