Entries from April 2010 ↓

[This was originally posted Nov 13, 2007 on my Sundrop Jewelry blog.]

I recently finished reading “Giving” by Bill Clinton (from the library, since I’m a tightwad and trying not to purchase excess consumer goods). Although reviews have been mixed (a few have criticized the lack of attention paid to the failures of government philanthropy) I found it fascinating and inspiring, and by the time I finished the book had quite a lot of little scraps of paper marking the ideas I found most interesting. Sure, it’s true that governments have more money and resources that could be used to promote societal good than most of us do, but the book isn’t intended to be a guide for governments. It is intended to reach out and grab individual readers with its poignant stories of successes by people who are both much more and much less powerful than each of us.

There are hundreds of people and organizations discussed, but I want to mention a few that most interested me, that really made me want to get involved.

I signed up for Kiva, an online micro-loan organization that lets you lend small amounts of money directly to individuals – tiny business loans, but which can have a large impact on the lives of these people and their families. Kiva has actually had so much interest as a result of this book that they restrict the amount you can loan any one person to $25: 20 people loaning $25 each will provide a $500 loan. Over the next few months to years the loan will be repaid, after which you can take your money out or re-loan it to another individual. Global Giving is a similar website that enables you to donate money to a specific project of your choice (topics range from AIDS to Climate Change).

[Update: I'm still using Kiva, relending my donation each time repayments add up to $25 sitting in my account.]

Other types of giving are more traditional: donating money to World Bicycle Relief so they can provide locally-made bicycles to HIV/AIDS healthcare workers and help tsunami victims re-establish their lives; or Heifer International to give animals that produce milk, wool, eggs, meat, and honey to help poor families set up businesses selling excess milk etc. I like these particular charities because they manage to make monetary donations work even harder; the locally-made bicycles create jobs in the area, and Heifer families ‘pass on the gift’ by giving away the first offspring of their animal to a neighbor in similar circumstances.

These are the easy ones in my mind, the ones that only involve money. I would like to get involved with Habitat for Humanity again, partly because I want to learn more about building, especially low-energy homes using green materials. That will depend to some degree on where projects are located – for all the benefits of not having a car, bicycles can be restricting.

• Plant something: so, the eggcartons don’t really give enough room for plants to grow big enough to transplant outside. I found this out the hard way, when most of my tiny kale transplants died. So, this week I transplanted broccoli, cabbage, chard and some tomatoes up to bigger containers.
• Harvest something: marjoram, and I tasted sorrel for the first time – last year it was tiny and I was afraid to pick any for fear of killing it, but this year I have two plants coming back all by themselves. Sorrel has an interesting, lemony/vinegary flavor.
• Preserve something: still kind of early for this.
• Waste not: standard composting, recycling, etc.
• Want not: flour to tide me over until the big delivery (two 50-lb bags) in a couple weeks.
• Community food systems: well, someone apparently stole the six bags of composted manure a friend had kindly delivered to me. It was probably someone in the community – maybe they’ll grow food with it. I’m kind of pissed about it, though.
• Eat the food: marjoram was used in garlicky asparagus (or green beans).

As mentioned in my previous seed saving post, I had a hard time finding consistent, believable information online about how to save seeds. One webpage would talk only about the method for cleaning and storing tomato seeds, not addressing whether or not you should worry about whether the seeds you were so carefully saving had been cross-pollinated by something else, while another would insist that all tomato varieties must be separated by at least 25′ or you’d end up with a funky, undesirable new tomato variety when you grew out the seed next year.

So, to the library!

While Suzanne Ashworth’s book “Seed to Seed” is the definitive guide to seed saving, as a novice I found it a little impenetrable. It’s the place to go for every nitty-gritty detail, but I needed a stronger general understanding before I could make best use of it. “Saving Seeds: The Gardener’s Guide to Growing and Saving Vegetable and Flower Seeds” by Marc Rogers was less intimidating to a beginning seed-saver like myself.

“Saving Seeds” is written for the home gardener learning to save seeds, with clear directions on how to prevent cross-fertilization in all the usual (and some unusual) garden vegetables, written in an approachable, conversational way. Most important, the author states clearly which seeds are easy to save (beans, peas, and tomato) and which should be left to the intrepid expert (cauliflower, beet).

