Frugal Cutworm Collars

You loving raise plants from seed. Or you buy them at a healthy stage from a nursery and bring them home and lovingly plant them. Either way, they are your little vegetative babies. So imagine your surprise when one morning you go out to survey your growing yummy goodness and you see one of your little darlings cut down! Chomped down is more like it. Cutworms are nasty little buggers that seem to delight in cutting down healthy little seedlings before their stems are thick and strong. They delight in making a meal not out of the leaves and flowers, just the stem. Just cutting down the whole plant. If you find such damage in your garden, pull away the first half inch or so of mulch and dirt in a 3 to 6 inch radius around your casualty. You'll probably find the culprit, snoozing off his stem feast. Squash him, otherwise you'll have another casualty the next morning.

To combat cutworms before they start their lumberjack ways, I use cutworm collars. Some folks like to use yogurt cups and cut the bottoms off to make a ring of plastic protection around the plants, others buy the fancy ones from garden supply stores. I've had good luck so far with something a little more prevalent and a little more lazy. I present the humble toilet paper roll.


I know what you're thinking: it looks awfully ghetto. However, I don't have to cut the bottom off of anything, I simply gently ease the roll around the seedling and press it into the soil about an inch. The beauty in my mind is that the rolls can be composted once they've served their cutworm protecting purpose. And I figure I KNOW I'll use, er, the other stuff that comes on a roll, so after saving them up all winter long, I have an abundant supply.

Blackberry Winter = FROST!

Seriously!? Frost is in the forecast? What kind of crazy spring is this? So much for Mother's day being our last day of frost in this part of VA. To deal with this blackberry winter (that's what my grandmother always called it when we got a late cold snap while the blackberries are blooming), I've covered my little seedlings in the garden with newspaper. They're calling for frost again tonight, so I'll take pictures of my little hobo garden. One or two sheets of newspaper lightly draped directly over the plants is enough to protect them for just a night. If we were going to have long term (a week or more) cold, I might invest in some floating row covers, but for just a night or two, I can get away with newspaper.

Garden frost protection falls into two categories: those that can be left on during the day and those that need to be removed. And those categories change as the daytime temperatures rise.
Those that can be left on include:

• Milk cartons with their bottoms cut off and their lids left off. This is great for a few prized tender plants in the garden (Basil, Eggplant, Peppers to name a few). But if your daytime temps are going to be above about 70, you should remove these to keep your plants from baking.
• Floating Row Covers. Some folks leave these on their crops all summer to prevent pest damage too.
• Water Walls. These little guys go around each individual plant and can stay there all season if you wish, but most folks remove them. The cheap way to do this is to fill multiple water bottles and surround the plant with them. Again, only cheap if you've just got a few plants. I've got 24 peppers and 38 tomatoes.... not an option for me.
  

Those that need to be removed: Basically anything that can cover the plant and keep the frost from forming directly on the leaves but that won't allow sun and air to the plant for days on end.

• Bed sheets - cover a lot of space quickly
• Newspaper
• Pots turned upside down over your plants
• Straw or other loose mulch

With any luck, these cold nights won't last long and my little plants will be just fine with a little protection.

Frugal Recycled Seed Starting Trays

The first year I started seeds, I used those fun little jiffy pots. I found, however, that when I was digging up the garden that fall to plant cool weather crops, all of the netting was still around the rootball of my plants. Now, for annuals, this might not be a problem, but then again, I didn’t really want all those little pieces of netting floating around in the soil in my garden. So I started using trays. Well, actually, I started using egg carton tops with drainage holes punched into them. Don’t get me wrong, I love to use the cardboard egg cartons for buying eggs because they biodegrade in my compost pile. But I found that starting seeds in the Styrofoam egg cartons actually helps the soil retain moisture for longer, cuts down on fungus (because they can be washed in hot soapy water to help kill bacteria… hot soapy water tends to destroy the cardboard kind of cartons) and helps give me something to do with all those egg cartons!

So here's how to make your own cheap seed starting trays.

• Take a styrofoam egg carton and cut the top off using scissors.
  
• Wash the egg carton top (that is now separated from the bottom) in hot soapy water. Allow to dry.
  
