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My intent for tonight was to write about starting seeds for my summer garden.  The weather is nice and warm now, days in the 70s, nights in the 50s, just perfect for starting seeds outdoors, which is my preferred way to do it.

I have a potting shed  - well, not really where I pot.  As it turns out,  other areas of the garden are better for potting.  Instead, I use the shed   to store hand tools and start seeds.  The roof is clear corrugated fiberglass and one side wall is a big old salvaged window, making for plenty of light and just enough air circulation.

For the past five or six years, I’ve tested vegetable, flower, and herb seeds for Organic Gardening magazine.  Each spring, I get an envelope filled with all kinds of seeds.  Some years, there are themes, like the year we tested six kinds of eggplants.   There are always plenty of tomatoes, a couple kinds of peppers, cucumbers, squash, melons, and flowers.  That’s how I re-discovered my love of zinnias.  Have you seen zinnia ‘Benary’s Giant Lime?’  It makes a prolific display of the most unexpected bright green flowers.  The plants bloom all summer.  ‘Benary’s Giant Coral’ is another of my favorite zinnias - - and honestly, I had give up on annuals!

Zinnia 'Benary's Giant Lime'

I can’t tell you what I’m testing this year.  You’ll find out later by reading Organic Gardening.

But I digress.

This afternoon, I pulled out the year’s seeds, wrote out the labels, then went to the potting shed for planting containers.  Before I found the containers, though I found something amazing.  A rat’s nest.  Literally.

I haven’t been in that shed much in recent months, but clearly, someone else had.  The potting table was caked in  dried out red Eugenia berries surely put there for winter food storage.  When I was a kid, we’d pick the red berries to paint our faces.  These, however, looked more like dried cranberries than the plump juicy berries of my childhood.

The space beneath the potting bench was stuffed with pieces of mulch, leaves, shredded wood, and who-knew-what.

The big decision then, was whether to put off cleaning until another day, or go ahead and tackle it now.  I’d rather put it off, but where would I put my seeds to germinate? I needed the space, and I needed to make sure that the rats were no longer in that space.

So, gloves firmly in place, I went to work. The rats had pulled everything off the shelves, shredded it, and mixed it together  - hard plastic, string, jute, plastic bags, popsicle sticks used for plant labels, clothes pins that hold frost cloth, irrigation parts….  I pulled out a big funnel that  use to filter worm tea.  The rats had lined with shredded, dried sphagnum moss.  Quite honestly, it looked pretty cozy!

The rats pulled everything off the shelves to make their own brand of mulch

It was a stinky and messy job, but on the flip side, I cleaned out stuff shoved into the shed long ago.  There was a dried out 5-gallon can of wood preservative last used more than 10 years ago, I’m sure!    Old yogurt containers I use for scooping and storing stuff were brittle and crumbling.  They went into the recycling.  Out went broken plastic nursery containers and old green mesh strawberry baskets from a test I did years ago.  I turned the  baskets upside down over strawberry plants, then poked the developing berries up through the mesh.  That kept them off the ground and way from hungry slugs and sow bugs.

I was sad to find the rats had chewed up  the liner for an insulated seed starter kit that has a built in heat mat.  The brand label has long worn off but the heating element still works.  Maybe I’ll line it with heavy duty plastic now.

I filled one 30 gallon trash can and part of another.  By then it was dark and my husband was calling me for dinner.

Part way through cleaning

Tomorrow, I’ll start my seeds.

People constantly ask me how much and how often to water their plants.  There is no definitive answer.  It depends on your microclimate, the type of soil in your garden, the type of irrigation you use (drip, overhead, etc.) and more.

That said, figuring out how to water your plants isn’t all that difficult if you use my “Canary Test.”

In the old days, miners took canaries with them into coalmines. Since canaries are very sensitive to lethal but odorless carbon monoxide gas, the miners knew to leave the mines when the canaries started to get sick.

My “Canary Test” is way to test how often and for how long each of your garden’s watering zones actually needs run. In your garden, the “canary” is the first plant to show signs of water stress.

The Canary Test

Test one watering zone at a time (a watering zone is a set of sprinklers or drip emitters that are connected to the same valve and run at the same time).

Figure Out How Often to Water

1. Pick a zone. Make sure you know which plants that zone waters
2. Turn the zone off.  Mark the date on your calendar
3. Wait and watch for the canary -  the first plant to show signs of water stress.  When you notice a plant whose leaves look a bit wilted, you’ve found your canary. It might take several days or it might take several weeks. Eventually, you’ll see the canary.
   
4. Check your calendar to see how many days passed since you turned that zone off.   Make a note of it.
5. Figure out how often to water.  If, for example, it took 14 days until you noticed a canary in a particular zone, then water that zone every 12th or 13th day (that’s two weeks, minus one or two days). If it took seven days, then water every sixth day, and so on.

Your goal isn’t to get your plants to wilt, but rather to to avoid watering before plants need the water.

Figure Out how Long to Water

1. Once you identify your canary, run the irrigation in that zone.  Check the soil every five or ten minutes for overhead sprinklers, every 10 to 20 minutes for rotating nozzle sprinklers, and every 30 minutes for drip irrigation.
2. Note how long it takes for water to soak deep enough that when you stick your finger all the way into the soil, it is saturated not just at the surface but as deep as you can feel.

If the soil is really hard, you may need to dig down with a hand trowel or soil probe rather than using your finger.

1. Repeat the process for each watering zone.

The point is to get water to plant roots deep in the soil. However long that takes is the amount of time to irrigate that zone.

You’ll soon realize that each zone needs to run on its own schedule. Your lawn, for example, may need to run ten minutes, three times a week in summer, but your flower border can go for a week between waterings.  Your shrub border can go two weeks or a month, especially if you deep-water each time.

Areas irrigated with overhead spray  need to run for only minutes at a time, but drip irrigated areas run for an hour or longer since they release water very slowly.

Repeat the Canary Test for each zone, once a month to create a year-round watering schedule. Winter’s rainfall may provide enough water for weeks or months. On the other hand, in the dry heat of summer, plants need watering far more frequently.

Every time you water, water deeply and thoroughly. Don’t be afraid to use your finger as a  probe to test how wet the soil is.

Whether you control your sprinklers manually or use an irrigation clock, adjusting your watering schedule to match your plants’ needs saves tremendous amounts of water and grows healthier plants.