Two Ingenious HACKS to protect your Seedlings (and Green Leafy Vegetables)

There are 2 ways to grow Garden Vegetables and Flowers. You either start them from seeds or from baby plants, called seedlings. Whichever method you choose, it is such a rewarding and inspiring experience to watch your plants growing and thriving.

However, both seeds and seedlings are still delicate and are in a way, very vulnerable.

Growing from Seeds (Fava Bean)

 A Seedling (Fava Bean)

Today, I want to share you 2 Ingenious HACKS to protect your Seedlings.

1. Protect them from Fungus
One moment, your baby plants and sprouts emerging from the ground are there. Next moment... POOF!!! They disappear. You begin to wonder. You begin to doubt. What exactly ate or nibbled or tore off your seedlings? In most of the cases, it's not a bird, or insect, or nocturnal mammals. It's a fungus. The gardening community calls it "damping off." The easiest way to put it is that the high amount of moisture on the seedlings created an environment for mold to grow.

A common Homesteading trick to combat this is to generously sprinkle cinnamon powder on the seeds or seedlings. This trick has helped me and I hope it helps you too.

2. Protect them from Slugs and Grubs.
For 2 years in a row, whenever I try to grow Bok Choy, I can't get them to grow more than an inch. They almost, always disappear, bit by bit. I suspected birds pecking them off and tried to get bird netting. The result was the same.
This year, I tried something new. I call it "Slug Check. Grub Check." Slugs love moist environments. So if you water your plants and there are water leftovers, they tend to pop out of nowhere. Slugs usually feed during the night. Some gardeners suggest to visit your plants during the evenings and catch the slugs. Unchecked, slugs can easily wipe out your seedlings. Especially the green, leafy parts.

Seedling Leaves eaten by Slugs (Fava Beans)

This year, whenever I water my seedlings, I incorporated a new task: "Slug Check. Grub Check." I would lift the pots and see what's on the ground and what's under the pots. The following is an exercise for you to find what kind of creatures were below my containers and on the ground. EXERCISE 1: Slug Check.  Click on the image and find the slugs. All these are my actual photos since Spring. Hint: Some of them have 2 in one photo.

Slug 1

Slug 2

Slug 3

Slug 4

As I practicing my Slug Check, I soon started to notice other creatures on the bottom of the pots. They looked like caterpillars of some sort. Then I remembered when I first began gardening, I lost about 8 medium pots of Radishes by green caterpillars. They ate all the huge leafy green parts of my  medium sized Radishes. If I was not able to catch these, I would surely have lost all my Fava Bean seedlings and Bok Choy seedlings.
EXERCISE 2: Grub CHECK. Click on the images and see if you can find the grubs. Hint: Some of them have 2 in one photo.

Grub 1

Grub 2

Grub 3

What should I do with the Slugs and Grubs?
That's up to you. Most gardening books, I've read says to kill them. I couldn't get myself to kill them. What I do personally with the slugs, is that I pick them up from the side of a flat stick, or with my fingertips, then I throw them on my compost pile. To me, this serves 2 purposes. I gave them a 2nd chance, instead of killing them. On a more practical reason, I believe that they are like scavengers, so I just get them to help break down all the unbroken matters on the compost pile. I do the same with rollie pollies and the grubs.

If you have any other tricks you want to share, please comment below. Here is a photo of the Fava Bean that made it and didn't get eaten up. She doesn't look too healthy yet, but she made it.

Fava Bean Survivor

Growing Veggies from Seedlings VS from Seeds

There are various ways to grow your own Vegetable Plants.

 The easiest way is to start with Seedlings.

This means baby plants. They have already been sprouted from being a seed and grown for a couple of weeks to a few months. The economical advantage of buying veggies as seedlings is that they are cheaper than buying mature ones from the grocery. The biggest advantage though, is that they are perfect for beginners. Growing veggies from seeds on the other hand, requires more time, trial and error, and there are more possible initial setbacks to deal with.

If you want to take it a step further, wouldn't it be more interesting to learn how to grow plants from a Seed? This is the more powerful way.

There are some advantages of growing from seeds.

