Welcome Potential Contributors,

Note: this page is temporary and is intended to give information to potential Contributors. I have included some articles written on my Farm's BLOG simply to give some idea of how the page works. With the exception of  "Sprouting with Hydrogen Peroxide" these are not exactly the format of the articles I intend to publish. These posts will be removed or restated before the Good Earth Soil Magazine goes public. 

    Recently I read a plaintiff statement on a social media post which proposed a question which can be paraphrased: "Why do we have to answer these same basic questions over and over again?" And this simple question may have presented an opportunity.  

    Despite the post's apparent argumentative nature, it occurred to me that I too had ask the same question, albeit never in an open forum, because the answer is as basic as the question: We answer the same questions over and over because our answer becomes the research of people searching for answers in their own gardens and the media makes it this way. We, as gardeners and writers want to help others along in their journey, just as we were helped. But there's a more technically correct answer. The fact of social media forums scrolling infinitely into the past causes successive posts to bury the insights we seek to give, causing questions are restated over and over again. 

    An easy answer to the problem of inherent lossiness imbedded in the medium might be to ask the people with knowledge sufficient to answering these basic questions to write short answers on a page which centralizes the answers outside of the social media environment. My intention in starting the Good Earth Soil Magazine (GESM) is to create something of a  "frequently asked questions" (FAQ) resource for Gardeners and Market Garden Farmers. And I am asking you to consider joining in the effort by positing questions and then answering them. 

    The idea of these articles is to answer those questions repeated over and again by people coming into the Sustainable Agriculture Movement. There will be room for new theory, but the intent is to state forcefully the working knowledge we all have had to find on our own. In practice the same answers to the same questions you may have given many times can then becomes a link to a prewritten and well considered answer, rather than a five paragraph short essay written onto a small window.

    GESM wants to bring the "Basic Set" of Sustainable Agriculture knowledge to people in a searchable database of articles, written by people who know, who have done, and who wish to help. So I am inviting you tell us what you know, what you did, how you learned, and who you are.

    Of course there will be questions on how best to do this we will find in our own journey together. Ideas which come of the problem solving we will do on top of research of others. But our insights, both old and new, might become the next big thing; the newer Ruth Stout; the easier way Back to Eden. If you have a book, are writing a BLOG, or have a video to promote, the Good Earth Soil Magazine can become a central location by which more people might find you. 

    Every Contributor article will be given front page exposure and made available by key word search and by key topics. The only restrictions on content will be to the general topic of Sustainable Agriculture knowledge. Anecdotal evidence is sufficient to the needs of our intended audience and Citations to other people's work can add to the veracity of your work but is not required. And if you can make a dollar, without spamming the page, then this can be part of this too. 

     If you are interested in proposing an article GESM,or have further questions about becoming involved, follow this link to Rules and Contact information.

Propose your questions and write the answers. Include a few key words for the searchbots, images and links to Citations or products. We'll find a way to get your work onto the page.  

Our Journey into No-till

 When we decided to take up owning a farm, we really had very little plant knowledge. Even less about how to work the land or make money in farming. What we did have though, was a good idea of how to work and a sure faith in our ability to learn what we needed to do. We decided early on that we wanted to grow organic. But had little idea of what that would mean. 

The "conventional" idea in organic gardening is to till rows, fertilize the dirt with stuff that comes in bags, plants seeds, harvest produce. When the plants finished in Fall we cut off the plants and start it all over the next Spring. Most large farms do this sort of thing and you pay a bit extra in the store or farmer's market. What could be easier?

Our first picking in 2018

As it turned out, organic gardening wasn't quite the same thing as planting things in the back yard. We bought tools to till the soil, and bags of "organic" fertilizers too. We mixed the stuff together in neat rows and planted "organic seeds". In our first year we did pretty well, but the tally at the end of the season proved that our lettuce would cost about eight dollars a head, tomatoes around a buck each. We spent most of the season pulling weeds and harvesting root crops proved to be very hard work since our soils were also very hard. 

