Planting Soil Blocks

April may be my busiest time of year, and I am very late in my posting this month. One of those busy things is transplanting dozens of seed flats full of young plants. It’s now time for many of them to go outside.

My experience with Soil Blocks has been really great. I get very good results and avoid using pots whenever possible, but nothing ever goes as planned. This year I’ve noticed two problems. The first was I used a different brand of worm castings in a few trays. These plants struggled and it looked to me like there was a phosphorus deficiency and I found it necessary to supplement them with some liquid fertilizer to keep them going. The other problem I noticed was that for some of my plants I believe I started them a little too early in the season and by the time they were transplanted some of the lower leaves started to yellow, also indicative of a nutrient deficiency.

Pictured here are many of my Brassica transplants: three varieties of kale, two broccoli types and a purple cauliflower. These seven trays had been growing in my basement for at least four weeks prior. A week before my transplant date I moved the young plants outside into the hoop house so that they can begin to feel what the outside world is like. This is called hardening-off.

The next step is to prepare the transplanting bed. I first used a hula-hoe or scuffle-hoe to quickly mop up any weeds that had germinated and pull any larger weeds. I then added some humic acid, kelp meal and some rock dust made of crushed basalt. Mix this into the top two or three inches, then rake the bed out flat.

Now I determine spacing, information usually given on the seed packet. I’ve learned that not all seed packet information is the same. I usually also look through a reference book or two and search the internet as well. Your experiences and individual soil conditions will also suggest differences. I do most of this look up during the winter months when I am stuck indoors and document them on my calender.

For transplanting, the first step is to determine the plant spacing. Plant spacing is easy, it’s the distance recommended between each plant. Don’t confuse that with seed spacing, you want the final spacing between plants after thinning. I review, but usually ignore the row spacing. Row spacing is how many feet between growing rows if you’re farming, or as many gardeners do scaled-down farming. Pre-industrial gardening is a nearly forgotten art. Most gardeners base their knowledge on the experience of farming and scale that downwards into the garden space. The spacing used for farming is very inefficient and was born out of the need to accommodate a tractor.

For my Brassica’s, I started at the end of the four foot wide bed and measured out two rows for the broccoli and cauliflower, and three rows for the Kale. Please note that the distance between my rows is the plant spacing, NOT the row spacing. You can even go a little smaller if you stagger the transplants in each row. Another thing I’ve learned is to be sure and think about how your going to weed later in the season and to always leave enough room for your favorite weeding tool. I normally space my bed rows no less than 6-8 inches apart. Then I take a stick and carefully draw the rows down the length of the bed to mark them.

Now I extend the measuring tape down the length of the bed and fix it there. Using a hand hoe I quickly dig transplanting holes using the measuring tape to guide the spacing. When you have more than one row in the bed, I alternate the transplant holes. For example, with my kale I used 12 inch spacing and I dug holes down the first row on the foot markers (1, 2, 3, …). The second row I offset the holes by 6 inches (1.5, 2.5, 3.5, …), and for the third row I went back to the foot markers (1, 2, 3, …). This actually put each plant at about 13.5 inches apart. This gives you whats called BED SPACING. In the same space using traditional rows I would have only achieved two rows, not three, and I just increased my yield by 33%.

Once all the holes are created, I decided to insert a small handful of high quality worm castings into each hole and mix it up by hand a little. Then I carefully lowered each block into its new home, but haven’t buried them just yet.

Since this blog is about Biological Gardening, how could I leave that out. I now mix in some beneficial bacteria with several gallons of water and use a watering can to wet each block well. After this I carefully bury each plant up to its cotyledons. The cotyledons were those first two seed leaves that formed after germination.

Since I did this work a few weeks ago now, I can also report how they are doing: The plants with the bad worm castings, have recovered and are now growing well, although they are still behind the others. The plants that were started a little too early are still alive and growing but they did struggle to get through a few light frost. The plants that were started indoors at the appropriate time, are doing amazingly well and are bright, green and happy. Despite the differences, of the 224 brassica plants featured here I haven’t lost a single one.

Why would the plants I started only one or two weeks earlier be struggling from a few light frosts when the others are so nice? Their brix was low because the block didn’t have enough nutrition to support that extra growth time. We can discuss this more in the fall, but a high brix plant is not phased by a little frost, as the extra sugar/nutrition lowers the freezing point of the plant.

Cheers,

~Sean