Different Harvests

For later weekends in August, I spent little time maintain the garden. I would check the water level every few days, and use a watering can to add 2 or 4 gallons.  Most weekends I had some small harvests, usually a bowl or two.  I even gave a lettuce plants to my mother.  With experience I found that there was different types of harvesting for basement gardens, like the selective, the pruning and the final harvest.  One of these are the types typically used in your outdoor garden.

Most outdoor gardeners want each plant to thrive and grow, harvests are made to keep the plants alive.  In an indoor garden, the less plants in an enclosed planter, the bigger the remaining plants can grow.  When lettuce is grown indoors, the leaves are not harvested, it is the entire plant.  The harvested plant’s root system should be pulled out of the planter.  Finally, additional dirt is added to fill the planter and provide additional nutrients for remaining plants.

Only harvest the amount needed.  How much of the vegetable is needed for the meal?  If the need is only enough for a few sandwiches, this would be a selective harvest. Pick the largest of the plants, and don’t take out chunks.  The selection should be distributed across the container, making space for adjacent plants.

When harvesting enough for a side dish, that’s a pruning harvest. The goal is to harvest a significant chunk of the plants in one container, and have the remaining plants to recover, expand and grow.

Then there is the final harvest.  This is when all the plants from one planter are harvested. There are other harvests earlier, but this should be a large harvest to turn the planter space around faster for the next harvest. Additional work after a final harvest is needed to plant the next vegetable.

There is also a Grand Harvest, which is when you are harvesting for a special side dish, typically for a party.  For a family gathering in February 2011, I had grown a full container of Swiss Chard that I rarely touched.  The leaves were huge, and a tall 20 gallon pot was filled.  I was able to steam enough for 6 adult Swiss Chard lovers, and even had leftovers. Harvested basement vegetables shelf life is pretty high, especially if refrigerate in vegetable bags available at supermarkets.  The bags are reusable.

It doesn’t take more than a few pinches of seeds to plant an entire container, and usually takes a month until the first harvest of any leafy vegetable such as lettuce, spinach or Swiss Chard.  The first few harvests can be early harvests of “baby” plants, where it might take many plants to make a meal.  When planning this approach, the distance between seeds when planting is closer than recommended, increasing additional plants in each planter by a factor of two or three.  Early pruning harvests of baby plants makes recommended space for the remaining plants. Additional dirt should be added to the planter after any pruning harvest.

Basement Farm Framework: Version 2, Part III

Basement Garden 8/5 - just before vacation
Note Beans sprouting

When we got back from our vacation, I heard a gutteral cry from behind the basement door.  It turns out the oldest cat, Patches, was in the basement.  We had a neighbor house sit and take care of the pets while we were gone, but I didn’t warn them that Patches will sneak down to the basement to spend time.  The way this cat was complaining, I guessed she may have been there for a few days.

Later when I checked the framework, it turned out that the cat created a “nest” in one of the planters closest to the window and under the grow light, so she could sun herself uninterrupted.  One of the lettuce planters had half the lettuce pushed down, and a newly planted Swiss Chard container had seedlings pressed into the dirt, covered with cat hairs.

Aside from that, the other 6 planters where growing well.  The Beans were going nuts.  I left with seedlings barely breaking ground and came back to six inch plants!  I underestimated the growth rate and size of beans, and realized I need to move things around in a few weeks.  The Swiss Chard planting looks like it was recovering from the squirrels, and one container of lettuce was ready for the first harvest.  I measured that under 2 gallons of water was used during the time we were gone, leaving plenty left in the 5 gallon pail.

Basement Garden 8/11 - back from vacation,
Note size of bean plants

Chuck and I arranged time to work on the watering via eMail while on vacation.  He showed up early on one of my last vacation days to give me a hand. I had already done some some carpentry work on the frame to support the 5 gallon water container, that’s 8.6 pounds.  I found a twenty gallon tank, but I needed to reinforce the framework to cover the additional weight. The 20 gallon reservour would weigh 170 pounds, a significant increase for the overall frame load.  Additional support would need to be in place before I purchased the reservour.

We wheeled the platform out of the basement, manuvered it down a two inch concrete lip to the garage.  Once we had it in the garage, we spent only 10-15 minutes removing the containers and disassembling the major components.  We had to put it on its side to install a 2x6 support beam under the location for the water tank, I also added a 7th pivot wheel under the beam, allowing the extra weight to rest directly over a ground support point.

We also reviewed my design for watering.  The upgrade would replace tubes tied to a 1x1 rectangular wooden frame with PVC pipes arragned as rectangles with large pre-drilled holes for the feeding pipes.  The original design two rectanges with a shared side, and 3-pipe corner PVC connectors with PVC holding it up to be over the planters.  I couldn’t feed the water tubing through the corner pieces, so T connectors were used instead, with the tubing going thouth the top of the T and support provided through the lower beams.  Each pipe had a T connection at each edge.  Three sides of each rectangle was a single pipe. The water feed came through the shared side, breaking two sides in half.  All together about 30 pieces of PVC pipe were cut. 20 of them used for support within a T connection, and under a foot in length.  Chuck couldn’t stay long that day, but his input in the design was helpful. The work on the watering system took much longer than expected, well into the night.  I completed test drips of the new water system.  All the drips were working fine, The new pump was driving water with regular dripping at all end-points. In a few additional places there were small drips came from the connection between the small feeder tubes and the larger ones.  I didn’t want to fix it immediately, but watch to see how long it deteriorates over time.

