Confounding the Peas

Not the peas we had in mind!

A major issue in observation studies is that we often don’t always know what the potential confounding factors may be. In the soil fertility experiment we started a few weeks ago the confounders have overcome the experiment to the point that it was almost impossible to tell what was happening.

First, the planter was visited by our resident rodents, the hopping mice that peek out at us from the bushes and love to steal tasty treats. They dug out many of the seeds and presumably ate them.

Next, maybe due to the delicious rodent perfume worn by our mice, a cat visited the planter and dug through one side of the box creating a large mound containing who-knows-what sort of catly gifts. And that was before the huge storm that blew everything around and even washed some of the soil right out of the planter and onto the plastic around it.

Who's That Growing in Our Bed?

In spite of all of this, a few things did actually sprout. If you look carefully at the East side of the soil test bed, the “Tomato Soil” side, you can see how we counted twelve sprouts the last time we recorded data from this experiment. But 12 sprouts of what, exactly?

At least three of the sprouts were squat, strong-looking stems with rounded leaves on them. The rest were spindly stems with elongated, pointed leaves on them. Only the first three were a match to the pea patches growing in two nearby planters.

Pea Patch Volunteers

So, since this a really great experiment concept, and we already have the nicely amended (thanks for all your help, Cat!) soil on one side and the do-nothing-to-it “Tomato Soil” on the other side, we decided to replant this experiment to see if we can get a less confounded idea of what happens.

The bed was smoothed on the West side, and the cat pile was carefully removed. The bed was then replanted with 1 oz. of ‘Alaska’ (Earliest of All) peas, also known as Pisum sativum var sativum, packed for 2009. These were planted equally on the two sides but we decided to allow the existing pea sprouts to stay. They were marked so we can take them out of the data if we choose to.

 

Burlap Fail

Then the bed was carefully covered with burlap and cages to discourage visitors. Unfortunately, this morning there seem to be a whole lot of holes in the burlap that weren’t there when we put it on! Kids weren’t the only ones out trick-or-treating last night. We’ve been raided by varmints! (I”m sorry about all those things I said, Cat. Please come back to the garden. We need you! We’ll plant more catnip, I promise!)

It looks like at least a dozen holes were dug into the planting area last night. There’s no way to tell if the mice are eating the new seeds or the old seeds that might be still left in the soil. But there are certainly some of the seeds still undisturbed in the planting area.

 

Pea Prison

In order to try to salvage this experiment we grabbed a few things we had around the garden and built a mesh wire cage over the planter like the one we use for the carrots’ Fort Knox. Hopefully this will give the peas a chance to sprout and grow through the tender and delicious stage. We noted that the peas that we started weeks ago who were sitting nearby in their nursery packs waiting to be planted are undisturbed.

We didn’t have a large enough piece of hardware cloth to cover the entire bed so we covered an equal amount of each side and will leave the area with the most rodent damage exposed for now. Maybe that will help keep the mice from breaking into the seeds we are trying to save and then we can plant it with another crop in a week or two when we see how things germinate.

 

 

Dispersing Seeds

Ready to Thresh

This week during Open Garden, we collected the bean seeds that have been drying on the plants for several weeks and examined the soy bean seeds that had been left to undergo their natural dispersal process. At the final stage of drying the bean pods will twist until they burst, allowing the beans inside to pop out of the shells and spread out in the surrounding around.

Ready to Store

The trick to collecting your soup beans is getting to them just before they hit this stage. You want the pods to be dry and brittle, but not at the point of starting to twist. I usually have to find one that has already twisted and flung out its seeds before I realize it’s time to pick the rest of them. Once the dried seed pods are collected, you can put them into a paperbag and shake the closed bag to break open the pods and free the beans. Then lift out the dried shells to toss into the compost bin and what’s left in the bag is your beans.

Ready for Soup

Just to be sure that they are really dry, I sometimes add a commercial desiccant packet to the bottom of the container I keep them in, but a little dried milk in a folded piece of paper towel will also do the trick.

