Just a tiny reminded that it is Mid-February.
Its time for a good portion of the USA to start hauling out the seeds and potting soils and all the stuff to start tomatoes, peppers, etc.
Tomatoes I have found to grow best when started in a mixture of half regular potting soil mixed with half vermiculite. I use paper cups (real paper coffee cups - no wax on them) and I start three seeds per cup. I thin when the plants put out their first adult leaves, selecting what I feel is the strongest one per cup.
I place the cups in a pan, leaving 1 inch of water on the bottom of the pan - keeping the soil very moist. Since it is still winter, it is dry in the house, the inch of water provides humidity for the tender plants. I add water when the soil in the cup begins to dry at the surface. The cup may retain water even though the surface of the soil is dry. I keep them in a sunny location, and give them room to grow.
I have discovered that three plants per person in the household is more than enough tomatoes for the growing season. If you plan on canning or preserving, you may want 5 plants per person.
When it comes times to move them outdoors, I have a three step process. One place-where they get late after noon sun, protected from wind up against the house. Another place where they get afternoon and late after noon sun, still blocked from the wind, then finally in the garden, on top of the bed where they will be planted.
I leave the plants in these locations for a week at a time, after the threat of frost has passed.
When it comes time to plant, I peel off the paper cup, and I plant the plant to a depth of two or three segments. I remove the leaves off the lowe segments before planting.
Then I take sections of black and white newsprint and cover the ground around the base of the plant leaving about an inch all around. I turn on the sprinkler to soak the newsprint, then I cover with mulch, such as last years half composted leaves, spring grass clippings. The mulch is just to hide the newsprint.
As the plants grow, I trim and tie them to the trellis. I have them grow flat, instead of allowing them to bush. They tend to spread farther, and it makes it easier to pick tomatoes and also gives more surface area toward the sun.
During the growing season I use a compost tea, I put a shovelful of compost in an old t-shirt tied off at the bottom. I fill a 5 gallon bucket with water, and seep the 'compost tea bag' in the water over night. The next day the water is a brackish/brown color. I pour this at the base of each plant. I do this every other week.
I also add to the soil with more grass clippings, leaves and partially composted matter. This is my "mulch" over the newsprint. By fall the news print is pretty much decayed, and when I pull the plants, I rake up the old much and news print, throwing them in the compost heap and lay our fresh news print, holding it down with scrapes of wood, plant poles, stakes, etc. until I cover the winter garden with fall leaves.
This cuts down on the weeding and also holds the moisture in the soil so you don't have to water as much.
Peppers can be treated the same way.
Cucumbers are best grown in the soil, as well as beans and peas. They don't fancy being transplanted.
With vining plants like peas, beans and cucs, I have discovered that they prefer more space at their bases, thus I give them 2 inches of space around the base. Since I plant in rows, i have taken to laying out my news print on either side of the row, sprinkling loosely grass clippings at the base of the plants - still cutting down the weeding and also holding in moisture.
Easy Seeding:Carrots, celery, lettuce, radish, and other similar small seeds are real difficult to work with out in the garden. Now days I spend the winter months making 'seed - blankets' and seed 'Tapes'
I use white paper towels - two ply paper towels can be pulled apart to double the area.
I make a "glue" out of cornstarch and water. I mix about 1/4 cup cornstarch with a couple of teaspoons of water, making a thick paste.
If you are really a perfectionist you can lay out a grid on the paper before doing this, I'm not so I move right on to the next step which is gluing the seed to the paper. I find that having a few sheets still together (3' long) works best for me.
I drip out drops of the cornstarch glue every inch or two inches depending on the seed (read the package) making a grid of drops. Then I add a seed to each drop, some times I push the seed into the drop with a tooth pick.
Let the seed blanket dry, then you can roll it up until planting time.
At planting time, break up and fluff up your soil, take out your seed cloth, and roll it out Upside-down (seed side facing the soil) then you can sprinkle a bit of loose soil over the whole thing to a depth of 1/4 or 1/2 inch (read the seed package) moisten and you will be assured a nice even crop with out spending a great deal of time on your knees making lots of little hole in the soil.
Some seeds, like carrots and leaf lettuce don't even need to be covered with soil. The paper towel acts like a sun shield, and it also keeps the birds from stealing your seed. The paper falls apart rather easily, by the time your seeds sprout, they can push up through the towel no problem. The paper towel will compost before the growing season ends.
Seed tape is similar above, except you can cut longer sections of paper towel into 2 or three inch strips (up to six feet long) seed Tapes are great for pole beans, peas and other single rows of plants.
I haven't tried it on corn though.
Growing Potatoes with out soil:You can do this with any kind of potato and even yams.
Make a 3 foot high chicken wire circle about 3 feet in diameter. Cut up potatoes (preferably specific seed potatoes, but you can also get a crop out of store bought potatoes) leaving three eyes per piece. Let the potato 'scab' over night.
Inside of your chicken wire basket, lay out a layer of news print (black and white only) you want it to be about an inch thick. You can either presoak it by holding it in a bucket of water, or you can run the sprinkler on it. This will hold the moisture you add keeping it from seeping down into the soil, and will also prevent weed from growing up through the bottom.
