The Life of Cabbage

Among the produce we have growing is red cabbage. Neither of us have grown cabbage before and knew nothing going in. We have had a warm spell here in California that had us concerned that the cabbage ( among others ) was bolting and wasn't going to properly grow and produce.
This prompted a Google search and a lot of learning about cabbage.

Stage 2 ( our current stage )

We looked at our plants and didn't see cabbage, we saw a weed like sprout in our beds. It will continue on like this, adding leaves and stems and leaves until stage 5 when it starts to look like it wants you to make soup out of it. 

Stage 5 a.k.a "pre-cupping"

By the end of stage 5 the base and the stems are completely concealed when viewing from above. 

When we hit stage 6 all we will be thinking about is corned beef recipes.

Stage 6 a.k.a. "cupping"

At stage six we will have between 20 and 25 leaves and the innermost "heart" leaves will be concealed by the larger older leaves. Then we leap forward to stage 9 ... Mature Cabbage !

Huzzah ! Let's throw them at lousy vaudeville comedians !

I am rather disappointed that not a single paper I read, website I looked at or stranger on the street could explain to me how it is that creepy dolls come from cabbage. 

How ?! Why?!

Getting Our Herbs and Flowers Started

It's a lovely day here in the East Bay. We hit around 70 degrees in the hills and with the sun beating down on us we were highly motivated to get some seeds going.

The focus was on herbs and flowers today. Somewhere between 150-200 of them as a matter of fact. We aren't growing 200 different herbs and flowers we are starting that many seeds in hope of a 50% success rate.

Our bag of boxes

You remember how to make seed start boxes right ? 

Fill 'em with dirt

Water & Wait 

* A couple notes that apply to our ever increasing effort to reuse as much as possible. 

The boxes are made from grocery bags and the plant identifiers are made from a cut up milk jug. 

Spring is coming

With spring just around the corner ( some of us closer to the corner than others ) some preparations need to be made. For us, the chief among them is getting our sees started. In a previous post we talked about the mini-greenhouses that we germinate in and briefly mentioned the origami boxes we make for each future plant to start in. Here is how to make those boxes.

We start by cutting up a paper bag into 7 x 7 inch squares ( giving us about 10 squares per bag ). 

Then the folding begins. 

Fold the square twice into a triangle.

Unfold your creased triangle

and turn the corners in.

Fold into thirds lengthwise

Crease and again unfold.

Fold in the corners

Fold up the two sides of the 1/3 fold and 

tuck in the ends.

Tuck in the other end.

There you go !

A 1 3/4 square box perfect for starting seeds indoor or outdoor.

The Littlest Greenhouse

I ( very conveniently ) work at a hardware store. This gives me easy access to recycled materials like pallets ( for making planter boxes etc. ) and also affords me the ability to make odd things out of odds and ends. Today I made tiny little greenhouses with +Brian Assef out of clear plastic buckets. It took us about 15 minutes to make two & now Brian and his girlfriend have somewhere to start seeds safe from their cats and frost.

This is the bucket with proposed venting holes marked.

 Brian drilling the holes.

Taking a break in a shopping cart.

The finished product.

As I said before, it only took about 15 minutes and was made entirely from recycled materials. Voila, the littlest greenhouse. 

*Update

Only 10 days after planting +Brian Assef is seeing results from his micro greenhouse.

We will be giving more updates later from Brian's really little & tiny farm. 

Until then here is a video of Brian working hard...

 

Starting Seeds

It can be a challenge getting seeds to start on any given day and even more of a challenge in the winter.

In our tiny little home we don't have the space to start seeds inside so creative solutions were needed.

Meghan re-purposed an old shower curtain and used some scrap wood leftover from a previous project and built this awesome mini greenhouse.

When we woke up this morning it was 38 degrees outside but it was nice and toasty in our seed started box. The greenhouse has even accelerated germination on some plants. Seeds that were supposed to take 2 weeks to pop out of the ground were peeking little leaves in just a week. It's amazing what you can do with what might otherwise be garbage.