If we were going to make a dollar in farming we felt sure that we needed another way to get the job done. I bought some books on market gardening to try and find out how people made a living.Each of these books shared much the same idea. Replace bagged fertilizers with compost. 

Composting works by turning dead plant matter into really dead plant matter by rotting it out intentionally in big piles, turning it occasionally to give the microbes that break down plant matter some air.  Beyond this microbial  processing stuff there is the fungal processing, which completes the cycle by turning the really dead organic matter, into dead-dead-dead nutrients that plant roots can use right away. Once the compost has been in the dirt for a while plants can use the nutrients found in the compost to make new plants.  But composting alone didn't really do much for our gardens. We piled up the compost, tilled it into the soil, and planted the rows. The weeds loved it. But crop plants were slow and unsteady, produced very little, and wasted another year, while wearing our hands out pulling weeds. 

In the end we decided that composting weeds was mostly a net-zero gain. The plant matter we used to make our compost came from the same ground we were putting the compost into. We were taking out one measure of weeds, then cooking it down before putting the same measure back into the ground.  Any nutrition we got out in produce took part of that measure out without adding anything to the soil. 

The next logical step was to bring some inexpensive horse manure in and boost the nutrition of our compost piles.  But this really didn't add much to the soil and was really quite expensive after paying for the trucking. We figure it would take about eight years to get where we wanted to go, at about two hundred dollars a truck load, ten truckloads a year. Adding manure was more effective, but too slow and much too expensive.  We still needed to find a way to grow things, and not the sort that simply gives up, we kept looking for a better way. 

On one helpful YouTube lesson I learned of the Ruth Stout method for growing in "deep tilth". The idea is to use imported straw, the stuff we often used to make slippery clay walkways navigable in Winter rains, as a medium for growing plants.  

Laying down a thick layer of straw on the soil late in fall, when it is cheap and available then, in Spring, planting directly into this straw layer, right on top of the soil seemed a good possibility. We thought it might work. We found the cost of straw to be as much as buying trucks of horse manure to build the soils and we were running low on cash. 

After talking to our local Ag. Agent Ann was invited to a class on Cover Cropping. The class was not very helpful, but a door prize she received during this class was. The book was on Composting theory and practices. The book was a good base of soil knowledge, even if it solved none of our immediate problems. But it did make mention of something that did work . . .

We found another way to go in "No-till" farming.  The person(s) most involved in this movement made a video and this was the clue we'd been looking for; a way forward. . .

2022 Was our first year
of no-till farming

No-till gardening uses "free" resources to do what the Ruth Stout gardening method does. Instead of using straw, we would use Fall leaves to create deep tilth. Instead of composting weeds, we would compost Fall leaves, which had fewer weed seeds and better nutrition. And using hardwood leaves as a mulch would take light away from the weed seeds so they wouldn't grow as well. 

Since my previous business had been in landscape maintenance it occurred to me that every year, in Fall, I would bring truckloads of leaf debris to a local landscape and rock supplier and then pay to dump the stuff. The Supplier which took my leaves would load them into bigger trucks and then pay to give it to a Composter. 

 So why not cut out the Composter guy and have the Landscape Supplier's leaves dumped on our long gravel driveway instead?

No till means not disturbing the ground
once you set things in motion.

We got right on it by asking the landscape supplier to dump the good stuff here. In the first year we took in about fif cubic yards of leaves and I got busy loading about six inches of raw leaves onto our existing planting beds to spend the Winter as a mulch. I would till this mulch into the ground in Spring and see how it went. I piled up the leaves I didn't put on our rows in long high rows, and spent the Winter learning about what I would do with the new information. One of those things involved protecting the soil in Winter, something I had not considered before. 

Spring is a time for hope

Every Winter the rains would come, each high speed drop hitting some soil we had carefully made, breaking it into their constituent parts and leaving a pure layer of light clay on top. Once the sun came out this layer would dry to a hard cover. And before planting I had to go out and till the top layer making the ground suitable for planting. The leaf debris I had put out on our rows was now rotting out in the gardens and protecting it against soil erosion. The protection of our beds meant last year's soil never broke down in Winter. In Spring the weed seeds which fell everywhere in the late Summer were buried under inches of light denying leaves and failed to germinate. But this wasn't all there was to  the benefits in the first year.