1. The cost of buying seeds is cheaper than buying seedlings. You can buy a pack of organic or non-gmo seeds for 99 cents to $3 and that would probably contain an average of a 100 seeds.
2. You are in more control of the optimal growing conditions because you can see what works and what doesn't based on which seeds make it and which ones don't.
3. You can store the seeds for long term while you can't store seedlings.
4. Growing veggies from seeds is the Ultimate Skill for becoming a Resilient Prepper.
5. When you grow your veggies from seed, you create a special bond with the plants. It is not only fulfilling to see them grow like your own pet or babies, you will be more motivated and inspired to care for them consistently.
    

 You can buy seeds and seedlings from Garden Shops, Hardware Shops, and Online. I like shopping at Home Depot, not only are the prices fair, but they seem to rotate a special sale every time I visit.

 Whichever method you choose to start from, I highly encourage you and support you in this process to learn to grow your own food. It's a Cool Homesteading Skill to acquire. In particular, consider starting with Tomatoes, Swiss Chard, Lettuce, or Potatoes as they are easier to work with.

On a future article, I will publish Growing Veggies from Seeds using Soil Cube Makers

Mason Bee House for Solitary Pollinators

Have you ever heard of Solitary Bees?

They are the most awesome pollinators that I've heard of. The Honey Bees we commonly hear of work as one big family and they have a hive that they share. They also produce honey. The Honey Bees have been in the news lately because of the Colony Collapse Disorder. From what I gather, one of the bees would return to the hive carrying a dangerous strain of bacteria which would then affect and destroy the whole colony. So the bottom line is that the bees could use all the help they can get for their survival. As many of you know, it's a symbiotic relationship between bees and us, because we rely on the bees to pollinate our orchards and vegetables.

There's a whole different type of bees called the Solitary Bees. To me, they look smaller than Honey Bees and sometimes get mistaken as flies. The photos below are called Solitary Bees that I came across a field of flowers in beautiful New Mexico.

Note that these photos have been magnified as dandelion flowers are small.
Solitary Bees have the following characteristics:
1) Instead of a hive, they create their own small nests and lay their eggs in it.
2) They don't produce honey.
3) They are more efficient than honey bees in pollinating flowers.
4) They are known to be gentle and don't sting too much.

We have partnered with Crown Bees who gave us a discount to try out their Mason Bee House. I just received the shipments today and look forward to seeing if my neighborhood would attract some of the bees. I will keep you posted. In the meantime, here are some photos of the package I purchased.

This is called the Chalet House. It's a Medium Sized House.

This is the Bee Cocoon Container called Humidibee and the Mud Box.

These are the Bee attractant, mud, and manual.

On the Right is a Pollination Pack, the Top Left is a Tray for Leafcutter Bees, and the Bottom Left is a Tray for Mason Bees.

The sellers actually suggested me to buy the Bee Cocoons. They encouraged me to do so because it would be a way of introducing the bees to the neighborhood. I declined because I wanted to see first if there are such bees in our vicinity. They also encouraged me to have a lot of flowers first. I don't have a lot of flowers yet in my backyard but my neighbors do. Because of these 2 suggestions that I am passing up on, if the bees don't use the nest, it would be entirely of my own choice and lack of preparation. But I still insisted on this setup because I truly want to see what my neighborhood has and which bees are already here. Plus I didn't want to buy a lot of bee cocoons not being sure if we had enough sources of food for them. When the bees do arrive, it would totally be worth it for me and for my neighborhood!

Stay tuned for more follow up!

Harvesting your Produce without Canning

Most Home Vegetable Gardeners either consume or store their produce.

For Resiliency, it's a good idea to store your food for the long term. But most of us don't know how to can food or don't have the proper equipment for canning. In such a case, why not freeze your food?

These photos are produce that I harvested from my 2015 veggies. They are Swiss Chard leaves that bolted but still had some edible leaves and flowers. By storing them in freezer safe zip lock bags, they are more manageable and can easily be stored. Once in the freezer, I can thaw them out when I'm ready to enjoy them. No need to can or freeze dry.