Planting Day

Today, actually April 6th because I’m delaying these posts a bit, was the first 65 degree day of the year here in the Seattle metroplex. The sun was very nice, even for an indoor troll like me. I got an early start and mowed the lawn, after fighting with the mower for nearly 20 minutes. It’s always a pain to start the first time after the long winter, but this year was worse than usual. It probably needs a tune up . . .

Anyway I got the lawn mowed. Here’s a pic of my garden plot after mowing.



The plot is 13.5 feet by 8.5 feet, about 115 square feet and on the north side of the property. It gets good morning an afternoon sun, but is blocked in the midday by a big evergreen tree and a rundown shed.

It wasn’t breezy yet (we often get a very nice easterly wind coming off of Puget Sound in the afternoon) so I figured it would be good to get the newspaper down fast. The first problem I was faced with was how much newspaper. One layer? Seems really thin. Two layers? Also seemed pretty thin. So I went with three. I started running out of the two weeks worth of newspapers I had saved near the end, so the last row was only two layers thick. It went without any problems (though with several “oh, I missed that article, let me stop and read it” moments). Here are a few pictures of the progress.





For the next step I took one bag of top soil and one bag of steer manure (each bought the week before at Lowe’s and each equivalent to 1 cubic foot) and mixed them together in my old, rusty wheelbarrow.



After mixing, I spread it as evenly and as thinly as I could across the newspaper. I wanted to weigh it down, give the seeds some soil to start growing in and as the paper broke down, give some nutrients to the soil. Then I did another bag of each and added it to the plot.



The newspaper was resting on the grass like a man lying on a bed of nails. Adding the thin layer of soil was enough to push the paper down in some places, but not enough in other places so I got a strange, “rolling hills” effect.



I watered the whole area thinking it might weigh things down a bit more and even out the newspaper with no luck. Here’s a picture after watering:



Now I was ready to seed. My process was to dump a small pile of seeds into my hand and then toss them out over the damp soil. It worked well close in, but farther than four feet or so my accuracy really suffered and it was hard to get an even covering of seeds. The directions of the seed packets said that each packet was enough for 100 square feet. I used a packet and a half to get what I considered a “reasonable-looking” coverage. I then sprinkled the entire plot with fresh grass clippings and watered again. The clippings are there to protect the seeds and to absorb and hold in moisture (the weather forecast now shows a week of rain showers coming in a few days).

In the end, it all looked like this:



Not a bad day’s work, if I do say so myself. Now let’s hope it actually grows . . .

Unexpected Finds

While I was ordering the Spring Wheat, I clicked the box that said “Send me a catalog.”

I just got finished going though it and . . . WOW.

They have an incredible selection of seeds and the catalog is packed with information about how, where, and how long they grow. There is so much information that they have to abbreviate it, so there are lots of codes to look up. They have a huge selection of books, one titled Ancient Agriculture, a translation of a 16th century Spanish instruction manual. Others that give directions on sustainable agriculture in limited space.

One offers the following trivia: “Currently it takes a minimum of 10,000 square feet to feed one person in the US and often 16,000 square feet in the Third World. This booklet gives a step-by-step approach . . . in as little as 2,100 square feet.”

Bountiful Gardens also gives lectures, runs classes and travels around the world (Mexico, Afganistan, Kenya) to teach and practice their impressive trade.

New Field, New Corn

I need some seed to start this off. If anyone read any of my old posts, you’ll see that I took some wheat berries that I bought at the local food co-op and threw them into a planter and, big surprise, got sprouts growing in my backyard. I planted those in September of 2008. Here’s the state of the grain in the first week of April:



It’s winter wheat, so it’s on target to produce some tall stalks by summer.

But now it’s April, and I don’t want to wait until next year. I want some grain now! So I went back online. I found the Bountiful Gardens website (located very near the small town I grew up in) and ordered some Spring Wheat. They had an ancient strain of wheat that they said dated back to the Stone Age. I was really tempted but it also talked about how difficult it was to thresh and clean.

Here’s a picture of the Modern Hard Red Wheat.

Standing on the threshold

I am about to plant some wheat. What do I do to prepare the soil? How do I get rid of the grass in my lawn? What about fertilizer or peat moss or manure? I have no idea.

So I did what anyone would do in this day and age. I went online. I googled.

I came up with a plan. To build a raised bed. To make a wooden frame, kill the grass under it with wet newspaper (which will starve the grass for sunlight and biodegrade), fill it with good topsoil and plant in that. It can’t go wrong. The wood is cheap. The hard part is getting a cubic yard of topsoil.

I never got around to finding out how much that would cost. Because I found this website. On page 8 it suggests a procedure to prepare a grassy plot to turn it into a garden. It says to lay down the newspaper, thrown on some compost and seed that with wheat. Once the wheat has grown, till it back into the earth and instant (well maybe not instant) garden.

Well, I’m not looking for a garden, I want to grow wheat. So this method seems perfect. That’s what I’ll do.

Who is this guy anyway?

I guess the most important part is that I know nothing about agronomy or gardening. My parents had a large garden in their first house, but when they moved out of that house (when I was 5), they had other things to do. My father planted roses while I was a young adult, but never involved me in the practice (I was given the job of doing the landscaping). I’ve planted tulip bulbs with mixed results. I’ve planted hearty juniper bushes and had them die.

So I am definitely confident that I can screw this project up at any point.

One of the things that gives me much trepidation is the ground. I don’t know anything about soil.

I do know that the area used to be a swamp and that there is a lot of gravel about 8-12 inches below the surface. Many websites I’ve looked at say that grain is just grass, and if grass will grow in an area so will wheat. That makes a certain amount of sense, but at the same time there has to more to it than that. I mean, if it was that easy to grow, there’d be no discussion of crop rotation. I never have to rotate my lawn . . . though I guess some people spend a lot of money on lawn fertilizer and weed killer . . .