Having six inches of worm food on top of the garden rows not only preserved the structure of the soil we built last year, it helped removed many of the insect pests that eat plants too.  The dead-dead stuff is protected from the rains an cold, so the microbes and fungi, which grow just below the layer where worms do their work, had plenty to digest into plant growing nutrients.

The whole thing becomes a system of life where the leaves feed the worms, which feed the microbes,  which feeds the fungi, which carry nutrients and water to the roots of plants, which produce the food, which feeds us.. We had to build Our Produce Stand to get rid of the excess produce this new no-till system created in the first year.  Our gardens began producing in overdrive. But this is only the theoretical end of the beginning.

The best melon I've ever eaten
came from a no-till hill.

The produce, no longer having to work with expensive bag fertilizers, which retard the natural growth of fungi and soil animals, is grown in soils which don't tend to dry out so easily for lack of places for the water to hide. The leaf mulch protects the soils from the heat as much as it did the rains and cold.  At night water rises from the ground in the slow evaporative process which happens in Summer. So water comes toward the surface at night and lasts all day long. Watering the rows was no longer a daily thing, instead we watered only when the plants looked like they needed it. The food produced from the plants that grew in the good earth had better water content, so it lasts better on the shelf and doesn't need refrigeration to stay fresh. 

The nutrient rich soils gave the plants all they needed to produce fruits and vegetable with higher than average sugar and vitamin content, making them sweeter as well as juicier. But better produce isn't free forever. Nothing is free in nature. But we are getting closer to it.

Objects may be more plentiful
than they appear.

The rows can still be improved going forward through the coming years. We bought a "broadfork" to keep the soils down to to the bottom of the fungi layer loose so roots and worms can work easily. By pushing our heavy broadfork deep into the soils we add open spaces, which speeds things up without disturbing the microbes, bacteria, and fungi. But, while this makes things go faster, it also digests the leaf debris down much faster.  So as part of what we do in this no-till system is to recharge our growing spaces by adding more leaf compost between every planting. 

Our first year's no-till experiment was fantastic. We didn't solve all of our farming problems in that first year, but we did learn enough to change the entire farm over to no-till in the nest year. And since then I have learned so much about how soils work which will bring us more planting success as we go from year to year. 

Some of the things we had learned in our early going remains good practices now.  We still leave the old roots in the dirt by cutting off the greenery. The roots die off and become water channels for those plants which follow after without disturbing the soil.  The roots compost in the soil and feed the worms which makes clumping soil, which feed the next thing and so forth.

We still cut off plants and compost the remains, but this releases the Soil Nitrogen plants need to grow new plants. So we add a bit of blood meal to the soil to help replace the nitrogen. The bigger the greenery, the more nitrogen you need. 

A bit of black mulch to
raise soil temperatures.

We add more organic compost to the top of the rows to replenish the worm food.  If your soil tests say you need calcium, you throw some bone meal on at this step too. Worms will process whatever is left in the dirt, eventually running out of food and moving on. We like fat worms that stick around. So we put about an inch of leaf compost on top of each row between plantings, stirring it into the topmost layer.

It is said that a general rule in bed flipping is to consider how much greenery you take off as about the same weight as the compost you put on. But since we are relatively new to this we are overdoing it a bit. Some say it takes about twenty five gallons of compost to replenish a fifty foot row, but I think they are just guessing.  We add more than this to our rows because it is early on in our soil building process, but it might take less. I'll add a bit about soil testing for soil organic matter to this blog later on, but if you put a cup of your row soil into three cups of water in a jar you can tell how much organic soil matter there is relative to the clays and other stuff pretty easily.  

We plant directly through the new leaf debris or let things work through the Winter for planting in the Spring. And the circle is closed, the cycle continues.

Rows already flipped,

Weeds will slowly disappear in this system, or are very easy to pull since the soils are so light.  A bit of diligence is a good idea to get them out of the garden.  Eventually weeding will take less time than watering, which won't take much time at all. 

