The Compost Bin

My 4 year old daughter, who at this point is a lot more interested in gardening than my 6 year old son, came to me during breakfast with big news the other day. "Your Rogoogula is growing."

And since then, I've been calling it Rogoogula too. I like the name better than regular old Arugula. Even Rocket Arugula (the seed variety) doesn't have that same ring to it like Rogoogula does.

But regardless of what I'm going to call it, it did sprout pretty quickly under the light setup that I have in my basement. I'm going to wait until some true leaves appear before I thin out the seedlings. This way I can put the cuttings to good use on a sandwich or something. These first leaves don't really taste anything but once the true leaves start growing, the plants actually taste like arugula.

I'm still a long way from having arugula pesto but since it's still February, I'm just happy that I'm doing any gardening.

After my Aero Garden post, I decided to hit the search engines and see what I could learn about this thing. Well I don't know how much I learned because it looks like two of the three videos that I found on YouTube are actually from the Aero Garden people. I guess that's what you have to do now a day to market a new product. And I still think the Aero Garden looks like a cool gadget.

Has anyone seen the Aero Garden? The ads call it the "World's First Indoor Smart Garden." For those of you who haven't seen it, it's an appliance that makes it easy to grow herbs and vegetables right on your kitchen counter. You take a grow pod that has seed in it and drop it into the Aero Garden where it's treated to a "near perfect rainforest growing environment." It has it own lights that are on a timer and it'll tell you when it needs more water or nutrients. These nutrients come in tablet form and you just drop them in. So it's really a hydroponic setup with no dirt involved what so ever. And the Aero Garden people claim that you'll get maximum growth from your plants in a lot less time.

Now, my fondness of compost should be apparent to my regular readers. Getting my hands full of dirt and working in my yard makes for a good day in my book. Not only do I make my own compost but I do my best to keep my yard totally organic. So you'd think that I'd be appalled at growing seeds without dirt in a bath of water and nutrients, right? Well I am, but I still totally want one.

I tried to hate this thing because the idea of growing plants without dirt sounds kind of test tube babyish to me but my love of gadgets won out on this issue. And the idea of having fresh salads and herbs right there in your kitchen, even in the winter sounds great too.

If anyone has any experience with the Aero Garden, I'd be really interested to hear from you. Please leave a comment and let me know what you think. There's a good chance that I may find one under the Christmas Tree this year. It'll probably be marked, To: Anthony, From: Anthony but there's still a good chance that it'll be there.

I blame Carol at May Dreams Gardens for making me seed crazy so early in the season. She posted a bunch of seed starting questions that were a lot of fun for me to answer. But now I've been spending way too much time thinking about seeds. My January is usually spent leisurely browsing seed catalogs with a nice cup of hot chocolate and thinking about all the possibilities. This year all my catalogs are already worn out and I've got post-it notes stuck to most of the pages and an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of what I'm ordering and from who. What happened to the hot chocolate?

Since then, Carol has moved on to ask other questions, like what makes you a gardener but I'm still stuck on the seeds. Oh well, I may as well just go with it. Expect more seed related posts this week.

I recently mentioned how I'm a big fan of Gardeners Self-Watering Seed Trays. Now it's time to talk lighting for seed starting.

I'm envious of everyone with nice bright sunny window sills. My house has gigantic eaves that keep all of my southern facing windows in the shade. Sure it's great for keeping the AC bills low, but terrible for starting seeds. When I start my seeds, I am forced to go down to the basement.

To grow things in a basement you need some artificial light. Luckily for me and my budget, starting seeds need a lot less light than growing plants completely inside. All of my seedlings go outside and grow in the real sun once the weather warms up. So there's no reason for me to invest in Metal Halide or HPS Lighting solutions. Regular 4 foot shop lights are just fine for my needs.

You could do a lot of research on what kinds of bulbs to buy for your shop lights. There's natural light, cool light, white light, grow lights, aquarium lights and they all have different amounts of green wavelengths and red wavelengths and etc, etc, etc. Here's what I did and I get great results. I bought at least one full spectrum light for each shop light. Done. Full spectrum lights only cost about $5 so they won't break the bank either.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have some more seed shopping to do.