It’s pretty usual advice to expect older seeds to not all germinate, so when planting older seeds.. most people plant more than they will need. Yet pretty much every seed Nikki planted – many of them old – decided to germinate, meaning she’s got way more plants than she needs.
And that means it’s probably time for her to think about selling or giving away some plants. And today she wants your feedback on how she should do it.
These informal, unscripted vlog-style videos are a chance for the team to share some of the fun things happening in their respective gardens – and are filmed without a teleprompter in a single take.
Read the full transcript here:
Hey everybody, happy Sunday. I hope that wherever you are and whatever you are doing, you are safe, you are well, and you are with people you care about who also care for you. Welcome to a Sunday chicken and garden update.
And I want to start by showing you that we’ve got more tubs. So we used to have two — now we have one, two, three, four tubs, and of course there’s one behind me, so we actually have five of these metal tubs. And the reason behind it — if you just walk up here with me by the sound of the bees…
I don’t know if you can hear that — you probably can’t — but there are bees up in my cherry trees pollinating, and all I can hear are bees. In fact, if we walk a little bit closer we might be able to actually see some of them — they’re very, very hard at work. Here we go. Okay, just look — so many bees just buzzing around. It’s like they’re all doing a little hum at the same time. It’s very, very nice.
Anyway, so we’ve had this space here which we have used in the past for parsnips — we had parsnips in it last year, the year before that we had potatoes. But look what happened a couple of weeks ago: we started to have volunteer potatoes pop up, and these volunteer potatoes are nice and healthy and strong, so I made the decision to just leave them as they are and not take them out.
And so I went to Lint and Feed and Seed, which is not far from me, and I purchased two more tubs. Originally I’d looked on a local OfferUp and there was someone selling one — I went and looked at it and they wanted a hundred bucks and it had holes in it, so I was like, I’ll just get new ones for $240 each. So I got those and I’ve put my potatoes in there, so we’re all good — it’s looking great.
But what a week it’s been in the garden! The garden is looking great, we’ve got some great growth happening, things are looking pretty amazing — there goes my neighbour — but one thing we have had this week is weird weather. So if you look here, I put some fresh soil down. We’ve got some of our miniature daffodils, we’ve got some of our tulips, I also put some poppy seeds in there. And you might note from that that I went and got some more soil — so last Friday I went and got some more soil from the place not too far from me that sells organic soil. It was $22 for a cubic yard that I put in that truck — I need to replace the lights on that though, not the truck, the trailer. I took the truck down there with the trailer and I put — sorry, 22 cubic yards? One cubic yard. I don’t know where I got 22 from. I need to fix that — it’s late in the day and I’m running apparently ten times the speed I need to.
Over here things are looking great at the front. I have a strawberry flower, which is kind of cool — so we’ve got some strawberries coming, we’ve also got some lovely growth here, and I put some sunflowers in here — whether they will do anything or not I don’t know. There’s also some sweet peas in there.
Also over here we have had some progress with the peas and also with the radishes and also with the onions. So let’s show you what that looks like — and if I’m walking a bit funny it’s because I worked out particularly hard this week and I have very sore thighs. So — to the onions, we’ve got our radishes, I need to put the carrots in this weekend. Effectively the carrots are like two weeks behind schedule — I was supposed to have put them in two weeks ago according to my own plans but I haven’t, because the weather has been terrible. We had a frost last night. So it is the 16th of April — we had a frost last night, we’ve got another frost tonight. And when I say we had a frost, I looked at my temperature monitor for the house and we dropped below freezing for approximately half an hour, and it was literally just below freezing — so I think the plants are going to be fine. But still a frost. And we had snow yesterday. It snowed here yesterday — it didn’t settle but it was coming down really hard for about an hour and a half.
Anyway, to the peas and the beans. You’ll note that we do have some growth happening here — we do have some beans and some peas coming up — but also folks are going in and helping themselves to stuff. So what I did — I think I shared this with you last week — I’ve gone and bought some more seeds. I had some peas and some beans and I decided to plant some new ones in tubs in my house, which is what I’ve done, and they’re already starting to germinate. So I’m going to keep them in the house and make sure that they stay a little bit protected from critters, and then I’ll put them outside.
Also check out my rhubarb — my rhubarb is looking amazing!
So into the greenhouse. And this is where the meat of the matter has happened — because there might be a chipmunk in here. I think I just heard a chipmunk exiting at high velocity. The chipmunks are coming in, and so far I haven’t caught them eating anything that they shouldn’t, so I think they just come in and chill out because it’s warmer in here than it is outside. And like I said, it’s very, very cold outside right now.
But I have a problem. Look — all of these are all of the cucumbers, and tomatoes, and tomatillos, and peppers, and brassicas over there, and celery, and more peppers, and more tomatoes. Basically, I have grown and germinated about 200 seeds. And I feel like I need to acknowledge why.