To use the beans, I soak them overnight with a good size piece of kombu (seaweed) to make them easier to digest. Then I throw out that soaking water but save the kombu to cook with the beans. In the Spring I definitely plan to try more varieties of drying beans for soup all Winter long.

October 10th, 2009 by Sidney, Kimberly and Marilee

Opening Circle: Mackenzie shared a beautiful, new song with African lyrics. The English lyrics are as follows:

Welcome to my village
You are part of my village
We are all one village

Today we passed an invisible “talking stick” and shared the name of our favorite veggies. We also shared the progress of our seed jars. Most of the seeds had quickly germinated and in some cases had multiple leaves, or the seeds remained dormant with mold growing on the moist paper towel.

We discussed that the newly emerging plants were initially feeding on the nutrients within the seed and then each new plant grew toward the sunlight. Sidney shared a seed dispersal experience describing how a neighbor’s dog collected and distributed seeds which had caught onto his fur.

Mackenzie introduced our special guest today, Suzanne Mills, her mother from San Diego. Suzanne was busy helping everyone today with the experiments, cooking, clean up and sharing stories about growing up with Mackenzie. Thank you Suzanne!

Garden Chores:

The front yard was cleaned up with old growth tomato plants taken away to the compost pile.

Tomato Plants Become Compost

Science Project:

We talked about the 3 elements; sunlight, water and soil and how they relate to plants.

There were 3 experiments. Mackenzie prompted the investigation with a question about one of the elements and then we created our scientific guess, sometimes referred to as a hypothesis.

Q#1 What happens to roots with various amounts of water?

Hypothesis: Plants need water

Method: 5 cups of soil were given varying amount of water and ability to drain water.

C1 – no water

C2 Water once with cup drainage holes

C3 Water once with no drainage holes

C4 Water several times with cup drainage holes

C5 Water several times with no drainage holes

Q#2 What does soil do for plants?

H: Quality soil gives us bigger leaves

M: 3 pea seeds using 3 methods were planted in the garden

P1 Peas with water and sun

P2 Peas with poor soil with water

P3 Peas with good soil, sun and water

Q#3 How does light affect plantʼs growth?

H: Plants donʼt need light but they grow better with light

M: Put 3 cups filled with seeds and soil into 3 areas of varying light

C1 Inside without light (closet)

C2 Create a collar of foil around the cup to maximize light capture

C3 Put cup outside with no foil collar

How Does the Garden Feel?

Senses in the Garden:

Everyone had fun searching the garden and acting like a detective finding 18 different

textures, smell, sounds, colors, tastes. The “brightness” of each individual piece was

enjoyed.

Cooking Project:

Cooking 3 different dishes using Polenta; Polenta crust pizza, soft polenta with olive oil, soft polenta with tomatoes, olive oil and mozzarella cheese, and apple upside down cake.

Polenta is a dish made from boiled cornmeal. When boiled, polenta has a smooth, creamy texture due to the gelatinization of starch in the grain.

Let's Eat!

We watched Talia finish up cooking a pot of soft polenta. After adding the polenta to boiling water she stirred the mixture for over an hour. Her patience paid off as the batch passed the thickening test with her mixing spoon standing straight up from the mixture.

Owen, Kevin, Kimberly and others sliced and diced tomatoes, mozzarella, and basil to decorate the top of the polenta crust.

Everything was delicious.

First Journalist Report

Saturday in the Garden
by Talya Klinger

Saturday, September 26, was a big day for Dirt to Dinner and for a particular Green June Beetle (Cotinis Nitida), who was the day’s initially Unidentifiable Bug Talking Object.

The pea seed carrier competition was on. Everyone worked hard to make seed carriers that could float on water for 5 minutes, move 2 feet horizontally on their own, and fly from the top of the play structure.  A popular creation idea for floating seeds was to press peas into Styrofoam balls, and then release them into the competition buckets.  Movement and flight were typically accomplished simultaneously with one creation serving two purposes. Many participants’ creations were balloons filled with air , but left untied, so the seeds could easily release. To disperse the peas, people let their creations fly from the top of the play structure.  Others let their balloons explode, enabling their seeds to disperse with a blast.

