Alaskamp!: Actual Farmy things (Starring DIRT)

Author's note: It's late and I'm tired and I'm not going to edit this. If there are any glaring formatting or grammatical errors, please email me and I'll fix them.

These are undoubtedly involved in the selection process.

So Annie already covered yesterday evening, but I will add that it was the coolest party I’ve ever been too (sorry AEPi). I’m coming home in October because I have important places to be, but I might be flying right back up here and never leaving again. I’m enchanted with Alaska!

Today I got to play with dirt. It’s still too cold to plant most stuff outside here so we get the seeds started in the creatively named seed house. The process of choosing which plants to plant, how many to plant, and when to start them revolve around an ancient ceremony shrouded in mystery, by which I mean it’s clear to me that it’s complicated, and I’m still learning about it.

This is the end Result

I love the fact that everything that we grow is contained in one little box. This is strictly speaking not the case; it’s several boxes, but it’s still like magic to me. Planting seeds feels more like trying to bring plants back to life from the dead, seeds are dry and insubstantial and they turn into FOOD! But before we coax them back into existence, we need something to put them in. Enter dirt blocking.

Several boxes.

Instead of using plastic trays to start the seeds, we use potting soil blocks. We have dozens and dozens of empty wooden trays, and big bales of dry potting soil. First the soil needs to be dampened (read as: needs to have a lot of freaking water poured on it). It starts in a consistency not dissimilar to that of NesQuick powder, and has some of the same habits. It likes to form clods and not soak up water, at least at first, and is a light brown color, not too much like the rich black stuff your pansies come in. After much water dumpage and copious raking, shoveling, and mixing with hands, it starts to look more like a thing you want to put your plants in.

This is how a pile of dirt looks with a shovel in it.

We use the dirt blocker (I made that name up, I don’t know what they’re called) to make…(wait for it)…. blocks of dirt. The soil has to be wet enough that you can grab a handful and squeeze water out of it easily (if it’s too dry the blocks fall apart, if it’s too wet they sort of melt). The dirt blocker itself is not very complicated, you mush it down into the box of potting soil, make sure your soil is really well packed in, then move it over to a tray, squeeze the handle on top, and out pop six (or twenty with the little one) perfect soil blocks. Each tray can hold four loads from the dirt blocker, so you can have either twenty-four or eighty seeds per tray. The type of plant determines whether you need to use the large blocks or the small ones. Smaller seeds like kohlrabi or cauliflower can go into the smaller blocks, big stuff like squash require big ones. Seeding the trays is simple, but time consuming. You put seeds in each block, depending on the germination rate of the plants you're seeding you might put just one seed per block, or you might put several. It’s better to get a plant in every block, so redundancy might seem like the obvious choice, but when more than one seed in a block germinates you end up having to cut one back.

Happy plants that just got fed!

This bad girl blocks the dirt!

I got to spend several hours making perfect soil block trays, and seeding many of them. We’re going to be seeding a lot over the next month (including 40 trays of bunch onions EVERY WEEK) which is good because I like it. It’s very Zen, and I can do it while I listen to my books on tape, or to the hermit thrushes.

After blocking and seeding for a while I got to fulfill a life dream and walk around with a backpack full of water that smelled like poop and spray it on stuff. I’m not kidding, we feed our plants a mixture of soil amendments (bone meal, blood meal, some other stuff) called OMEGA 666 which sounds like a great name for a metal band, it’s delivered via a mister (like for mist, not Mr. Maloney) you carry on your back, and Susan my boss says it "smells like poopie". It isn't that bad really, after a minute you don't notice. I did spend a minute pretending to be a Ghost-Buster, that thing is freaking sweet.