How can you have your very own Korean Hornbeam trees or small white cucumbers or striped tomatoes? Start them from seed! Really, it’s the only way, unless you happen to be living close the worlds most exotic nursery.

The best part of all of this is that, when you’re talking about vegetables (and annual flowers) starting from seed is not at all complicated. In fact it’s easy.

So why are so many people convinced that it can’t be done and why are some people not successful. Two reasons I can think of.
1. Failing to follow simple instructions.
2. Failing to pay attention.

So, the flip side is that all you need to do is follow some simple instructions and pay attention.

The seed pack will tell you if you need to cover the seeds or not. Typically, very small seeds won’t be covered because they need light to germinate. They simply get sprinkled on and then pressed into the surface of the starting mix. You’ll notice I said starting mix and not soil. You can make your life a little easier from the get go and use one of the soiless seed starting mixes which have a better texture than most garden soil and are also sterile and that’s important too, because it will help to prevent “damping off”which is a disease that can kill seedlings.

If the pack says not to cover the seeds – don’t cover them. If it says to plant them 1/8th of an inch deep- don’t stick them an inch into the ground and expect them to ever see the light of day.

If it says to keep them warm, keep them warm and ditto for cool. Figure out the not too fine line between bone dry and soaking wet. It might take a little practice, but trust me- it’s quite possible.
So – step one is ready the flippin’ instructions and follow them.

Step 2 is pay attention! Once you’re seeds have sprouted – which for most vegetables will be within a week or so, check them every day. Just look to see that they’re not too wet and they’re not too dry. What you want are chubby, stocky little seedlings as opposed to tall, wobbly, spindly little guys that only grow like that because they don’t have enough light.

If you pay close attention to them, there’s a really good chance that as time goes by it will get easier and easier to look after them because rather than feeling a obligation to see if the little suckers are dead yet, you’ll be grabbed by a wave of curiosity to see what your plants are doing. They will become familiar friends and you’ll find that there is something very rewarding by starting at the beginning.

Unlike the annual vegetable seeds that (be warned) I’ll be relentlessly promoting for anyone who wants to grow container vegetables, these perennial seeds were not considered easy to germinate or grow. But, to make a long story short, although it’s a little late for that already, I was eventually successful and from then on – totally hooked.

I have a new project that I’m starting this year and if I’m lucky, I’ll be working on it for the rest of my life. I have an online bonsai store and I’ve basically given up on finding outdoor bonsai trees in Canada. There are a few very limited sources, but they aren’t offering much depth in their online inventory and other than the odd Trident Maple, outdoor deciduous trees are not available. I’m going to change that and start growing outdoor stock and to get the variety I need, my only option is to start them all from seeds.

We’re not talking the easiest of seeds to start here (nor the hardest) since they all require extra steps like scarification and stratification. One of them – the Korean Hornbeam, Carpinus Koreana – requires about two months of warm stratification, followed by three months of cold, before anything like germination can be expected. I timed the start so that my seeds will be sprouting around April, which is when I’ll be set up to deal with them.

My delight was heavily mixed with surprise and a light sprinkling of dismay when I checked on the seeds a full 4 months before I expected to be dealing with little trees, to find that two have already sprouted. I had no pots in the house, which is hard to imagine, but true and nowhere set up to put them.

So now, I have two Korean Hornbeams, the first two trees in my outdoor bonsai nursery, growing in converted plastic water bottles on my office window sill. I check them out a few times a day. To my delight I find they remind me that that new beginnings are always possible although they won’t necessarily appear when or how you expect.

I was going to talk about growing vegetables that will allow you to get the greatest possible yield from a small amount of space, but maybe if you’re already going with something that is fairly compact we can deal with concepts like multiple crops from the same small planter later.

I’ve seen articles and blog posts that talk about the money that you can save growing vegetables on your balcony. Go fish! In my experience if you’re only growing vegetables in containers on your balcony because you think you’re going to make a noticeable dent in your grocery bill- I’m sorry- you’re going to be dissappointed. Yes, you might harvest a few quarts of tomatoes at the end of the summer, but you’re going to do it at the same time that every store is flooded with cheap local produce and you could have bought your entire crop for $10.00.

But what you can do is

grow something different

– not outlandish- just a variety that you can’t already buy. If you like cucumber, why not try a beautiful little white Dragons Egg Cucumber, or a Chinese Beauty Heart Radish or how about a Green Zebra Tomato?

By taking a vegetable that you already love and growing a unique version of it, you’ll not only have the pleasure of picking your own food right from your planter, you’ll be able to treat yourself to something that you wouldn’t otherwise have a chance to enjoy. Just for the record, your local grocery store will not be filled with produce that was grown because it’s unique or unusually healthy or tasty. In fact, most produce grown commercially is selected because of it’s uniformity of size or shape, its ability to ripen in the box or survive the rigours of being trucked across the continent. You can do so much better than that. Go for something special!

Just imagine for a second what a hoot it would be to invite your friends or family over to dinner and stun them with these awesome cool green striped tomatoes or green radishes with a bright red center. Now that’s something that you can’t find in every grocery store and they taste delicious. Check out some of the wonderful heirloom vegetables at http://www.rareseeds.com

Yes, it means you will start your vegetables from seed, but trust me – it’s not difficult to do and its a ton of fun.

When you’re considering what to grow, a good place to learn about their needs is from seed catalogues and another – even better source – is from other gardeners, but there just never seems to be a master gardener handy when you want one!
Some plants like cucumbers, and tomatoes can be trained to a trellis and indeed so can some melons and squashes – but not all of them.

