dessalles

Unbeknownst to my neighbors, I’ve got a bit of a seed starting operation taking place in my apartment - vegetables on my bookshelves, books on the floor. Once they’re hardy enough to handle wind, nighttime cold and direct sunlight, they’ll be carried up to the roof where they’ll spend the summer overlooking the New York harbor.

Above, a photo of some cucumbers and string beans only 5 days after their shoddy planting. Below, a list of 6 things I’ve learned so far…

1. Cable boxes, computers and other flat-top, vampire-energy consuming, home electronics make great heat sources for seeds which require soil slightly warmer than room temperature to germinate. Alternatively, you could spend $80 on a seedling heat mat, but if you use your DVD player instead you’ll be putting otherwise wasted electricity to good use.

2. Turns out, if you accidentally drop seeds in soil, they’ll sprout whether or not you want them to. So you’ll need to kill them off to prevent them from competing with whatever you had intentionally planted. People actually spend good money on veggie sprouts for stir-fry, salads and such; so vegetable gardening is the only activity I’ve encountered that produces valuable, edible mistakes.

3. If you’re a data visualization or stats enthusiast, you’d like seed starting cause there’s A LOT of data you can record and analyze. You can map soil temperatures, sunlight exposure, watering and planting depth to time-to-germination, growth rates and eventual plant productivity. And whatever you learn is easily put to good use next summer.

4. The seed packet I got for cucumbers warns to keep your crop at least a 1/4 mile from any other cucumbers so as to prevent cross-pollination. But I’m actually hoping for cross-pollination. If someone else in the neighborhood is growing cucumbers, we might end up with some sort of urban, rooftop-hardy, Brooklyn-tough-guy-farm-boy hybrid

5. And generally, you can take a page out of the natural selection book and save seeds from your most productive plants. After a couple years, you’ll end up with your own varieties - optimized for your apartment/city’s growing conditions. It’s like science!!

6. Lastly, heirloom varieties are more fun to grow cause their back-stories, crazy names and strange looks make for more interesting conversation. I’m giving the Van Doren Moon & Stars Watermelon a shot:

Kent Whealy rediscovered this legendary watermelon on Merle Van Doren’s farm near Macon, Missouri, where it had been brought from Tennessee. The early history of Moon and Stars is unknown. Henry Fields (Shenandoah, Iowa) and Robinson Seed Co. (Waterloo, Nebraska) both were offering it during the 1930s. The medium-sized oval dark green fruits are covered with pea-sized bright yellow “stars” and usually one larger “moon.”