I hope this article explains things sufficiently to get you going in no-till, if you wish to go. Most people are not planting an acre and a half in vegetables and fruits, so they can use leaves from the tree out front of the house or down the block. But no matter the size I can attest to this system being really good in the first year and sustainable forever. The product being better in quality and quantity without a lot of petroleum distillates in your food is what we need more of too. 

We are in this to win this, so we will keep doing what we do. I can't see how this system can fail, though I am sure I will find some way to make it do so at some point. But I am told this is fairly idiot proof, so time will tell.

And it gets better every year.

Our No-Till Journey So Far

 In the weeks coming up to early Spring, most of our plans are made and in place. We know pretty much what we are going to grow and where it will all go, before actually starting to put stuff into the ground. And, as we have in all previous years, we fail in enacting a large part of our plans for many reasons. Weather is the ecstatic part of our plan. Nature will do what it does and nothing we plan can change things. Planning is a static thing. We spend time learning new things, looking for pieces of a puzzle aimed at making the Farm produce stuff people will buy. Every year brings a new opportunity to do what we came to do when we bought this place and took up the work. The Farm has it's own schedule, if we fought this idea we'd lose. Despite all of this, every year I try to come up with ideas on how to get the job done. The New Year's Resolution habit has been something I've done for decades. I would pick one thing to learn, one thing to do, and learn to do it; the list of stuff I've learned is pretty overwhelming (you'd think one of them might have made money). Two years ago I spent my spare time looking at Compost stuff. Last year it was all about Pest Control. This year I'm hip deep in soil science. My focus is on improving the soil below the surface, without actually going down into the dirt to get there.

Last year's no-till effort was all about attracting the right sort of animals, worms, and discouraging the wrong sort, beetles. My brother remarked that he had left a straw bail on our soil for a week and when he opened it there were literally hundreds of Compost Worms trying to eat an entire Straw Bail,this  tells me the Compost Worms are abundant and happy. The questions of improving worms is the Earthworm population that actually lives in the soil, not Compost Worms  live in stuff above the soil surface, like piles of leaves and this prepares the compost for being made into Soil Organic Matter (SOM).  But Earthworms take in the clay, sand, and Soil Organic Matter and pass the mix through their digestive system. It comes out behind the worms in clumps which are covered over in digestive microbes.

These microbes release the nutrients they find pre-digested in these clumps. The microbes eat the clumps, they accumulate nutrients in their little bodies, and when they die the nutrition is released into the soil ready for plants to use. Clumping soil is also better because it has space for roots to grow where they will find water and ready nutrients ready for plants to use. But there's one more peice of the puzzle to think about and it takes a bit of learning.

Fungus is among us.  For our purposes I won't go into how fungi are everywhere, on everything, in the air we breath . . . The truth is Fungus is everywhere. But this is about garden soil fungus and there are a few basic types. The first are the Mushroomy sort of fungi that live on rotting wood. This sort of fungus s helpful to farming because it breaks down large wood that worms cannot eat. Permaculture farming is often based on putting logs under the dirt and eventually this leads into some really nutrient heavy soils which don't require much water. There are fungus that break down animal and vegetable matter and these are the things I am writing about today. Fungus processes dead things so once the microbes I wrote of earlier die off this makes room for fungus to come and break their little bodies into their useful parts. Once particular sort of fungi, the mycorrhizal  (literally "fungal root") type,  live on the surface of living root systems.  There are two basic types of mycorrhizal fungi I am spending time learning this year.  Both do basically the same job so I'll treat them the same.

Endo and Ecto Mycorrhizae live on plant roots and connect the roots to the soil in a broad web. The fungi finds loose bits of nutrition and water, carries it to the surface of plant root systems, and trades it for stuff the plants make, like sugars.  These fungi extend the effective size of a plant's roots, so less root is needed to support more plant, more fruiting. Endo Mycorrhizae does this best for annual plants, like Summer vegetables and flowers that live through the Winter in seeds. Ecto Mycorrhizae does this too, but with perennial plants that live through the Winter in the roots of plants.  Both of these types of fungi do much the same job, and just like other fungi they are literally everywhere, but the difference between a good garden and a really great garden is in making the conditions right for these two types of fungi to thrive in the soil all of the time. There's competition to think about.