In the kitchen, kids were making seedy granola.  Nuts, seeds, dried fruit (but not raisins fortunately enough!), and maple syrup were combined and baked. As a result, many of us are enjoying delicious homemade granola for breakfast and snacks this week.

Juli was also cooking up a storm, along with some other parents. Lunch was a spicy pasta with veggies in it and cheese  on top. Tomatoes and peppers had to be harvested to make the sauce. Fortunately, we had learned a whole lot about pepper seeds earlier in the morning, thanks to S. Almost as soon as she arrived, she began  counting pepper seeds. She estimated that the pepper plant in the backyard has 852 seeds on it, using the seeds of one pepper and some multiplication. However many seeds it has, it sure made for a delicious lunch!

Pasta wasn’t the only grain product to rule the day. Actually, the official grain of the day was amaranth, a grain domesticated in Central America. The Aztecs called it Huautli. Mackenzie boiled some up, giving us honey to drizzle over it.

And if you think the day was just about seeds and grains, then you didn’t notice the dead tomato plant removal going on at the back of the garden just after lunch. Because of a lot of cutting, pulling, and hauling, the big pink wheelbarrow was filled with the stalks of summer’s tomato crop. The bed is now ready for winter’s spinach. If anybody has any spinach salad recipes, we should be ready to sample them in a couple of months.

Our first Dirt to Dinner of Fall 2009 was the perfect recipe of sunshine, friends, songs, bugs, dirt, worms, seeds, plants, and food!

Peas and Potatoes

Potatoes Looking Done

Last weekend at our Open House the kids harvested the last of the All Blue potatoes. The plants were looking pretty sad by the time we got to them. Which is fine. That’s what potato plants do. When the vines die down then you have an easy way to tell that they aren’t doing anything more to grow the potatoes and you can take them out of the ground now. The ones I hadn’t already stolen ‘new’ for potato salads, that is.

This week during our Open Garden time, we pulled the spent vines and tossed them into the compost. Then we added a layer of finished compost and the worm castings we saved when we added a new level to the worm farm and mixed those in well with the existing soil.

Split Bamboo to Keep the Dew and Mold Off the Plants

Peas like to have something to climb on, even if they aren’t the pole varieties that grow very tall. On one side we put in Cascadia Snap peas and the seed packet says they climb to 32″. Our poles extend well beyond that, but we figured there was no harm and that way the poles stay a good size to use with our determinant tomato plants in the Spring.

The other side of the bin holds Oregon Sugar Pod Snow Peas, the ones that you pick and eat flat. We are only expecting those vines to grow to 28″ or so, but it still helps to keep pea vines off the ground when you are growing them in the Fall. We don’t know if the weather will be wet or the slugs will be hungry so climbing gives the vines a little bit of an edge against both bugs and disease. Peas also don’t like to be touched and having them staked will make it easier for us to harvest the peas without messing too much with the sensitive vines or possibly spreading disease from one plant to another.

Spacing Out the Pea Seeds

The Cascadia peas are planted ~1″ to 1 1/2″ apart and the Oregon Sugar Pod packet insists that they need 2″. The packet actually says “Seed Spacing: 2″ (Yes. 2″)” which made me feel like they knew me and maybe had seen how closely we had packed in the peas last year during the Winter Pea Trial. I think for one of those varieites we calculated almost 100 peas planted in a single square foot. We gave the Oregon Sugar Pods each their 2″. If they don’t all sprout we can always fill in next week when we see what we’ve got coming up.

The middle section of the bed on the Oregon Sugar Pod side we planted some Golden Beets. Next week during Open Garden we can keep filling in the bed. It might be nice to try some greens along the front of the bed where they will get a bit of shade and we have a seed donation package coming from Territorial Seed Company that might have some interesting things in it we’ll want to add. We also still have kale, broccoli, spinach, cauliflower and celery plants we have started that are all getting ready to look for more permanent homes. There’s always plenty to do in the Dirt to Dinner garden!

