Sara's Garden MarketSustainable Living, Gardening, Flowers, and Food

Dinner and speaking by (Multi.) New York Times best selling author, Michael Pollan.

MORE INFO

Thursday, May 2, 2013 – 7:00 pm – Beth El Synagogue
5224 West 26th Street – Saint Louis Park, MN 55416
http://www.besyn.org/pollan

A portion of the proceeds of this event will go to benefit Appetite for Change, a North Minneapolis nonprofit which seeks to build individual, family, and community capacity to use growing cooking and eating food as vehicles for social change.

(I will not be at this event due to other commitments on Thursday evenings.)

Thanks for stopping buy!

Sara

Plans are forming at our house to visit the Macy’s Flower Show in Minneapolis this Sunday, March 24th. If you’d like to see pictures from years past please visit my page on facebook,

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Saras-Garden-Market/347778026634

While you’re there “like” it for valuable gardening tips and tricks.

This year is all about container and unconventional gardening!

To see where the Macy’s Flower Show is in your neck of the woods visit:

http://social.macys.com/flowershow/#/minneapolis

And a special shout out to my favorite floral artist, Manette Garrison who lives and works in San Francisco now, but grew up in good ol’ Minnesota. 🙂 I always think of you when I go to the flower show. 🙂

Thanks for stopping by!

Sara

The Winter Harvest Handbook, Year-Round Vegetable Production Using Deep-Organic Techniques and Unheated Greenhouses, by Eliot Coleman is a very detailed and exhaustive look at winter greenhouse gardening in zone 5. I am loving the look of the greenhouses on page 64, with snow piled up around the bases of a few large greenhouses!

This book not only talks about traditional greenhouse structures in winter and how to utilize them, but many other alternative ways of gardening in the winter time. Good tips on which vegetables to grow, pest control (different season = different pests!), and garden tools are peppered liberally through out the entire book.

This is an EXCELLENT companion to Carol and Chuck’s Winter Greenhouse book.

I look forward to using both books this Spring/Summer and into next Fall and Winter as I take on the adventure of building and using my own greenhouse in the winter in zone 4/5!

I am so excited because I just read this great book. I highly recommend it to anyone looking to have a permanent greenhouse in zone(s) 4/5. They do use some supplemental heat and a small amount of electricity in the coldest/darkest months. Their greenhouse employs many innovations for keeping it’s cost and carbon footprint to a minimum and returning a yield of winter crops for 18 families in their winter CSA!!!

Watch for future posts where I will be visiting their greenhouse, and making plans to build my own this Spring/Summer!

I’ve been out of touch recently, but I’m back in 2012 with new inspiration!

I have found a few great resources about winter gardening in Minnesota! Can you believe other people are as crazy as I am? 🙂

After my little plastic greenhouse got ripped apart by all the wind we’ve been having this Fall/Winter I was inspired to look into building a permanent structure. I went to my local building store and looked at their shed kits/structures and greenhouse poly/plastic sheeting and corrugated sheet metal and recycled material. It was very exciting and totally do-able.

But NOW; An even better solution has come into focus from a link shared on facebook. (Thank you Lara!!!!) A couple in Minnesota started a solar powered organic winter greenhouse. It grew into a winter CSA which now provides organic veggies to 18 families all winter long!!!

What’s more is that they are very nice, and will support anyone who wants to try to do what they did, AND they wrote a book all about it. What better way to pass this winter than learning how to garden year-round starting this Spring??

The book is titled, Northlands Winter Greenhouse Manual, by Carol Ford.

While searching for this book I also found, The Winter Harvest Handbook, by Eliot Coleman.

Both are about sustainable organic winter greenhouse gardening. Watch for more posts as I read and review these books and start planning my permanent greenhouse project this Spring.

I could not be more excited and I am so grateful that I found these books/resources before I went ahead and started my own pioneering project with this. I will be leaps and bounds ahead of where I would have started out with all this.

Who wants to by in my Winter CSA??? 🙂 (I am only half kidding.)

I have to make room to start my seeds indoors, so I have decided to harvest my carrots. These carrots were started on September 1st 2010! I can’t believe it’s been that long. That’s about 200 days. That is a very long time to not have full grown carrots at harvest time.

These carrots got 14-16 hours of daylight bulbs within inches of green foliage every single day, plenty of water, and had no issues or pests. They were developed under the best circumstances and still the largest ones are only about two inches long, and most never made it beyond the starter stage although the foliage was abundant and tall.

Needless to say, there will be no carrots in my indoor garden next winter!

Here’s a pic:

Thanks for stopping by!

-Sara Murray

My daughter Maddie suggested that we can use the indoor garden to propagate the strawberry patch!!!!!!!! What a genius idea!

As you may or may not know strawberry plants only produce fruit the first or second year. They send out shoots (like a vine) and plant new plants them selves each season, and those are what give next year’s fruit. In Minnesota, and in a very small area in our garden we only get a handful or so of delicious (and I mean delicious) strawberries each season.

So today at breakfast she says, “Mom, we can have more strawberries if you dry one strawberry, and take those seeds and make plants over the winter.” WOW! Yes, we can!

So, (of course you need to start off with non-GMO and non-Hybrid seeds in order to get plants that come from seed correctly and don’t mutate themselves!) here is a great link for how to store your own strawberry seeds and sow them: http://www.ehow.com/how_2106637_preserve-strawberry-seeds.html

The trick is to find any strawberry plants or seeds that are non-GMO and non-Hybrid! Mine are coming true to plant, so I think I have a good batch. I have yet to try preserving and sowing the seeds though. I tried to google non-gmo strawberry seeds and plants and the general consensus is that there aren’t any. 🙁

(stop reading now because what’s below this is a major downer!)

Thanks for stopping by!

-Sara Murray

(This is a huge tragedy, and if it continues to happen with more and more food seeds we will see the complete destruction of food as we know it and it may lead to a great starvation on this planet! So, please whenever possible use heirloom seeds and buy non-gmo produce and seeds if you can.

50 years ago my daughter and I wouldn’t have had to think twice about if the seeds of any fruit or vegetable would produce more of that fruit or vegetable. Of course they would! Now… you never know.But that’s another blog post all together!) between this and the bees big business and big agriculture can really get you down…

So, I noticed a big difference when I used dirt from my garden to grow some of my indoor garden this year!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! And it wasn’t good. 🙁

I now highly recommend using only sterile, baged indoor potting soil for indoor gardens. Either that or you have to go through a process for preparing your soil to be indoors. (Such as treating it with a pesticide for a few weeks every 5-7 days and then letting it rest or washing it before bringing it inside. – much easier to just get some potting soil!)

Same is true for wintering over. If you have an indoor garden *and* you want to try to winter over some plants from your pots or garden I highly recommend keeping these plants separate from each other.

This year I used some soil from my garden for my indoor garden and I brought in a lot more than just soil for my garden! I also brought in some pests that put my indoor growing season way behind. There are bugs in that soil!!!

In particular Spider Mites and a type of Fruit Fly were what did the most damage to my indoor garden. I actually had to resort to using pesticides to get rid of these little buggers. (I got some that were highly recommended by organic gardeners that are specifically for food, and specifically for indoor use.)

So! Grab that potting soil, you’re not doing yourself any favors by trying to use raw outdoor soil for use in your indoor garden!

Thanks for stopping by!

Sara