The main points:
• Maintain genetic diversity by harvesting seed from multiple plants. If you harvest seed from a single plant each year, your stock will eventually get inbred and be more susceptible to disease (exception: saving seed from just a single squash or the self-pollinating beans and peas will not weaken the strain).
• Choose only your best plants and best fruits/vegetables from which to harvest seed.
• Decide what you want to emphasize – earliest tomatoes? turnips that keep well all winter? disease resistance? lettuce that bolts latest in the summer? dwarf variety for container planting?
• If you just save what’s left at the end of the summer (like I was) you’ll end up selecting for the latest-producing peas and beans, rather than the earliest.
• Isolation to prevent cross-pollinating – how to do it and when is it necessary?
• Beans, peas, lettuce, and tomatoes are self-pollinating and rarely cross-pollinate even between varieties (e.g. my Black Cherry tomato is unlikely to cross with a Brandywine tomato), but it can be a good idea to separate varieties with a different kind of plant.
• Since isolation by distance for corn, cucumber, squash, melons, eggplant, and peppers is impractical in the confines of a home garden, you can bag the flowers to prevent them from being cross-pollinated by different varieties. Bagged blossoms of corn, squash and melons must be hand pollinated, while the eggplant and peppers will self-pollinate.
• Members of the brassica (broccoli, cabbage, etc.), mustard (turnip, chinese cabbage, etc), and celery (parsley, carrot, etc) families are biennials and in my zone most must be dug and overwintered, then replanted in the spring to produce seed the second year. Almost all of these must also be physically isolated (flowers bagged) to prevent crossing.

Having read “Saving Seeds”, I now have a much better understanding of what I need to do to save my own seeds, and feel much more confident that it is possible (and not nearly as complicated as some other sources made it seem) to save seeds even within a small garden. I’m especially excited to begin saving some tomato and pepper seeds this year. Essentially, I’ll be starting my own breeding program, over time developing varieties adapted to my particular growing conditions.

Today was supposed to be the ‘Water’ episode of my 90% Reduction Project update, but life is crazy. Still hiring and training for Sundrops, my mother-in-law is visiting, and I haven’t managed to even look at the water bills for the last year. So, a different post on water: building self-watering containers for gardening!


I found these tubs via Craigslist. Step 1: Get some tubs
I bought 26 50-gallon rubbermaid totes for $4 each from a company that was selling 1000 of them – they’d been used to breed worms to sell as food for pet lizards. Each self-watering container requires two tubs.


Measure twice…



Step 2: Determine the depth of the dirt vs. depth of water reservoir
What are you going to plant in these containers? Will you grow deep rooted plants or plants that need a lot of water (or both)? The book “Square Foot Gardening” talks about making containers with only 6 inches of soil – the carrots came out L-shaped, but grew fine.

…cut once.
One of the tubs needs to be watertight. The other tub is going to be cut down and used as the divider between the top section (planting soil) and bottom (water reservoir). Some of the tubs had cracks in the bottom, so I used those to create the dividers.
Find another use for the top ring.
I used it as garden bed edging.

I cut a large strip off the top, about 7 inches below the lip, which will create about equal-sized top and bottom sections.


Step 3: Making it fit
Take the bottom section and put it upside-down inside the whole tub.
Structural plastic in the way If it doesn’t fit, figure out why not. My tubs had this bit of structural plastic sticking out in each corner.
Cutting openings so the divider
will fit inside the other tub.
To make it fit, I had to cut out flaps from the divider so it would fit all the way down into the whole tub.

Now that we’ve tested the fit, take the divider back out – there’s much more to do.


Step 4: Drill time
Drill holes in the divider
Next we have to drill holes in the divider. ‘What good is a divider with holes?’, you ask? The divider needs three kinds of holes:

• LOTS of little holes for air exchange and drainage if it rains.
• A few bigger holes to hold a wick – a piece of cotton with one end in the water reservoir and the other end in the dirt. The wick allows plants to suck up into the dirt only as much water as they need.
• One hole to hold the access tube for adding water to the reservoir.

Holes in the sides too



I used a 1/4″ drill bit to make all of these holes, but making the larger holes is much easier if you have a hole-cutting drill bit. Drill air exchange / drainage holes every couple inches all over the bottom and sides of the divider. Make 3-4 slightly larger holes in the center, evenly spaced from end to end, by drilling 4-5 holes so close together that they merge. The large hole for adding water needs to be pretty big (the size of the watering tube – see step 5) and I got really tired of drilling this big hole with a small drill bit by the time I’d made a few of these containers.

