In honor of Earth Day, I thought I'd do a quick post on our gardening activities so far this spring. (If you want ideas on how you can celebrate Earth Day, check out this booklist I made for work.) While we're not currently in a position to grow a large garden, we did manage to do pretty well even with a 4 foot by 8 foot raised bed last summer (plus some pots and planters).
Growing your own food--even a little--is much more sustainable than buying it from the store: you save on emissions by not driving to the store (think how much less often you could shop if you didn't need a regular supply of fresh produce), and you save on packaging by harvesting directly instead of buying vegetables in the plastic they usually come in. Plus, you're creating a more nourishing environment for insects, birds, and those pesky squirrels. (I recommend dousing your garden soil liberally in cayenne pepper on the regular to deter squirrels. It doesn't hurt them; they just don't like it. Neither will you, if you touch it directly, so be careful when harvesting if you try this technique!)
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| Our raised bed near its peak last summer. |
As you can see, even in a pretty small space, it's possible to grow a good deal of food and flowers. The golden cherry tomatoes and lettuce were probably our most successful crops, along with broccoli and Brussels sprouts--all of which we bought as transplants, involving plastic containers that are flimsy and not recyclable...
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| Last summer's herb box. Herbs are much harder, in general, to propagate from seed, so we may end up buying them as transplants in the future, too... but at least the companion flowers (to attract pollinators) might be possible to grow from seed. I haven't had much luck with that in the past, but then I haven't tried super hard, either... |
This year, we want to do a little better by starting more plants from seed--still some waste, as the seed packets have to be purchased and may not be recyclable--and in the future, we'd like to get to the point where we can save our own seeds from our crops. This would be the most sustainable option. In the meantime, we do have plenty of seed packets and plenty of plastic egg cartons to use as seed starting compartments. Our favorite cage-free, certified humane brand claims they'll be switching to more sustainable (easier to recycle) cardboard packaging soon, which would also work for seed starts and maybe even be better, as cardboard will decompose pretty quickly in soil, allowing us to potentially plant the entire carton directly into the ground when ready to transplant, which would disturb roots less than popping transplants out of plastic egg cartons, which will obviously not decompose basically ever, though they can be reused from year to year.
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| Our current seed starting setup. |
I guess the upshot to using the plastic cartons for seed starts is that the plastic acts as a mini-greenhouse, helping keep heat and moisture in with the seeds. There aren't a lot of areas in our apartment that get sustained direct sunshine, which isn't a problem at this stage--the seeds need to be kept warm at this point, but light doesn't matter--thus the setup here: it's over the baseboard heat, and you can also see our little heat fan, which we run for a few minutes in the morning and sometimes at other times of the day to give them a boost. We water with the spray bottle, from a bit above. If we spray directly, the soil goes flying!
Two days after starting the seeds, we already noticed that our arugula seeds were sprouting! This is far faster than we imagined, and it's probably due to luck more than our particular skills. Nothing else is sprouting yet, but that's to be expected: most of the seeds would normally take closer to two weeks to germinate. We're excited to see how our seed starts fare and to continue nurturing them so, hopefully, they will grow into plants that can nourish us this summer.
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| Arugula sprouts! |
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