Spring fever has hit, along with its annual increase in work load. It seems like I’ve always got a ton of metalwork to do in order to meet deadlines around this time, compounded by the equally time sensitive pressures to get the garden prepared and planted. This year I’ve added the task of composing posts about these activities for this blog. I’m struggling to figure out how to handle it all.
While I want to sit down and write some longer, more considered blog entries this keeps getting put off due to the time involved. Theoretically I should be able to spend a bit of time each day working on a single, more substantial entry, but I don’t seem to work in that fashion. When I write I find I get mentally immersed in the process, propelling me to finish no matter how long it takes, or what else doesn’t get done as a result. So I’m going to try a different approach for the next few days. Instead of one longer post I’m going to attempt to put out a short one each day. No promises, but let’s see what happens.
So today I thought I’d share a food project I’m trying to develop into a regular system here on the homestead. Mostly I’m thinking about how beneficial this would be in the winter if I can work it all out. Still it’s going to be handy now in early spring before I have a steady supply of salad greens coming from the garden.
What I want to do is grow a bunch of micro greens to use as the base for salads. This would provide me with very fresh, healthy food, and save me the expense of getting tubs of greens at the supermarket, which I’m then in a race to eat before they go bad.
It would seem like growing sprouts should be easy, but for some reason I’ve never had much success with it. I will have to tackle this again at some point, but what I’ve found I can do fairly well is get seeds to germinate and begin growing in soil. When done in large quantities what I get are micro greens.
My thought is that these would work out fairly well in my home in the winter because I’ll have the rocket mass heater bench to warm the soil helping germination along. In the winter especially though what I don’t get is a lot of sun. This is even more true in the house with its deep window wells. However, if I choose to do this with seeds that are fairly large, thus having a lot of stored energy, I shouldn’t have to worry about low lighting conditions too much. The seeds should be able to fuel the initial growth of the young plants. I intend to harvest and eat them before they’ll get to the point of requiring a lot of sunlight.
So what seeds should I use for this? I’m thinking sunflower seeds! They germinate fairly quickly and have a decent sized kernel to provide the initial energy for growth. They are also crazy cheap when bought in bulk. I went to a local farm supply store and bought a 25 pound bag intended as bird food for $10. I’m not sure just how much this will yield in micro greens, but as a guesstimate I’m thinking I should be able to convert 1 pound of seed into 1 pound of greens. Sure, I’ll lose the weight of the shells, but I should gain the weight of the added water. If it actually works out like this then it would mean I get high quality, super fresh greens for 40 cents a pound. By comparison, the organic greens I would purchase otherwise are regularly priced at $5.49 a pound.
The hope is also that I can learn to grow and harvest the seeds myself in the long run. I think it would be quite cool to have a little field of sunflowers here on the homestead. I’ll try planting them in a reasonable quantity this year and see what happens.
What I need to figure out yet is just how many I need to plant at a time, and what the interval needs to be between starting a new batch in order to have a steady supply available for the large salads I like to eat 4 to 5 days a week. What’s nice is that if I don’t actually harvest them until I’m ready to eat them there is a bit of variance in the timing. By this I mean I can keep them fresh by simply keeping them alive and growing longer if I’m not eating them fast enough. Of course if I wait too long then they will start to get too old and tough.
I’ve got a couple cheap aluminum roasting trays with a couple inches of potting soil in the bottom that I’m using to grow them in. One is now ready for eating, and today I planted out the other. The tray that’s ready for harvest I think I started a week or so ago. It doesn’t look like enough greens for a week’s worth of salads though, so I’m guessing I’m going to need to get a couple more trays to add to the rotation.
I’m hoping that I can keep using the same soil for many growth cycles since I’m relying mostly on the energy stored in the seeds themselves to provide the fuel for growth. As the shells rot down this whole process might even enrich the soil rather than deplete it. I don’t know if that will be the case or not though. Time will tell.
One final thought on this project, if it works I’m seeing it as another way to “preserve” food in addition to dehydrating, freezing, canning, and the like. I would really be working with nature, letting the seeds natural preservation techniques do the work for me. I would just have to keep them dry and in a reasonable temperature range. Oh, I’d also need to keep them protected from birds, rodents, and other such hungry critters. For that I’m using a storage tub with a decent lid.
Hopefully this all works out and I will have a system to supply me with fresh,homegrown salad greens year around, even in the depths of my cloudy Michigan winters. If it goes well then I’ll have to look into other seeds I could use for this “gardening” approach in order to offer some variety.
Studio Snippet
Not too much of a studio snippet today. My prime studio task was getting a batch of vessels carefully packed up, double boxed, and inventoried to head off for a show at my Chicago Gallery, the Vale Craft Gallery. This year the Society of North American Goldsmiths (SNAG) is having their annual conference in Chicago, and the gallery is hosting a special show, “Midwestern Metal” to coincide with this. Happily the contents of this package will be part of this show.
This sort of work I often refer to as the “business crap” is not always what I’d like to be doing, but it is an important part of being a professional artist. I’m very blessed that I have the business to result in having this “business crap” take up my time!
While I won’t be at the official opening reception for the show on May 3rd, 2019, there will be another reception held during the SNAG conference on the gallery crawl night of Thursday May 23rd, 2019 from 5 to 8 pm. I do plan on being there for that. If you are at the conference or in the area please come by and say hello.
I’m happy to have a site where I can again allow comments. (I had to shut them off on my main website because the spam was simply uncontrollable!) So please I encourage you to share thoughts of your own. My general rule about comments though is just to play nice. Differing views are fine, but I’m not interested in engaging in or moderating verbal fights. If I feel things get out of hand, by whatever criteria I decide, I’ll just start blocking or deleting things.