Lay out your pieces of potato every six inches. Cover with 6 inches of grass clippings, old mulch, leaves, hay or even shredded paper (Make certain that it is black and white print only, some colored papers contain lead and other nasty chemicals which are absorbed by the plants and then you eat those nasties)
Moisten, and keep moist. When the plants grow a foot tall, add another 6 inches of material covering the lower six inches of plant. Repeat until the plants are three feet tall. Since potatoes are viney, they will continue to sprout upward. You do not have to remove the lower leaves as you cover them, they will die with no harm to the plant.
Allow the plants to run their season (some potatoes have the prettiest of flowers) Then when it is time to harvest, pull off the chicken wire and fish through the loose, semi composted mulch.
The additions of mulch will force the potato plant to set off new potatoes every six inches. of main stem growth. You will find that the lowest level of potatoes will be bake potato size, while the highest level will be new potato size.
Yams work very well this way. They are more of a vine and will, if provided with a mild winter, continue to grow year round.
Compost:The Gardener's best Friend and one of the easiest things to make.
If you do not know what compost is, you really need to do a web search to discover the wonders of this organic material which is 100% better than any fertilizer you can think of, and also is a good way to get rid of green trash and kitchen trash (No meat, bones or baked goods). Egg shells should be crushed before throwing them into the pile, coffee grounds, tea bags, vegetable trimmings, apple cores, banana peels - all go into the pile. This will reduce the amount of 'wet trash' and the compost will give you one heck of a garden in time.
I use the mot of my compost in the vegetable garden itself. In spring I spread it out over the seed beds, such as carrot, radish, lettuce crops. For individual plants I dig my plant hole 1/2 again as large as it needs to be, filling the hole 1/2 way with compost, toss in the plant and put back in the rest of the soil making little dikes of dirt around the plant so any watering is held where it is needed. In fall I make certain to spread out the last year's worth of compost, I usually just spread it out with a shovel, I do not even turn it into the soil since it will be turned and mixed when I plant.
Used to be I would make three containers to compost my material in, going out every three days turning the piles and cooking up compost quickly. I discovered a few tricks which make the process easier and gives me more time to do other things.
First I have reduced the number of active compost piles from three to one. In that pile the 'New stuff" goes. 1/2 of my grass clippings, half of the winter leaves, all of the kitchen organics, 1/2 of the shredded newspaper (black and white only) and other organics. This heap is kept active by adding and turning once a month.
It is a compost heap that is off the ground. I built a simple structure of wood posts with a wood frame of 2x4s set every 6 inches. Over that I used metal mesh (1/2 inch squares) and over that chicken wire. The sides are planks of wood. The distance between the bottom of the heap and the ground is two feet. This gives me plenty of room to get under their with a shovel.
I start the heap off with a 1/2 and half mix of leaves and grass clippings, or 1/2 grass clippings have shredded paper. This is my base. I take three shovel fulls of dirt from the garden and spread this on top. Then I pretty much throw what ever comes along inside as it comes along.
When I'm working in the garden and I find a worm, he is moved to the new palace in the sky. Worms just love shredded newsprint, they grow big and fat and multiply swiftly. I keep the heap moist, but not soggy, and I turn it when I get a round too it (about once a month)
What usually happens is as I turn the pile, the composted stuff falls through to the ground, leaving the bigger, un composted stuff and a majority of the worms in the pile.
If your compost heap stops cooking, meaning if it stops composting and producing heat its either two dry, not enough 'fresh material' or it needs a boost of soil (bacteria) to get it started.
Second composting place, the garden.
I find that there is a lot of space between the individual plants, space that grows nothing but weeds. I have taken to sheet composting, laying out the layers of grass clippings, leaves, etc between the rows. I keep the kitchen waste in the compost heap since it does attract insects and rodents who might take a fancy to my plants when they are eating the kitchen scraps.
This sheet compost acts like a mulch, you don't need to turn it or do anything, just build up the layers. Grass tends to compost fast, leaves take longer. In the fall after I pull the leavings of plants, I rake up all the mulch into a single pile - this is just the top surface, below that I find lots of black gold just waiting to be turned into the soil.
After I turn the soil, I cover the beds with a thin layer of news print and spread out the fall leaves on top. The next year I can plant plants by taking my hand shovel to the mulch, spreading the leaves and cutting out the newspaper to fit the plant (I find that 5 sheets of newspaper tend to compost during the winter here in California) for seed beds, I rake the mulch into rows between types of plants.
Potting soil:Here is one of my secrets which I rarely give out. I make my own potting soil.
I use compost and vermiculite and mica. 3/4 compost, 1/8 mica, 1/8 vermiculite (I add more vermiculite for seed starting)
After I have cooked down the compost, leaving a black humus, I spread it out on a black plastic sheet (thick) I spread it out to a depth of an inch, or so. Over that I spread out thick clear plastic. I roll the ended of the two plastics together (about a foot) weight them down and let the Sun take over.
This only works during the hot summer months, and your 'oven' has to be in direct sun light. I have a large open space-in the middle of my garden, another way to keep down the weeds
) Let the compost bake in the sun for a month. Water droplets will form on the plastic, you can 'dry the soil by uncovering one day out of a week. The baking process will kill all insects and most of the bacterias. The plastic can reach temperatures of +130 degreesF.
The baked soil can I store in a 30 gallon trash can. I use it instead of buying potting soil.
David
AnswerPool.com 
David, what a great post!