New Level of Vermiculture

Worm Relocation

Worms have to eat too. As we discovered in Open Garden Thursday at Dirt to Dinner, it’s not hard to make a new lunch level for the worms to call home. First we removed the amazing compost the worms had finished with in the bottom layer of their home. (We saved that for our next project in the garden.) And we carefully placed all the worms that we could into the working bins of the worm house. It’s OK if some of the worms end up in the garden–they’ll survive–but we want to keep as many worms working in the bin as we can.

Worm Lunch

Then we took a collection of kitchen scraps that included several melons we had tried earlier in the day and other bits we knew the worms would enjoy.

Worms Can Work with Small Bits of Food Faster

And we chopped the large pieces into more manageable bits to make them easier for the worms to use.

Mix Well with Damp Browns

Next we added some “browns” to the compost we had chopped. Worms need a good mix of food scraps and other “greens” and paper towels, napkins, egg cartons and other “browns” just like you would mix in a regular compost heap. Moisten the browns so they don’t drawn moisture out of the foods and cause the layer to be too dry for the worms to move around comfortably.

From Bottom to Top

Next we lay the newly empty layer on the top of the vermiculture stack and empty the compost bucket into it. The worms will work their way up through the stack. As they finish the compost in the bottom layer they will move up into the next bin searching for new food and bedding and leaving behind beautiful fertile “castings.”

Mix Well with Damp Browns to Fill

The worms need to have a mix in the layer of about three parts dampened brown material to one part food scraps or green material. We filled in the layer with torn strips of newspaper to give the worms plenty of new material to work with.

Something to Read While They Work

The whole layer needs to stay moist, so we finished it off with several sections of newspaper on top that we then sprayed with the hose to keep damp.

 

 

 

Voila! Our worms are ready to move into their new home and start making more fertilizer for the garden.

Thanks, worms! Enjoy your lunch!

Inside A Seed

Broad Bean Seed and Almond Nut

Today in Open Garden time we dissected Broad Bean seeds and almonds to examine the structures you can find inside a seed. Here’s a quick rundown of the process for those of you who weren’t able to be with us today.

We used:

• Several pods of Broad Beans
• Almonds
• Magnifers
• Food dye
• Towels for blotting dye
• Tweezers

We first slit open the pods to examine the structures that hold and protect the seeds. You can see a picture of an almond “fruit” that would hold the almond “seed” you are familiar with here.

Inside a Broad Bean

We examined the outer casing of the seed and the nut, called the “seed coat,” noting the differences, then carefully slit the seed coat on the long side of the seed or nut. That allowed us to carefully pry apart both the bean and the almond.

Here’s what we found inside the Broad Bean. One side came away clean and the other side has the plant embryo attached to it.

Embryonic Leaves Inside the Broad Bean Seed

It wasn’t as easy to see things as we had hoped so we added a little bit of food dye to bring out the contrast. (Thanks for the tip, Mary!)

Look carefully. Can you see the tiny “seed leaves” folded up at the tip of the seed?

Embryonic Almond Bits

Here’s what the almond looked like.

Most of what you see is the cotyledon, the food stored inside the seed for the emerging plant to live on. That’s what makes seeds such nutritious food.

Which ones will you compare?

You can experiment at home with different kinds of seeds and see which ones give you the best view of their internal workings. If you’d like to share your results here on the blog, you can do that too.

Opening the Fall Program

Squirrel o' Lantern

Today was the Open House for the new Fall 09 Dirt to Dinner program. We focused on three things. Getting to know one another and the garden. A chance to get more familiar with the different responsibilities we’ll each be taking on in the garden this session. And an exploration of some of the seeds that are available in the garden and that we will use this Fall to plant both here and at home.

During today’s Seed Hunt, kids spotted seeds in the garden including onion, celery, edamame, green bean, pumpkin, corn, grass, dandelion, lettuce, potato, lemon, cucumber, watermelon, tuscan melon, tomato, tomatillo, pepper, squash, pea, sunflower and “bird seed.” How many of them could you identify? We’ll be saving seed from many of these varieties to use again next year. I’ve already planted some of the celery seed we saved and hope to see it sprouting this week.