Drill overflow hole through
both outer container and divider

One last hole to drill. Put the divider back inside the whole container and find where the top of the divider sits inside. Drill a hole through the side of the outer container and through the divider about 1 inch below the top of the divider. This is the overflow hole, to prevent your plants being drowned. When watering, you can just leave your hose on until water starts coming out this hole, and your water reservoir will be as full as it can be.

Hold pipe still using a C-clamp or vise
Cut pipe at an angle
Cut pipes for multiple containers
Step 5: Watering Pipe
Remember that big hole in the corner? Well, now we need to make the watering pipe that goes through that hole. Take a length of pipe (some people have argued against using PVC, but the leaching concern is really about phthalates used to make softer PVCs, not hard pipes, and I had it on hand) and clamp it to a table. This is going to be difficult, since the pipe is round. Keep trying until the pipe is steady.

Cut the pipe at about a 45° angle – it doesn’t need to be exact, the purpose is so that the pipe will never sit flush with the bottom of the container and keep water from flowing into the reservoir.
Pipe with bugscreen Step 6: Keep the bugs out (optional)
In my original version, I put bugscreen over the top of the watering pipe and the outflow hole in the side of the container to prevent mosquitoes laying eggs in there.
Screen covering outflow hole However, halfway through the first season the rubber bands broke and the bugscreen started to come off, and the outflow holes had a tendency to get clogged with soil. I didn’t use screen the following year and didn’t seem to have any insect problems.
Container with soil guards
Step 7: Keeping soil in place
Put the divider back in the whole tub, making sure the outflow holes line up. In my tubs, there was a considerable gap around the edges, and I didn’t want all my soil to fall down into the water reservoir, so I added little cardboard flaps to keep the soil out of the cracks. However, when I went and filled the tubs with soil, they tended to bow outwards, and soil still slipped down, obstructing the outflow hole in a couple tubs. I’m thinking I might try a few layers of newspaper around the edges next time.


Measuring the wick Step 8: Adding the wick
Get some cotton material – it can be an old T-shirt or whatever you have in the rag bin, I’m using some braided denim I made from old jeans back when I owned a laundromat and always had a huge pile of lost-and-found, and which had previously served as wrapping for a cat clawing tower. Make a knot in the middle of the material, making sure the wick is long enough to drag on the bottom of the container, and stuff the end down through the holes. The cotton will eventually break down, but mine last about a season just fine, and I replace them in the spring.


Fill with water, soil and plants! Step 9: Plant
And you’re done! Just put it where you want it to end up – it’s going to be heavy when full of water and damp soil. Then fill with water (it’s easier to fill it all up before the soil’s in place), add your soil, and you’re ready to plant!

Update Notes
I made this tutorial a year or two ago, and have found a couple problems.

• The containers I made are BIG and all that soil gets heavy. The divider bows down under the weight, and eventually cracks. This year I’m going to put a couple empty plastic pots that are about the right height in the water chamber to help hold up the weight.
• I’ve had a couple containers develop a crack in the bottom and start to leak, and since my containers are resting on landscaping rock I don’t necessarily notice right away. I’m going to epoxy the thin and cracked places this spring before replanting the containers this year.

Other Resources

• Incredible Vegetables from Self-Watering Containers: Using Ed’s Amazing POTS System, by Edward C. Smith – As always, I suggest borrowing it from the public library rather than (or at least before) purchasing.
• Homemade Self-Contained Gardening Systems – This is a different version, using a basket of soil in the water reservoir to bring water up to the plant roots, rather than a cotton wick.
• Pat Meadows – A description of self-watering containers, why you’d want to use them, and links to some other instructions for making them.
• Container Vegetable Gardening: Healthy Harvests from Small Spaces – A nice version made using 5 gallon buckets. I had made a couple using two nested buckets, but it didn’t provide a very deep water reservoir – this version allows you to place the divider wherever you want. I’m also considering stacking a smaller bucket (abt 4 gal?) inside a standard 5-6 gallon bucket to get a larger water reservoir. I can sometimes get empty 5 gallon pickle buckets from a nearby deli, and smaller peanut butter buckets from my local co-op.

Did you do the last Tip of the Week – reducing your heating energy use by installing and properly programming a programmable thermostat?

Many water heaters come preset at 140° F, but for most purposes 120° F is perfectly adequate. Lowering your water heater thermostat to 120°F will reduce the risk of being scalded by water coming out of the tap, as well as reducing your energy costs by 3-5%.

