I’m going to try starting tomatoes and peppers inside this year for the first time. Previously we’ve always bought started plants. I have started cukes and squash inside before, but those don’t take as long from starting to transplanting.
Regardless, I’ve just used soil from our pony pasture. It’s worked for the others. I’ll see if it works for tomatoes and peppers. It won’t help you other than knowing it’s super fertilized, because I pick the area where the ponies put their droppings - though it’s worked into the soil around it - not fresh droppings.
I used to use the starting soil from Home Depot or Lowes, but lately I just use peat moss, much easier for me is throwing the seeds in the ground, but then I won’t know whether the seeds came from my own compost or from the seeds I’ve sown. I’ve never labeled anything.
Lately I have used miracle grow potting mix for many of those tasks. Peat moss is good for starting seeds as well but once they’re up and growing bigger they should have more nutrients.
Thanks. I dug a little further and learned that Miracle Grow products claim to be safe for all edibles (fruit, veggies). That makes me lean that direction. The flower-centric packaging had on their potting mix had me wondering.
Miracle Gro potting.mix should work well in any containers. It’s certainly safe for fruits and vegetables.
If you are doing larger beds I would personally make my own mix, which I do. For garden beds I usually use a mixture of ordinary soil, peat moss, compost and manure. Organic matter is your friend in the garden.
Have any of you heard of a company called Sub Pod? I bought one of their mini sub pods to try. It’s an in ground worm bin for worm composting. And it’s been FABULOUS! I also have an in ground worm bin that I made out of a 5-gallon Home Depot bucket (with a pot saucer I put over the top for a lid). Put in your kitchen non-meat scraps and other compost stuff and the worms do the rest. I have it in my raised vegetable bed. So far, the sunflowers closest to the worm bins are performing better than the other ones.
Worm castings are a fabulous fertilizer. They are like black.gold in the garden. It’s crazy the price people can sell the castings for. I checked out that system and it looks effective for composting with worms. I imagine it’s really efficient when you follow their instructions. It certainly looks aesthetically pleasing also. As you say you can also use other products (a bucket) and get similar results. The worms will really populate almost any properly formed compost operation. They are powerful little creatures. It’s nice to have a ready supply of fishing bait too.
I have 4 64-gallon of worm bins, that’s where all my vegetable waste go into. They produce black gold. It’s also how I recycle my clay. I mix them in the worm bin.
A couple in our neighborhood have some kind of worm compost going and seem to like it. But I don’t know the details.
This week I attended a composting zoom class run by a local nonprofit. For us, I think it will be too much work. (And a bit of risk. I was worried about bugs etc, but one participant volunteered that her attempted composting resulted in “rats around the whole neighborhood, BIG rats”. If I ever try, it will be enclosed/covered.) It was still interesting to listen to the speaker, with side discussions on mulch, water, seedlings, etc. Our city is doing curbside composting, including leaves and limbs etc… trying to talk hubby into that change.
It’s definitely been trial and error on my part to figure out what works best in our yard. I used to put food scraps in the regular compost bin, but Mighty Mouse showed up so now I leave food scraps out of that compost bin (which is rodent-accessible) and he sought out greener pastures elsewhere.
The Sub Pod Mini which I have is entirely rodent proof. It has latches on it and the holes are worm-sized, not Mighty Mouse-sized like the regular compost bin. Even my DIY Home Depot bucket in-ground worm bin has holes which are only worm-sized…and with a pot saucer as a lid over the top of it, the lid is heavy enough that a rodent wouldn’t be able to move it.
Neither the regular compost bin or the worm bins will smell if you have the ratio of greens & browns & paper right. For example, in the worm bins, about once a week, I throw in the kitchen scraps and then cover with a small layer of shredded junk mail, then spray it all down with water. The worms do the rest. If it starts to smell at all, add more browns or paper and turn the mixture to aerate it.
There’s a worm farm about 40 min from our house and I regularly go to buy 5-gallon bags of worm castings from them ($30 a pop…totally worth it!). Holy cow, that stuff is great!
Our kitchen scraps go to our chickens who turn them into eggs for us. Our chicken waste goes to our garden. Bones that the chickens won’t eat I toss into the woods far away from any house or road for the “wild things” that are out there. They disappear.
Paper products get composted, but in a hole in the ground so they just decompose over time. We don’t actually use that on our garden. I’m not sure everything in them (colors, glue, whatever) is suitable for what I want to eat.
We did worms when the kids were younger, but then found it was far easier to use chickens. Of course, it helps to have a place for chickens. Without them, I’d go back to worms.
My youngest and his wife are now quite a bit off grid in Puerto Rico. They use solar for all electrical needs and most cooking and just bought a bio-digester to get gas for cooking. That’s too new to know how well it will work for them.
We’re not off grid, but I’m starting to contemplate adding solar to our house. In PA it’s worked fine for our electric horse fence. I’m unsure what the return will be for our house, but I see them appearing in more and more places so it can’t be too bad.
Switching back to gardening, those of you who start tomatoes and peppers from seed, how long before you transplant them outside? I need to start counting backward to see when “plant” day is.
Depending how big your seed starter containers are I’d move them from tiny seed sprouter container to a 4 inch pot and then from there to in the ground - but as most plants, not until danger of frost has past. I’d also harden them when it gets close to moving inside to permanently out - set them outside for some daylight hours but back in in the evening for a few days.
This is exactly what I do. I start my plants in April in clear plastic egg cartons and then transfer the healthiest looking seedlings into 4 inch or larger pots.