Many of the kids planted seeds to take home with them, made seed jars to watch sprout and tried several varieties of cucumber and melons–while noticing that their seeds all look very much the same. Sometimes it’s easier to tell which plants belong to the same family by looking at their seeds than it is by looking at the finished fruits.

Chard Seeds?

One enterprising student matched up a number of the seeds by plant family and noticed that it’s almost impossible to tell the difference between seeds for chard and seeds for beets. In fact, Harold McGee in On Food and Cooking says “Chard is the name given to varieties of the beet, Beta vulgaris, that have been selected for thick, meaty leaf stalks (subspecies cicla) rather than their roots.”

One of my highlights of the day was hunting through the finished compost pile with one new young gardener intent on checking out the various bugs we found there. I was also impressed with the spontaneous way the kids joined in the potato harvest. We’ll be saving many of the potatoes they planted today through the winter to be used as seed potatoes in the early spring.

A Fresh Start for Fall

It’s almost time for the Open House for the new and returning Dirt to Dinner families. There’s a lot of work still to do to get ready but I’m excited to be getting the Fall program going. This session we are expecting a dozen families. Half were in the Spring program and half are new. We’ll have a balanced group as far as boys and girls and the ages will range from five to eleven.

In between meetings we’ll communicate by email and our Google group again this session since it seemed to work well in the Spring. We’ll pass on the Ning this time but we are keeping the accounts with VoiceThread since I know I will use it and we hope more of the kids will be involved in making VoiceThreads this session.

We’ll be rotating each family through ten different areas of responsibilities to help the kids personally experience the interconnectedness of all the systems working in the garden. I predict Worm Wrangler will be a pretty popular one. I am also looking forward to seeing what the kids do when it’s their turn to be the Journalist.

The Open House will also include a scavenger hunt to find various kinds of seeds around the garden. I went through earlier today with a camera and came up with twenty different kinds visible on, in or around the plants, if you include the potatoes. It will surprise me if the kids find all the ones that I did, but it won’t surprise me if they come up with something I didn’t. New eyes are forever seeing things in the garden that I seem to miss looking at it every day.

I also have seeds on hand for the kids to plant if they would like. It’s always fun to start some seeds in the dirt at the beginning of the project. And I have a lot of seeds available for them to just explore, compare and add to seed starting jars to take home with them.

Fall Starts

I started some new seedlings for the Dirt to Dinner participants to plant in their home gardens, if they are doing them this Fall. I started a mix of three different varieties of Broccoli and had a heck of a time getting any Early Dell Celery or Snowball Cauliflower to come up. But we went through a heat wave right after I planted, so that may have been the problem. It’s worth trying agin.

Tonight I started:

A Japanese spinach called “Oriental Giant,”
“Bloomsdale” spinach,
“Orange Fantasia” chard, which came up beautifully in the Spring and was promptly devoured down to it’s last root by squirrels,
A specialty salad green called “Gala” mache (never tried this one, let me know if it does well for you),
Something the kids would call ‘Dinosaur’ kale that says “Covolo Laciniato Nero Di Toscana Precoce” which I think means “Curly black kale from Tuscany,” but that’s just a guess,
Some more standard looking kale called “True Siberian,”
More Snowball cauliflower,
And the rest of the seed I had for the “Early Dell” celery.

It was luxurious having fresh celery available all Winter long last year and I actually saved seed from the plants we grew. I tried starting some of that along with the Early Dell. I have no idea if it will do well. I found the plant label from last year and it just says “Celery” so no idea if it is a hybrid that might not breed true. Put that one under the category of Experiment! :-)

In the garden we have:

some carrots tucked here and there trying to hide from the creatures that come in the night and dig them up,
some peas just starting,
turnips that could really stand to be thinned,
drying beans for soups this Winter,
sunflowers waiting for us to dry and husk the heads,
onions that still need to be pulled,
blue potatoes that are about ready to come out,
melons, pumpkins and gourds that have been growing all summer
and still more tomatoes!