3/14/08
The first thing I did was check on the babies. The little brassica seeds I had planted last week showed some growth. Not just one or two...all of them! And as I had planted three seeds in each tiny cup, two of the babies will have to be removed so the strongest one can survive and grow big. I was just so happy that any of them grew at all, that the thought of thinning out the littles made me a bit weepy. (I'm not quite sure if that's due to motherhood, menopause, Portuguese family ethic, or if it's just me, but getting rid of those babies was hard to do.) Susan assured me that it is all for the best, and sometimes a gardener has to exercise Tough Love.
The task for the day was to Pot Up the tomato starts. This involves transplanting the new plants into a larger container. First, Sakina mixed up some new potting soil which was rich in food and had good pH. The main ingredient was Ocean Forest soil from Arcata which contains forest humus, sphagnum peat moss, fish meal and crab meal (for nitrogen), kelp meal from Norway and fossilized bat guano. Yum yum. To this mixture she added glacial rock dust which helps to remineralize the soil.
I grabbed a big bucket of the soil mixture and headed for the greenhouse repotting table. The repotting technique is similar to that which I employed in Week 2 for the herbs, but the new tomato starts are smaller and more delicate, so much care needs to be taken in removing them from the 1.5x1.5" seed starter trays and placing them into the new 3x4" containers. The process involves putting some of the soil in the bottom of the new container, gently removing the tomato start from its home (I used a little spoon to help lift it out), and then centering it in the new pot, filling in around the sides with the potting mixture. Sakina told me that tomatoes don't mind if you bury them a little deep so that just a little of the stems and all the leaves are showing above the soil. Most of these little babies had long necks, so I covered them up warmly with the new soil, pressed down gently so they would be nice and snug, then gave them a good drink of water. Each container needed to be labeled for the Earth Day sale coming up in April, and Crystal spent a good deal of her time writing up the labels for these starts. Thanks Crystal!
This may seem like a very simple and fast process, but I really took care in making sure that the plants were happy in their new homes. In two hours time, I repotted 60 tomato plants, so that's about one plant every two minutes. With apologies to J. K. Rowling, I fancied myself today as a "potty wee potter." Here is a link to a slideshow of the day's work.
http://home-and-garden.webshots.com/slideshow/562799249JVNrcJ
Our SL journal lead question this week was whether or not the exercises with Doug Mosel (the speaker from our last face-to-face meeting) gave any insights or tools that could be put into practice with the service placements. I gave this some thought while I was potting up, and I realized that Doug's exercises and Joanna Macy's philosophies provide many insights and tools for me to use, not just at the Noyo Food Forest, but in everyday life. The listening technique is especially helpful to me for when I interact with others. I do hope The Great Turning that Macy envisions will occur one day, and soon. I believe it is essential for us to shift from an industrial growth society to a life-sustaining civilization. The more people who realize this and begin to make the shift, the faster the Great Turning will occur.
The task for the day was to Pot Up the tomato starts. This involves transplanting the new plants into a larger container. First, Sakina mixed up some new potting soil which was rich in food and had good pH. The main ingredient was Ocean Forest soil from Arcata which contains forest humus, sphagnum peat moss, fish meal and crab meal (for nitrogen), kelp meal from Norway and fossilized bat guano. Yum yum. To this mixture she added glacial rock dust which helps to remineralize the soil.
I grabbed a big bucket of the soil mixture and headed for the greenhouse repotting table. The repotting technique is similar to that which I employed in Week 2 for the herbs, but the new tomato starts are smaller and more delicate, so much care needs to be taken in removing them from the 1.5x1.5" seed starter trays and placing them into the new 3x4" containers. The process involves putting some of the soil in the bottom of the new container, gently removing the tomato start from its home (I used a little spoon to help lift it out), and then centering it in the new pot, filling in around the sides with the potting mixture. Sakina told me that tomatoes don't mind if you bury them a little deep so that just a little of the stems and all the leaves are showing above the soil. Most of these little babies had long necks, so I covered them up warmly with the new soil, pressed down gently so they would be nice and snug, then gave them a good drink of water. Each container needed to be labeled for the Earth Day sale coming up in April, and Crystal spent a good deal of her time writing up the labels for these starts. Thanks Crystal!
This may seem like a very simple and fast process, but I really took care in making sure that the plants were happy in their new homes. In two hours time, I repotted 60 tomato plants, so that's about one plant every two minutes. With apologies to J. K. Rowling, I fancied myself today as a "potty wee potter." Here is a link to a slideshow of the day's work.
http://home-and-garden.webshots.com/slideshow/562799249JVNrcJ
Our SL journal lead question this week was whether or not the exercises with Doug Mosel (the speaker from our last face-to-face meeting) gave any insights or tools that could be put into practice with the service placements. I gave this some thought while I was potting up, and I realized that Doug's exercises and Joanna Macy's philosophies provide many insights and tools for me to use, not just at the Noyo Food Forest, but in everyday life. The listening technique is especially helpful to me for when I interact with others. I do hope The Great Turning that Macy envisions will occur one day, and soon. I believe it is essential for us to shift from an industrial growth society to a life-sustaining civilization. The more people who realize this and begin to make the shift, the faster the Great Turning will occur.
The recent Quiz 6 on world religions made me think a great deal about how cultures of the world view nature. It seems to me that another Great Turning happened centuries ago when so-called Western Religions came into being. With Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, we see a shift from religious beliefs that view humans as part of an interconnected cosmic body, to the belief that God made nature to provide for the needs of humans. If we look at the more ancient religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and the aboriginal (or native) religions, we see that humans do not hold themselves above nature and that there is a feeling of connection to the earth and all other living things. Only in these latest three religions is there a disconnect happening, a feeling that it is okay to use (read: exploit) nature for selfish purposes, without much thought regarding the ethical and cultural implications of such use. In my mind, this was one Great Turning of thought that needs to be Turned Back, so humans again realize that we must reconnect with nature, or risk becoming forever disconnected as we skip down the merry path to extinction.
Shifting gears to a lighter subject, Hey! A few of my little red-leaf lettuce plants I put in the hoop house bed during Week 4 are growing up! Want to see?
Week 4
Week 5
Week 7
Since we are looking at growth in the hothouse, here's my video tour of it. The shaky handheld video quality is only slightly more nauseating than the Blair Witch Project, so I hope you will bear with me.
That's it until next week!
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