Getting the hang of gardening

Posted on May 24th, 2010 by Sacha Chua

I’m starting to figure out what works for me in terms of gardening. I start seeds indoors on a seed tray, keeping them cat-proof by stashing them in an indoor greenhouse. I don’t get enough light indoors, so I move seedlings out to larger containers in a small outdoor greenhouse, or in the pots on the deck. As seedlings grow, I move them into the garden bed, where chickenwire keeps them safe from squirrels and birds.

How is this better than planting directly in the ground?

Because I start the seeds in sterile soil mix, I don’t have to figure out whether a seedling is one of my plants or a weed.
It’s easier to weed around larger transplants than in a seedling bed.
I make better use of the sunny garden areas because I don’t have to wait for seeds to start.
I can use a heating mat to germinate seeds that need warm temperatures (bitter melon, canteloupes).

Things that are doing well: cilantro, lettuce (many kinds), tomatoes, spinach

More posts about: gardening, kaizen // 2 Comments »

Short URL: http://sachachua.com/blog/p/7191

http://smartpeopleiknow.wordpress.com Bernie

My dad said that my grandfather used to rotate yellow beans in his very big garden. He said they returned nutrients to the soil (plus, you got nice beans!)

Where did you get the seed trays from
- http://sachachua.com Sacha Chua
  
  I started with the Jiffy seed starting trays, which were okay but a little shallow. I’m trying out Rootrainers now, which I got from Lee Valley Tools. But I think my best results have been from recycled yogurt containers and milk boxes…

On This Day...

2013: How to make a hand-drawn highlighted web page header — For the longest time, I’d been meaning to make my website look more hand-written and to take advantage of Google [...]
2012: Starting up my delegation experiments again: data entry from receipts — We decided to skip the community-based and culture program this season, and instead buy the vegetables ourselves. I wanted to [...]
2011: Experimenting with standing desks — (From May 12) People in IT tend to spend a lot of time sitting in front of a computer. Unfortunately, [...]
2009: More gardening — We spent most of this weekend thinking about and working on our garden. Laura’s going to think of what we [...]
2006: More thoughts about what I want to do with my life — Here’s a sketch of what I want to do: I want to help people connect with people through social software. That’s a [...]
2006: Hooray for people who know how to cook! — How to not burn pancakes, from Mom: use a teflon pan. heat pan. put very very little oil on the pan. [...]
2006: Team of Filipino Students Win MIT Entrepreneurship — From: “Santamaria, Samuel” SSantamaria AT aicpa.org Here’s another victory we can be proud of. Tell your friends about it. A team of [...]
2006: Blogly angst — Hands, a sketch by Dominique Cimafranca Sometimes life doesn’t work out the way we think it should, but then that could be [...]
2006: Microsoft Word in schools — Didith Rodrigo, the chair of my alma mater’s computer science department, seems to be getting a bit frustrated with people [...]
2006: More thoughts about social computing — Come to think of it, the hardest and most interesting part won’t be figuring out how the technology works. That [...]
2006: Web 2.0 and entrepreneurship — From the Kagay-anon Linux Users’ Group mailing list: sa mga hilig ug web/2 one page lang na guide; gamit kaayo.. http://www.vipedio.com/roman/blog/20culture_full.html sa mga hackers [...]
2006: Aha! — Thanks to a conversation earlier about web development and careers, I think I’ve figured out a little more about what I [...]
2006: Renaissance dance performance — Toronto Coranto – the renaissance dance group that I got drafted into - performed for a class on Love and the [...]
2006: Breakfast — When Steve called me up on my cellphone at around 8:00 and said only “Help!”, I panicked and nearly fell off [...]
2004: Acoustic cryptanalysis for possible cryptographic attacks — Acoustic cryptanalysis – http://www.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/~tromer/acoustic/ Link sent by Carlos Sia
2004: Research ideas — Blog visualizer It is useful to see how blog entries and other chronologically arranged items like e-mail cluster around certain topics over [...]
2004: Took the TOEFL — Am still somewhat annoyed that I got one of the listening questions wrong. Max score 297. We’ll see what my actual [...]

sacha chua living an awesome life