To save your 3-5%, start by turning your water heater down to 120°. If you don’t like it and want hotter showers, or if your household goes through a large amount of hot water over a short period of time and you run out of hot water, turn the water heater up a tiny bit and use it that way for a few days. Continue until it’s at a comfortable temperature.

Setting your water heater temperature
• Go take a look at the temperature knob on your water heater. If your temperature dial has actual numbers, you’ve got it easy – just turn the knob to 120°.
• Unfortunately for most of us, our water heaters don’t have numbers on the temperature dial. We need to look in the owner’s manual to decipher the cryptic symbols on the temperature dial. I keep all my manuals together in a file folder, but the previous owners didn’t leave the manuals for us. Google to the rescue! I just googled my water heater’s brand and model number, and was able to download a pdf of the manual. In case you’re having trouble tracking down your manual, the most common temperature dial configurations are as follows:
• Some dials go from ‘warm’ to ‘hot’, with a ‘▲’ usually indicating 120°.
• Other dials go from ‘warm’ to ‘hot’ with a longer tick mark which usually indicates 130°F, rather than 120°. So helpful. Especially when you only can find this out by looking in your owner’s manual.

My water heater is set at about 122°F, and we don’t have to mix any cold with the hot for showers – it’s perfect, and there’s no chance of scalding.

• Cost: free!
• Time: less than 10 minutes
• Annual Savings: 3-5% off your energy bills
• Payback time: instantaneous

• Plant something: peas along the fence, swiss chard, spinach and bok choy in a rather shady planter box out front – we’ll see how they do. A bit more spinach, mesclun lettuce and mustards. I got a late start this week for a couple peppers I traded seeds for. Transplanted kale and cabbage outside – a couple haven’t survived, but I’ve replaced them with some extra seedlings I started. Moved gooseberries, blackberries and sage to their permanent locations.
• Harvest something: Nope
• Preserve something: Also nope
• Waste not: coffee grounds on the newly planted peas – I hear it’s good for them, but have never done it before.
• Want not: a friend delivered some composted manure, which I really needed to amend the new beds I’m digging this year – my soil is practically pure sand
• Community food systems: Not really
• Eat the food: finally used up the butternut squash in a ‘pumpkin’ orzo

In many cases we’re eating the seeds of our garden – beans, peas, roasted pumpkin seeds, and corn. Or just throwing them away, like bell pepper and melon seeds. Can’t we just plant some of those next year?

Well, yes and no.

Some seeds (like beans and peas) can just be saved and planted the following year. However, some special work is necessary to keep a pumpkin from being cross fertilized by a zucchini and resulting in seeds that produced an inedible squash, for example. In the last couple years I’ve saved some of my own bean and pea seeds, and I saved seeds from squashes purchased at the farmer’s market last fall (we’ll see if they grow true to type this year) but that’s all. I wasn’t saving the best beans and peas, trying to improve the strain, I was just saving what I accidentally let grow beyond the yummy stage.

Looking for instructions for how to save seeds from more plants, I was beset with confusion. The online sources on seed saving I found were contradictory and I knew enough to know they were leaving a lot out. Most of them attempted to summarize seed saving in one of two ways:

• How to harvest and store the seed, but not even mentioning the potential problem of cross-fertilization between varieties and how to avoid it.
• Declare that all different varieties must be separated by the distances used by mono-cropping commercial seed growers to prevent cross-fertilization and keep their seed completely pure – often 1/4 – 1 mile, depending on the plant.

Obviously, the latter isn’t possible within my small home garden – the property is only about 50′ by 145′, and the whole front yard is too shady for growing vegetables, leaving me a maximum possible separation of only about 70 feet. Even the 25-foot separation recommended by some for tomatoes would be difficult, since I like to grow lots of different kinds of heirloom tomatoes. Also, I have no way of knowing whether there are other gardeners within half a mile growing spinach that could cross with mine, for example.

I knew there had to be a better way of saving seeds from the home garden – we’ve been doing it for a long time, after all. It’s only in the past century that most people have stopped saving their own seeds and started buying new seed every year instead. In large part, that’s because hybrids have become so popular. F1 hybrids are developed by deliberately cross-pollinating varieties in order to produce a new variety with characteristics of both parents. Unfortunately, these desirable traits are rarely passed down to the next generation, so saving seeds from an F1 hybrid is a bad idea, unless you just want to see what monstrosity results – usually inedible. Instead, you have to buy new seed every year. And the cost of seeds adds up.