There are a lot of fungal types, most do something of the same job, breaking down the dead into parts that life can use. These two types specialize in carrying this stuff down to plants in a symbiotic relationship, but the size of the fungal colony waxes and wains, depending on what is being grown. The right conditions are not always present to maintain a huge colony of Endo or Ecto types the whole year around, so colonies have to be re-established and those colonies have to re-grow into a useful size to support great plant growth. So the question becomes: If the soils is right, the worms are there, the microbes are dying in their millions . . .  How do we encourage the right sorts of fungi so that our plants can develop into living their best lives? So my experiment this year is to do a few things and see what happens. 

The first thing I will do has already started. The first things we did were to build a great soil mix so that the worms would come. part of this is to be really aware of soil compaction so that our worms weren't driving around harder soils, part of this was to establish a no-till system that didn't chew our worms up.  The worms brought the right sorts of microbes. Not mixing air into the soil encourages the right sorts of microbes and discourages the wrong sorts. Too much air encourages microbes that eat plant matter very quickly, so it isn't there to hold water or clump behind worms. Too little air ar the microbes we get work very slowly and give off methane gasses. The right sort carefully breaks down plant matter. These steps are already working today.

The second thing we need to do, the part of this year's plan where we make the change, is to put a bit of these Mycorrhizae type into the soil when we plant starts and seeds. Then maintain the soil with an eye toward encouraging the fungi to remain alive and healthy all the year around, so when we plant our veggies and flowers, there is already a thriving fungal community in place with stuff to offer the plants. This ought to encourage rapid plant development and make our short -bottom of a narrow valley- growing season to produce more and produce it more quickly. 

Our no-till system puts worm food on top, keeping our worms happy. Keeping our feet off the planting spaces and using soil watering systems keep our worm habitat happy. The worms spread the microbes, making the microbes happy. Feeding the worms and protecting the soil makes the microbial growth environment happy. If we put some of the Endo and Ecto Mycorrhizae directly on the roots of plants, or in places where seeds will sprout roots, our fungal colonies won't need to find roots to work with, making the fungi happy. And, finally, if the fungi become well entrenched in soils where things grow all of the time, the environment for plants will be completely happy.  Then we might be happy with the increase in produce that we can sell and spend the money on stuff that will make our farm happier.

Pest Control Theories

 

My one and only New Year's Resolution for 2023 is Step Two of the Grand Plan: to make the Farm profitable through production of food.

We made the Farm self-sustaining a little over one year ago and this meant no longer augmenting our income with savings. But this year is about making the future of the Farm more profitable so that we can begin the massive improvements we have been working toward for nearly eight years. Step One of the Grand Plan was to build the Farmhouse and we did that last year. Step Two is to build a Farm Business. Step Three is all about hospitality and creating a wedding venue in the future.

Our first year Step Two goal is to earn $25,000 in cash sales. Since we assume we will earn about a dollar a pound on produce then we will need to sell 25,000 pounds. But this level of efficiency is not likely to happen right away. Instead, we are assuming that we will need to grow nearly double this amount in order to find the highest quality goods, then preserve or donate the rest. The problems are many in reaching this level of growing things and many more in finding a way to sell it all when we succeed.

Of the things we have learned in our Farming practice so far I think getting rid of pests is perhaps the most important. In our second year of planting we found Squirrels, Gophers, Rabbits, Rats, and Mice all were very happy to come in and eat anything we had growing. We lost our entire crop that year as we learned to deter rodents and shoot straight. Last year all we had on the Farm were Chipmunks and a few field rats, so the problem wasn't too large to handle and we were able to sell a bunch of our production. But, even as we succeeded in getting the mammals under control, we found that insects began taking their place.