A lot of the seeds I put in this year were varieties that I had had sitting in my little packets for a while and I never thought they would germinate. So I was like, “Oh, okay, whatever — I’ll just put them in and see if they germinate.” And the advice I got from everyone in the gardening world was, “If they’re old seeds, they probably won’t germinate — so put extra seeds in and you’ll be fine.” Well.
So this is a lemon cucumber that is like four or five years old — the seeds — and it’s germinated. This is another cucumber variety called Çengelköy — I think it’s either Persian or Polish and I can’t remember which, so if you speak either of those languages, tell me. That’s like a seed with a little thing at the bottom — C-E-N-G-E-L-K-Ö — why is it one that I didn’t think would grow? It has grown. I have some Japanese — some Shintokiwa — I can’t remember the name of it, I wrote it down. Let me see if I can find one of them. I’m going to look for you… there you go — Shintokiwa — a cucumber over there. And again, it just germinated. All of the seeds just germinated.
Same with some of my peppers. Some of these peppers — this is a Japanese pepper seed from like five years ago, Omosako Kambe — and it is germinating. Cucumbers here, these are lemon cucumbers germinating. These peppers — the seeds are really old — germinating. So in past years I have struggled to get anything to germinate; this year everybody’s gone “yes, let’s germinate!” And that’s a problem because I don’t have space for 200 plants.
So I think what I’m going to have to do is build a little stall, put it outside my house — which might be a little risky — and then just put a sign up that says 25 cents a plant.
I’ve done some calculations. Oregon has some pretty strict rules about garden sales — you’re not allowed to sell more than $250 worth of plants in a single year for food. And so I need to make sure that all of these don’t total more than $250, plus any produce that we get later in the year doesn’t go over that amount either. And so I’m thinking about doing a quarter per plant, and just having an honesty box and putting up a sign that says, “Hey, these are — you can take them for free if you want, but I would really like you to pass it on. Make a donation of no more than a quarter per plant, or pass it on and post to a social media account” — which I’ll set up — “that says: this is what I’m doing, this is the good deed, this is the thing I’m passing on to someone else.”
So maybe if I give you a couple of free plants, maybe you spend half an hour helping your local community garden, or maybe you spend half an hour helping a neighbour do their shopping. And the idea is that right now literally nobody has money — I don’t have money, you don’t have money — and so stuff like this is really cheap for me to do. Yes, the plants cost me very little because the seeds are maybe three or four dollars a pack, and that’s probably like twenty to thirty dollars worth of seeds. The pots themselves — 200 pots for ten bucks. And then the labels are like five dollars for 200. Plus my time. Plus the soil. It’s really very low cost.
But me being able to say to someone, “Hey, here — this is a Telegraph cucumber, have a Telegraph cucumber, start it off, enjoy the plant, enjoy the stuff, tell me what you do with it” — or tell me what good you’re going to pass on — am I being stupid? Am I being too idealistic? I need your feedback.
But some of these plants are just too good to not share. So this is a San Marzano — it’s a tomato for sauce. This is Seattle’s Best of All — it’s a slicing tomato. This is a Brandywine tomato — which is a local heritage variety. We’ve got some more tomatoes that I haven’t even potted up yet. Let me know in the comments what you think I should do.
And it’s all organic — yes, I have used Sluggo, but Sluggo is an organic pest fighter. It’s basically iron phosphate and it breaks down into phosphate that the plants can use and iron that they don’t care about. So I’ve been doing that. I’ve also been using row cover cloth at night time, which I’m putting over the top of all of my plants to keep them warm — which, when the temperature has been dropping well below what it should for this time of year, has actually been really useful.
Additionally, in case some of you might not have noticed — these are my mini bell peppers that overwintered in the house. So I brought them outside to kind of make them a little bit more hardy, and they seem to be doing really, really great right now. It even looks like we might be getting some flowers coming on that one there. So I’m feeling positive.
Tell me what you think of my crazy idea in the comments below, and tell me what’s going on in your garden. And as always, thanks to the amazing list of people scrolling by on your screen on either side right now — they are the reason why — well, they’re one of the reasons why I do some of the things like this. Without you guys we wouldn’t exist as a channel. And while Transport Evolved right now doesn’t really pay me any money — and that may have to change this year if things go the way we think they’re going to go — the supporters allow me to pay everybody else, and to pay bills, and to keep people employed. And that’s a personal pride for me — knowing that for the last coming-up-on-ten years I’ve been able to pay other people to work on something that I felt passionately about. And not many people get to say that. And you’ve made that possible.
So thank you to the amazing list of people on either side as we go into another crazy week. How many weeks until the midterms? Please tell me it will be over soon.
Anyway, thank you for continuing to be the positive change that we need to see in the world. Make sure you tell the important people in your life that they’re important to you. And if you think you have a good idea for what I should do with all of that surplus plant stuff, let me know in the comments below — because I’m genuinely interested to learn. I’ll see you next week. Thanks for joining me — keep evolving!
Comments are closed.