Growing food with Seed to Spoon — OSU-OKC class

How to grow food

In the recording: 0:34–0:49 · 1:01–1:15.

We had never grown anything in our lives, but I have a bit of an obsessive personality, I guess you could say, and this became my thing. Everything we learned through building this went into our app.

I was having to memorize all these things and look the stuff up constantly, and I wanted a place to have it in a mobile app. I've been in software development my whole career, so it's the thing I wanted to make.

Choose the right location

In the recording: 2:10–3:16 · 4:45–4:54.

The first step to growing food is to choose the right location, and this is something that I did not do a very good job of in the beginning. I had a fence that casts a shadow on the north side of it, but the shadow is not cast during the summer when I built those beds. I didn't think about the sun and how it works whenever I built the garden, and that was a mistake I made. That's something you really want to think through. You want to think about where the sun is through different months. In March it's gonna be a different place. The sun moves north and south throughout the year, so you want to think about that and make sure that your beds are in a place where they get sun.

On the other hand, it's not necessarily a good thing to have too much sun in Oklahoma. Especially in the summer, we get really hot summers here, and if you have a bed that's out in the full sun all day long, it's going to get baked. If you have an area on the east side of your house that's protected from the sun in the afternoon, that's a great place to grow things.

Another thing you want to think about is convenience. You want to have your gardens to where they're pretty close to the house. If they're way out away from the house, then they're gonna be out of sight, out of mind.

A soil mix

In the recording: 5:32–5:41 · 11:15–11:59 · 14:23–14:52.

I recommend building either a raised bed or using a Smart Pot, and then filling that with a soil mix.

I make my own, and I make it with a combination of these three ingredients. This is vermiculite, peat moss and compost. Vermiculite is a rock that's mined out of the ground, and it's exploded. The point of it is it absorbs things really well. It's almost like a popcorn texture. Peat moss is the second ingredient, and you can also substitute coconut coir instead. It doesn't provide any nutrients to the plant. It's just a growing medium to help store water and nutrients and things like that. Then the compost is where the important stuff is because that's where the plants get their food.

You can make it yourself too. It's really simple to make. To make it ourselves, I basically just take wood chips, coffee grounds, autumn leaves. I don't really put food scraps or anything like that in there because I have a worm bin, and the worms are more efficient breaking that stuff down, and I don't have to deal with as many pest issues because the worm bin is indoors. You can take all these bulk ingredients and put in a compost pile and make it yourself.

As far as transplants go

In the recording: 20:35–20:58 · 21:04–21:38.

As far as transplants go, that's really simple to do. I recommend buying plants from the nursery the first year starting out because it's a lot to take on, starting gardening and starting seeds. I didn't even start the indoor seed starting thing until my second year. I didn't want to take that on my first year. I wanted to know I was getting healthy plants, that I at least didn't do that part wrong, and then if something went wrong I at least had less variables to deal with.

One thing I do want to mention as far as transplanting is concerned is it's very important to harden them off. If you ever heard that term before, it's simple. It's just introducing them to the elements gradually. When you get that plant, it's been sheltered in perfect conditions its whole life, and when you take that and you go put it in your garden where it gets Oklahoma wind and our occasional cold nights and all the stuff, it gets shocked. You can help the shock of that by gradually taking it out. For the first night it's for a couple hours. For the second night maybe it's a little bit more.

Automated drip irrigation

In the recording: 25:47–26:17 · 27:00–27:15.

Next is watering. When we first started I was hand watering everything, and that works. I'm very excited to water right now and in the spring, and then come July when it's a hundred I don't want to go do it, and I'm bored. I'm tired of fighting squash bugs. I'm over it. In order to solve that problem, I turn to automated drip irrigation. I ended up building my first system was made out of PVC pipe. It's a cheaper system to build.

What I've started switching to last year was the drip irrigation. I'm sure you've seen it where it's like the black tubing running, and they have little emitters. I switched to that. They're much more efficient with water, and I can water pretty much the whole garden on one or two zones, and that's important to me.

When to water

In the recording: 27:45–28:40.

It was something I struggle with a lot in the beginning, and the biggest mistake I made was over watering. For most things, they like to be watered thoroughly, and then they like to dry out a little bit before you water them again. Not dried out all the way, but they need to get oxygen in the roots. That's just as important as water, and if they're always under water, just like us, they can't breathe underwater.

I water my raised beds until there's water coming at the bottom, and I know that they are flooded and they are definitely watered. Then I don't water again until I can stick my finger down in the soil and about 2 or 3 inches down it's pretty dry. I do the same thing again. Right now that's like once a week maybe, and the summer it'll be maybe once every three or four days. It changes based on temperature and wind and humidity and all sorts of things.

A completely different flavor from night to night

In the recording: 48:09–48:25.

Once we started growing food and we committed ourselves to the first year, we wanted to eat out of the garden most of, almost exclusively. Squash gets very boring after you have it the same way every day, but if you have different herbs then you can throw them in and you have a completely different flavor from night to night.

Different microclimates in your yard

In the recording: 1:22:31–1:22:55 · 1:24:02–1:24:29.

Okra can take as much sun as you give it. But there's other things that like a little bit of shade in the afternoon, so put those on the east side of your house, and you want to identify different microclimates in your yard.

Even tomatoes, which are technically full sun, will like some shade in the afternoon. Now there are some things that you can throw as much sun as you want, like okra, watermelon, squash. But for the most part, most everything is going to benefit from a little bit of a break in the afternoon, just because it's not only so hot here but there's also the wind. The plants are being battered from all different ways.