Cucumber Beetles

There are a great many insects that can harm crops. Last year we had Cucumber Beetles, Japanese Beetles, Flea Beetles, and a few grubs, but there were doubtless many more we didn't look for.  There are Ants, but they didn't come into the garden much. You might see the scope of the problem we will face as we expand our gardens this year.  

Of particular concern are the Beetles since they nest and over-Winter in plant debris. Since we are importing hundreds of yards of plant debris as part of building a no-till farm, we are likely going to give a home to huge numbers of beetles.  

Japanese Beetles

Adult Beetles have few natural predators and many have chemical defenses so birds usually stay away from them. Almost all have significant jumping and flying abilities too, so they are hard to catch. As we plan for the Spring we are spending quite a bit of time on the problem of Beetle eradication and prevention. As is turns out there are quite a few ways to get the job done in an organic garden. We will likely use them all. The first thing we can do is to put the right plants in the right places. 

If you put all of a Beetle's favorite food in one row the numbers will increase and soon the wee beasties will finish off the crop and need to find substitute food. One way to plant right is to use barrier plants, things that stop the beetles from moving from row to row and finding new food to eat. We will plant our rows with the following in mind.

• Marigold is a plant we have been using since beginning to grow stuff. It gives off an odor which most mammals, and quite a few bugs, tend to avoid. Marigold also gives Bumbler Bees a great place to sleep at night, so pollinator populations tend to increase in number. Marigolds are cheap, fast growing, and long flowering plants which look great in rows which border the larger gardens. We usually put in around a hundred Marigolds, this year we will put in around one-thousand as we expand our growing spaces. 
• Nasturtium is a plant I put in during year one of planting, but haven't used in any year since.  Nasturtium is a different sort of barrier plant, the bug attractive sort which tend to bring insect to one spot. In the first year I thought Nasturtiums didn't do well here so we gave up on growing it.  But after reading up on the subject we found that bugs loved them. They ate them down to nothing ahead of the plants growing out and before moving on to other sorts of plants.   There are other plants that attract bugs too. Radishes and Kale haven't done well here, for the same reason as the Nasturtiums didn't.  We are planning to plant at least one large row of Nasturtium in each larger garden bed, then treat the one row with Diatomaceous Earth once a week to kill off those bugs that have been drawn to it.  
• Diatomaceous Earth is a natural pesticide, it gets into the joints of bugs' exoskeletons and they simply stop moving around until they die off.  But care must be taken even in using this relatively innocent dust because Diatomaceous Earth also kills off beneficial bugs. We will restrict its use to these Nasturtium beds and then dust other plants only if we find a problem.
• Onions, Chives, and Garlic, all form a barrier to certain insects. We always grow these but now they will become border plants to hold back pests. These will be grown as "companion" plants along side of potatoes, beans, and tomatoes. Some plants simply do better near some other plants. I have a few charts describing these relationships and so we will plan accordingly. 
• Many herbs also deter insects. Oregano, Cilantro, Dill, Rosemary, and Basil all can deter insects, some have insecticidal properties.  Dill and Thyme can prevent some insects from laying eggs.

Cutworms

So it seems safe to say that planning to put the right plants in the right places might make things go along a bit easier. But there is a second way to keep buggy populations down: bringing in some good bugs to eat the bad ones. 

• Nematodes are non-segmented microscopic worms that hunt down many pesky bugs while the pesky things are in their larval stage. Nematodes invade their evil larval guts and eat them from the inside out. Some larvae, of some bugs, infesting root systems and killing the plants from below. Some adult Pests eat leaves and stunt growth from above. Putting a few billion Nematodes on the garden in Spring will help to kill off the larvae and prevent the adults from laying eggs in the soil.  
• A large number of different varieties of Nematodes are available, cheap, and easy to find, and these things come in very large quantities. You put them out using a garden sprayer and they breed and persist in the soil so long as the bad bugs are around to eat.
• Ladybugs and lace wing flies eat aphids, so they can be bought to release into the gardens, or encouraged to come in from the wild. We usually have a lot of ladybugs in Summer and we don't seem to have much of an aphid problem so far, so we are not likely to buy these predator insects this year. 
• Our Ducks and Chickens all like a good snack and many bad bugs, like houseflies, slugs, and snails make good duck food.

