Peel Teaching Garden
12942 Heart Lake Road Caledon, ON, Canada

Starting Seeds Indoors Except for some specialty perennials, starting seeds indoors begins in March so don’t panic and don’t go buying ‘seed started kits’, soil mixes or anything else. PTG Class #III (11th Feb) is all about soil and will cover the construction of flower and vegetable beds. Class #IV, the following week, is a ‘show and tell’ about seeds, seeding, and tuber and pelargonium propagation. These two classes will discuss what to do, how when and, more particularly, ...why. Broadly speaking, all packaged seed sold at retail - by mail or in store - will meet some generally accepted standard of viability and that standard will vary depending on the sort of seed and what sort of growing season the particular seed crop has had. The viability will also depend on how the seed has been handled in shipping and in the store. Also broadly speaking, seeds available in non-specialty outlets will tend to be those which are the most reliable and the most easy to grow. Regarding the sort of lights which should be used for starting seeds indoors, the best answer is: whatever you can pick up for free. If you have a choice and beggars are seldom choosers warm white florescent tubes. The whole setup will only be in use for around eight weeks and growing your own seedlings only makes economic sense if you have no, or a very low, capital investment. Except under unusual circumstances, after a couple of weeks outside, the difference, between seedlings raised under the most expensive wide-spectrum grow-lights and those grown under third hand daylights or cool whites, isn’t enough for home gardeners to bother about. If you are growing Mary Jane different rules apply. As to what to grow, because garden space is always at a premium, tend to look for things which are high value and low volume. Most herbs would fall into this category, and what is not used fresh can often be dried for winter use. It make no financial sense, for instance, to grow garlic. 3lb. of fresh, cleaned, vacuum packed, cloves can be had, in the middle of winter, for $3.99. You couldn’t prepare enough ground to grow three pounds of garlic for four bucks, let alone buy the seed, plant, weed, harvest and clean the crop. See you at Class number III.

Rules of Gardening While reviewing garden rules - there are none - I drew a parallel between piano playing and gardening. A piano has a number of keys and using two fingers almost anyone can knock out a recognisable tune. The repertoire expands with the knowledge and virtuosity of the player. Horticulture also has a number of keys, simple techniques and principles, and with little more than ‘green side up’ and ‘snip off the dead bits’ something garden like can be achieved. Ju...st as a piano contains every piece of music ever composed, (someone is going to jump on this I just know it) so every garden ever created was based on one combination or another of basic horticultural notes. So how many garden ‘notes’ are there? I really have no idea, but like a piano I’d guess that the most used ones are clustered around the middle. Last Saturday I couldn’t remember how many keys a piano had, but I can now definitively state: ‘standard’ is 88, a few have 85, and the Bosendorfer 9'6" concert grand has 97. Isn’t Google wonderful. Trouble is, the 97 key job is just screaming to have its own limerick and that will be a challenge.

Spade Sharpening The difficulty that left-handed gardeners have when it come to sharpening a spade had never occurred to me. In the write up http://www.teachinggarden.org/sharpening.html I glibly glossed over the problem with the admonition Sinisters make the usual adjustments. It turns out that a right handed single cut file cannot be used left handed, the teeth are going the wrong way and will not cut. A left handed file - so far as I can discover - is not manufactured. ...What I demonstrated in the class was not left handed filing, it was just awkward right handed filing. There may be a work around using the tool as a draw file but, because I’m a bit ambidextrous, I’m not sure if I’m filing left handed or just kack handed. Between now and the next class I’ll try to sit down with a left hander and see if there is any way to do the job other than learning to file right handed. Either way, I’m going to have to rewrite part of the document which has been on-line these past five years.

Class number two, last Saturday, was well worth me getting up for. I ended up with at least four things that I had never given any thought to before. In this post I’ll deal with the easy one: In my story about the old geezers standing out in their front yards on warm weekend mornings with a squirter on the end of a hose ‘watering the law’. About them sending a fine spray into the air and me watching most of the moisture drift off in the breeze either to fall out in the road o...r to evaporate never to be seen again. As soon as I said that they wouldn’t live long enough to get the requisite one inch layer of water on the lawn, I realized that I really had no idea how long it would actually take. In the story I used the floor space in front of the tables in the classroom as the size of a small lawn, about 10' by 20'. 200sq.ft. one inch deep requires near enough 17 cubic feet of water. So, how long does it take to get that much water through the squirter? The picture shows how. 50' of " hose connected to the washing machine faucet and a bucket that just happened to be half a cubic foot in volume. It took a minute and five seconds to fill the bucket or two minutes and ten seconds to pass one cubic foot. Assuming all the water reached the ground, it would take a tad under forty minutes to water 200 square feet of lawn. Taking into account evaporation and drift, the vagaries of water pressure, hosepipe length and diameter, and faucet size, probably an hour to an-hour-and-a-half to do the job properly. Not a lifetime perhaps but totally impractical and actually damaging to the grass.

On Ants and Nuclear Power Stations When discussing the meaning of ‘natural’ in last Saturday’s class, I put forward the proposition that a nuclear power station is just as natural as an anthill. Ants take natural sand and natural spit and use them to modify the environment for the benefit of their species. Humans take natural sand and natural pebbles and natural limestone, to make concrete buildings; they take natural iron and natural carbon to make steel structures, and the...y take natural uranium to make fuel, all to further the cause of the human species. Anthill technology is just as cutting-edge to the ant species as nuclear power-station technology is to the human species. The difference, such as it might be, is one of degree, not one of kind. Both the anthill and the power station are made of natural stuff dug out of the ground and processed. If the power-station is deemed to be not natural, then it can only be because the humans who made it are not natural. And that poses the question: ‘When did humans cease to be natural creatures?’ A couple of points which I did not bring up in class are here taken from Wikipedia: A natural nuclear fission reactor is a uranium deposit where analysis of isotope ratios has shown that self-sustaining nuclear chain reactions have occurred. The existence of this phenomenon was discovered in 1972 at Oklo in Gabon, Africa, by French physicist Francis Perrin. The conditions under which a natural nuclear reactor could exist had been predicted in 1956 by Paul Kazuo Kuroda. The conditions found were very similar to what was predicted. Oklo is the only known location for this in the world and consists of 16 sites at which self-sustaining nuclear fission reactions took place approximately 1.7 billion years ago, and ran for a few hundred thousand years, averaging 100 kW of power output during that time. Additionally, Plasma physicist John Brandenburg has detected anomalies in gamma ray emissions from Mars in data from the NASA Mars Odyssey orbiter. This points to an abundance of radioactive uranium, thorium and potassium, especially in one particular spot on Mars that indicates that there was once a thick layer of radioactive substances, and the likelihood of a natural reactor. There is probably not a whole lot that humans do that nature hasn’t already done without out help. Like harnessing fire and water we’ve merely figured out ways to get the energy stored in atoms to do work for us. So what do anthills and power stations and the possibility of fission reactors on Mars have to do with gardening? The immediate object of the proposition was to show the importance of saying what you actually mean. Do not say unnatural if what you really mean is man-made. How an individual explores and resolves the deeper implications of the proposition, will influence how all sorts of decisions are made, both in and out of the garden.