• Take a knife and make holes in the bottom of your tray for drainage. I find that simply inserting the knife and rotating it 45 degrees to each side gives a nice size hole.
• Fill your tray with sterile potting soil or some other seed starting medium.
• Plant your seeds.
• Place your seed tray on a cookie sheet or some other tray that will hold water so that you can water from the bottom. This will help protect your seedlings from damping off and will also make your watering chores SO much easier.
  
• Congratulate yourself on reusing an egg carton and keeping your garden inexpensive!
  

Recession Garden?

I always perk up a little bit when I see mainstream media covering gardening news. I think in my heart, I still want to fit in on the playground, so it makes me feel better when I see that other folks are also starting to get back into gardening. So when I saw CNN covering the savings that a new gardener can expect from a new plot, I was heartened, and then disheartened. Disheartened because the article mentioned that not all new gardeners are going to save money because they simply don't know what to plant and when and how to do it for the cheapest possible.

So I thought I'd help with that a little. My favorite online places for gardening info and how to tips are rather varied, but there are a few that stand out.

GardenWeb Forums are fabulous for asking questions, searching for other questions, and generally gaining knowledge from a huge community of avid gardeners. It's like having a whole virtual neighborhood of gardeners at your fingertips.

National Gardening Association has tons of how to, getting started, find your zone, figure out what to plant when information. Not just food information either, there's lots of good info for the other parts of your yard here.

Vegetable Gardener is a new favorite for me. Timely posts, lots of how to tips, and all from people who have used all of those techniques in their own yards and gardens.

So are you planting your own Recession Garden this year? (Victory Garden? Vegetable Garden? Kitchen Garden? Just plain Garden?)

Seed Starting Light Set-up

Add one wire shelf, 8 shop lights, 16 fluorescent tubes, a couple of multi-plug extension cords and an inexpensive timer and what do you get? A seed starting set up! I’ve seen shelves like this in garden catalogues and drooled over them, and then cringed at their price (some of them are nearly $300 plus shipping!!). Armed with an idea of what I wanted and a coupon to my favorite home improvement store, I bought the supplies for half the price of the garden catalog variety, and I avoided shipping. I highly recommend having a friend help you set this up, however, as it is no fun to break a light bulb, but lots of fun to work together.
What kinds of bulbs should you use? I thought that a full spectrum bulb would work best, but they're expensive. So I did a little search and found out from the University of Minnesota that plain old shop lights work just as well. I then double checked that information against the wise sages of the Gardener's Forum and found that most folks there say the same thing: don't waste your money on expensive lights for seedlings (now, if you're trying to grow plants throughout the season, that might be a little different). Also, if you notice your seedlings are growing away from one of your bulbs, replace it if you can. You want your little darlings to grow as straight and evenly as possibly. I laugh to my cowboy that he will never have a shortage of lights for his workbench as he’s got all the seed starting leftover bulbs to use.

I've been Forked!

Actually, I've forked myself. Instead of buying those expensive little plant markers, I'm using leftover plastic forks (you know, the ones that just seem to accumulate in junk drawers, inside the pantry, and in the car behind the seat.) I know that it is more sustainable to use the little wooden plant markers for seasonal marking because they decompose when I'm done with them, but I'm on a budget and all of these forks would be making their way to a landfill by now anyway if I hadn't washed and reused them (washed them in the dishwasher with a load I was doing anyway, at least I'm conserving water, right?)

The forks are marking seed areas. I garden using a modified square foot gardening method (modified because it starts out all nice and square footish at the beginning of the season when I'm planting seeds and then digresses slowly to a marginally controlled chaos as the summer season comes on and I find the urge to fit in "one more plant" simply irresistible). As the season progresses and these squares get filled up, I'll post a garden plan (this year seems to be the year of "oh just put it over there").

For now, these are the seeds planted today:
Libson White Bunching Onions
Carrots (thanks, JM!)
Chard - Ruby and White
Peas- Snap
Peas- Snow
Spinach
Mesclun Mix (I'll succession plant this every 2 weeks till early June)
Kohlrabi (the alien plant)
Beets

I can't wait for salads!! What did you plant today?