After making calculations, I realized that each of the drips completed two gallons per hour, with eight drippers in the farm platform. That is 16 gallons per hour, even though the tank is 5 gallons.  That means each our the entire water would flow through the system over three times in one hour.  Thank goodness for closed cycle watering.  I run the system for 2-4 hours, twice a day.

The worked went until late at night.  After completing the drip test, I filled the trays with the planters.  I forgot about the two inch step between the garage and basement.  This wasn’t something I could lift, but used a small piece of scrap plywood to make a ramp.  Once I got the first set of whells up over the ridge, the rest came easy.  I didn’t even spill any water.

After putting the framework back in place, I examined the working system.  There was little planned maintenance work to be completed at this point, I still need to fill the water tank with two gallons a few times a week.  Even though the normal New England farmers were planning for their early fall harvests, I was now focused more on planting for a late fall and winter harvest.

Why I started growing vegetables in my basement after 9/11

When people ask you where you were on 9/11, most people over 25 years old can tell you what they were doing when they first heard about the airplane strikes in the World Trade Center.  Before 2001, September 11^th was the date to celebrate my lovely step daughter’s birthday.  On that day, the date took on a whole new meaning for our country.

I remember hearing about a plane hitting the world trade center while driving to a customer site in MetroWest. I was listening to NPR, and the 9 am news announced the first plane hitting the World Trade Center. While working at the customer site, I kept up to date by checking the Wall Street Journal web site.  I could access live feeds from web sites based in the vicinity. What many people don’t know is when the buildings went down, it was the ultimate testing of the capabilities built into the Internet. The Internet was designed to survive a nuclear attack.  It turns out that on September 11, 2001, one of the largest Network Access Points on the Internet was destroyed.  A NAP is a data center used to exchange binary traffic between providers, and typically has more weight in legal paperwork than the actual equipment used for traffic.  The NAP located in the World Trade Center was demolished, and the Internet barely hiccupped.

Within a few hours it became apparent the scope of the attack.  Few of the planes took off from Logan airport.  I knew those flights, and realized that there may be people I know on those planes.  The attack also changed the Technology industry. Companies didn’t want to spend money on new enterprise software solutions, or consultants, and Venture Capitalists started to shut down startups.  I was working at a startup as a Product Manager consultant, but within 45 days I was out of work.

I was in a transition point in my career.  I had a solid engineering background, but little recent hands-on experience.  I was working towards an MBA, but was a Semester short of graduating.  I decided to focus on finishing my degree while the terrorism and wars filled the news channels.  I got my degree the following spring, but couldn’t find a full-time job.  I continued to look for work.  Eventually the unemployment ran out, we were on food stamps.  Eating healthy isn’t easy on a limited budget.  Produce, especially during the winter is an expensive side dish. 

I needed to find a job with benefits and decided to take a job doing retail sales at a local computer store chain store in early 2003.  I worked there for over two and a half year until I was able to get another job within the High Technology Industry of Corporate America.  It was over five years after the terrorist attack when my career recovered.

The family did go through some hard times, and I realized the first thing that we couldn’t afford is good food, specifically fresh produce and vegetables.  While growing up, our family always had a vegetable garden, but we had too many trees in our property to grow a garden.  Separate from improvements in my career, we decided to spend some money on improving the house.  Part of that improvement was removal of a few trees to make room for a 3-season porch.  That also created a spot in the back yard to try growing a vegetable garden.  We started planting our first garden in 2009.

In the spring of 2010, I was laid off again.  Unfortunately, the technology industry has become a transitional career.  I had a great garden that year but realized my future plans were uncertain.  Unemployment would stop some time later winter, and based on the economy, I could not guarantee if I would have a job by then. 

That’s when I decided to start a basement farm.  I had containers, a tray from early planting, seeds, and could water the plants by hand. all I needed was a grow lamp.  I planted indoors throughout the fall, winter and into early spring.  Throughout that time I also had enough lettuce for salads on a regular basis.  I thought that if I could get something growing, it would be cheaper than purchasing produce in the middle of winter.  If our family ended up on foodstamps, whatever grew would help us eat healthy at a low price.

The commitment to grow a basement farm is like cooking, you mix the ingredients together and let the fire or heat do the rest.  Within a few minutes or hour you consume the results. The difference is with any framing it takes months to see the outcome.  I did a planting of Swiss Chard in early November, got a job in January, and had my family over for dinner in early February.  I harvested enough Swiss Chard (a favorite family dish) for 8 people with leftovers. I even had an occasional spinach harvest.  I kept it going to spring, when I moved the containers outdoors, then discovered squirrels got to the harvest of Swiss Chard before I did.

It seemed like an overall successful project.