However, if we plant open-pollinated varieties instead of hybrids, we can save our own seeds. Indeed, given how many seeds are in a single tomato, we can share with friends and neighbors. Admittedly, some seeds are much more difficult to save than others, but I can start small, saving seeds from just one of those difficult ones, and maybe swap with someone else for others.

Coming up: general seed saving guidelines and book recommendations.

There’s going to be a bit of delay in my updates of the 90% Reduction Project – I’m frantically scrambling trying to hire some people to make glass droplets using our giant fresnel lens for Sundrop Jewelry. Every other spare minute has been spent actually gardening – outside digging up lawn to create new beds (ow, my back).

Don’t worry, I’m not abandoning the 90% series, just pushing back the posts a bit.

Did you do the last Tip of the Week – reducing your Wii’s energy use by changing one setting?

My programmable thermostat.

I know this is one of the ‘old standard’ tips, but anyone who hasn’t done it yet should seriously consider installing a programmable thermostat, particularly if you live in an area with either high heating or cooling loads. My house had a programmable thermostat when I moved in and I have no doubt that it has saved me money, even though I don’t have prior bills to compare to. As the graph of my natural gas usage shows, the vast majority goes toward heating. Thus, by automatically turning down the heat at night in the winter, I’m saving around 10% off my natural gas bill.

However, to actually save you this much, it has to be programmed properly. It also has to be programmed so that you are still comfortable in your house – if you aren’t, you might end up setting it as if it was a standard thermostat, which would kind of defeat the purpose. The basic idea is to let the house temperature settle at a lower (in winter) or higher (in summer) temperature than you’re comfortable at when you’re out of the house or asleep – i.e. when it won’t bother you. It’s possible to do this with a regular thermostat, but not only do you have to remember to change it, the house temperature won’t be back to where you like it when you first wake up or get home.

In winter, I’ve set my thermostat to start warming the house up again a little while before I wake up (which has the added benefit of making the bathroom floor nice and warm in the morning), and allow the temperature to drop as low as 50° at night starting half an hour before bed. The temperature doesn’t drop that quickly, and as I’m getting in bed it isn’t too warm for all the blankets I’ll need in the middle of the night. Since I work from home, I don’t allow the temperature to drop again during the day, but if everyone in the house works elsewhere you could save even more by doing this. Most thermostats have separate programming at least for weekdays and weekends (some let you set every day separately), and you can always make a temporary temperature change that lasts until the thermostat’s next programmed time to change the temperature setting.

Since I don’t have central air conditioning, I simply switch the thermostat to ‘off’ in the summer. If it’s a really cold day I’ll turn it on manually, but there’s hardly ever need for that. If you have central air a programmable thermostat can save you quite a bit on your summer electricity bill too.

Here’s a fairly good general video on how to program a programmable thermostat. As always, if you can’t figure it out, don’t give up – dig out the manual and read it. If you can’t find the manual, look at your thermostat to find the brand and model number and Google “How to program X thermostat” – you’ll probably find instructions. The 5 minutes it takes to learn how to program your thermostat would save the average American $180 per year!

• Programming your thermostat properly
• Cost: free
• Time: less than 5 minutes
• Annual Savings: 10% off your heating and cooling bills
• Payback time: instantaneous
• Buying, installing and programming a new programmable thermostat
• Cost: about $30 – $150, depending on features
• Time: 15 – 30 minutes installing
• Annual Savings: 10% off your heating and cooling bills
• Payback time: 2 – 10 months, if your current energy use is about average

• Plant something: started inside – bok choy, basil, anise hyssop, tarragon. Dug new beds (ow!) and replanted all my raspberries and strawberries, and moved the bush cherries to their permanent place.
• Harvest something: indoor basil for pizza, and chives – they’re coming up! I love perennials; they come back all on their own.
• Preserve something: not really
• Waste not: swapped extra seeds for different varieties
• Want not: fixed my bike rack, replaced smoke detector battery, finally found an asian grocery and stocked up on soy sauce – a grocery store bottle is only enough for two big wok-fulls of stir fry.
• Community food systems: North Minneapolis Transition seed swap and gardening discussion
• Eat the food: found a really good new Pad Thai recipe, although not much that comes from stored food. I need to go back to the asian grocery and stock up on rice noodles and fish sauce now. (I thought I hated fish sauce, but it was great in this recipe, even though Shaun accidentally used tablespoons when it called for teaspoons. It must be something else in Japanese food I can’t stand.)