Aphids

The third way is to use insecticidal soap sprayed directly on the bugs. This is mostly a few tablespoons of detergent soap mixed in water and put into a garden sprayer. This stuff works by covering the little breathing holes on buggy bodies and suffocating them. There are no chemicals in Insecticidal Soap, but it can't be sprayed without care since it kills beneficial insects too. 

Finally there are physical barriers like cloth row covers. These keep the pests away from plants in an attempt to give the plant a running start. But row covers are time consuming, light depriving, and expensive to buy, so it's not likely we will invest in them this year. 

Since our problem is mostly beetles, we will rely heavily on the first and second means of keep their numbers down. We will carefully plan our gardens to include elements which deter bugs from sticking around or attract the bad bugs to their death. We will put down Nematodes to try and get them out of the soil. 

Flea Beetles

We have no hope of getting rid of all the bad bugs, but we can encourage the good ones that eat them if we are mindful of the problem.  The bug problem is a large and growing concern as we open more planting spaces and put out much more composted materials and leaf debris. The bug problem is much on our minds right now as we plan on making the 

Sprouting with Hydrogen Peroxide

 We recently heard about a few seeding hacks that seem to work.

The first new idea was pre-soaking seeds in a 1% hydrogen peroxide (h2o2). This is the same hydrogen peroxide you would use on a cut and it usually comes in a brown bottle. We took a small jar and added two parts water to one part 3% hydrogen peroxide. I did this by taking a simple measuring cup and an empty jar, then putting two measures for every one of the Hydrogen Peroxide.  

We did the first test with some rather expensive marijuana seed and a few days later with pumpkin, pepper, tomato, and squash seeds. {art of the idea in this is to clean the seed exterior of pathogens while giving the germ a boost of oxygen that comes from the extra oxygen atom found in h2o2. For the Pot seed I got a quick response and sprouted five of five in three days. This is excellent since I usually get as low as three of five sprouts and it takes anywhere up to a week's time.  The other seed tests were a bit more positive than negative, about a twenty percent boost in pepper pops, a quicker sprouting in tomatoes, and an ambiguous result with squash.

The second hack was snipping the sharp end off of the nib of squash, cucumber, tomato, and pepper seeds. We cut a very small tip off of these seeds using a razor blade prior to soaking them overnight in 1% hydrogen peroxide solution. 

The idea here being to let the pre-soak into the seeds more quickly and stimulate sprouting. In the tests so far we can make a good case for cutting the tips off because we got a four to seven day spouting time. Our pepper seed often under-perform so if we get a three of five seed sprouting ratio in half the time we have to look at it as a win. All of these seeds were sprouted in wet paper towels indoors, in zip-lock baggies, after pre-soaking them. Generally we got a better germination response by soaking the open ends that with those we didn't cut the nibs off of.

The Third Hack is to sprout larger seeds in paper towels. This is a pretty simple idea where you pour your seed off onto a paper towel after soaking them in the 1% Hydrogen Peroxide solution. I use a dinner plate to keep the mess down, but H2O2 doesn't stain things (it's basically water with an extra Oxygen atom). After pouring them onto the nicely wetted towel I fold the towel over to cover the seeds and slip the whole thing in a zip lock baggy. Since we usually sprout a large number of seeds  and many different varieties, the bags let you write on them with a waterproof pen. 

You can stack these things up without making a mess in a place where they will get limited light and not suffer chilling. We check them every day and might even mark the bag to show how the sprouts are doing. Sorting through them and checking for open seeds is sort of fun and, so long as the towel stays wet the sprouts will go a few days before they need transplanted. 

These sorts of tests are not solid science, they just seems to work. The pre-soak seems the thing most effective of the three, but snipping the ends worked very well in pepper seeds and extra good in tomatoes, so the practice might be worth exploring.

We are also trying the h2o2 presoak with peas, beans, cucumbers, and others as an antiseptic practice. So far nothing much to report here.

- David Smith - Creekside Farm Oregon - Manning, Oregon