Pumpkins and watermelons for example, turned loose on your balcony would not only take it over completely- they could probably take possession of your neighbor’s balcony and your living room too. Corn is another example of a plant that’s entirely unsuitable for a balcony. For one thing it’s tall but you don’t grow it to a trellis which means that on your balcony the wind would easily break it but more to the point, you need to have a fairly large patch of corn growing to be assured that it will pollinate properly and therefore actually produce any corn.
As you’re making your list, keep the really large plants off.

Actually, for what it’s worth – here are the plants that I think are best suited to balcony vegetable gardens:
Beans, peas, some cucumbers, some sweet peppers, hot peppers, tomatoes, some eggplants, salad greens but not many cabbages and most annual herbs.

Asparagus and rhubarb are not suitable since they’re perennials.

Although I successfully grew hot peppers last year, some of them came in just under the wire and I tend to favour short season tomatoes. Crops (although “crops” seems like a bit of an exageration when describing the amount to be grown in containers) that I will probably never try include such long season goodies like cantalopes and honeydew melons.

Respecting your growing season and what you would like to grow also means that some vegetables like spinach will grow early and late in the season, but not during the “dog days”of summer – although last summer in Toronto we didn’t have anything like that.

Look, if I talk too long here, all that will happen is that I’ll make a very simple idea much too complex and instead of helping you grow something great to eat on your balconies or decks or patios, I’ll just scare you off.

That is NOT my plan. So I’ll wrap up with this. Do just a little bit of research on the length of your growing season and get a feeling forthe things that just need more time to grow than your summer will allow.

The first principle I’d like to present you with is the idea that you need to grow something your already know and already like. This might sound very simplistic, but seed catalogues and nurseries can make even a vegetable you don’t care for sound irresistable! (Heaven only knows I’ve fallen for it more than once.)

If you have a 20×20 foot plot in the ground you can afford to take a chance, but when you only have a small amount of room, go with a proven winner that you know you’re going to enjoy.

Also, you need to adopt a very Stephen Covey idea and begin with the end in mind. By that I mean only grow vegetables or herbs that you not only like but you actually know exactly what you’re going to do with. to make my point, just think of zucchini. Every year at the end of the gardening season when abundant harvests are generously distributed to friends, family and neighbors – what gets handed out more than anything else? Zucchini! Why? Well, because almost everyone plants too much of it and almost no one knows what to do with it! Do you?

Vegetable gardening on your balcony deserves a bigger reward than harvesting your crop and then watching it go bad when you realize you really don’t know exactly how to cook or preserve it or what to eat it with. I did that the first time I grew Thai Basil – which I love and NOW know what to do with.

Think it through!

But I know that anyone who is interested in growing vegetables – hydroponically – will have a ton of questions and I don’t really know what they will be.

So, if you have questions about how you can use the system that I use to grow container gardens – vegetables, herbs or flowers. Please send me comments and questions.

There are so many things I can say and so much I can write about, it would be incredibly helpful to me to know what you would like to know.

Thanks,
Lorraine

Are you familiar with the Free Radical Theory of Aging? It has nothing to do with politics and is one of the most widely accepted theories around right now to explain the process of cellular and system degeneration. It’s about how your body acquires and produces unstable molecules called free radicals. Because nature seems to abhor instability, a molecule that is missing an electron will steal it from a nearby molecule, or atom.  This creates a new free radical or oxy-radical which in turn steals from another neighbor. If left unchecked, this process can create damage that begins at a cellular level and as these damaged cells accumulate, the systems that they are a part of start to break down.

Antioxidants are nature’s answer to free radicals. Antioxidants are molecules that can donate an electron to a free radical without becoming unstable themselves. They halt the chain reaction and prevent the damage.

You only need to look at the face of a 60 year old sun-worshipper to see how cellular damage ages us. We can see the skin, but we don’t see the accumulated damage to the liver or the heart or the brain. Meanwhile, arteries get clogged with cellular debris and joints become swollen with chronic inflammation- of damaged cells, all directly caused by free radicals.

So where do they come from? There are two main sources of free radicals – one source is the outside environment – think of pollution and cigarette smoke and the host of toxic substances that we inflict on our bodies. And then on the other hand there are the free radicals that are made by our own bodies.

We produce free radicals through four different mechanisms.

To create energy we use oxygen as fuel and generally convert it to water. But, like many other processes in nature the fuel doesn’t always burn as cleanly as we would like, resulting in damaged versions of the oxygen molecule.

Our body uses some oxidants to fight chronic infections, bacteria and parasites. Unfortunately, in the process other cells in our body are exposed and vulnerable to the free radicals. We fight fire with fire and sometimes manage to burn ourselves in the process. We also produce hydrogen peroxide- another free radical version of oxygen – when we metabolize some fatty acids.

Our bodies produce free radicals in millions of and millions of cells and do it almost constantly. Luckily we also have the ability to produce the remedy in the form of powerful free radical scavengers like CoEnzymeQ10 and Glutathione.

In an effort to combat the external sources of oxidants – like drugs, pesticides, cigarette smoke and other foreign and toxic chemicals our bodies creates an enzyme called Cytochrome P450. However, in calling up this necessary enzyme, we create a by-product, free radicals. The toxins damage us on their own, and we damage ourselves to fight them. It ages us.

If you’re interested in helping your body combat the damaging effects of free radicals, you need to support your supply of antioxidants. Some antioxidants, like Vitamins C and E can be supplemented and you simply cannot – in my opinion overestimate the importance of a good diet. Other antioxidants like Glutathione cannot be supplied as a supplement although you can nourish your body with the precursors -raw materials- to produce it yourself.

Anna Ruth writes about why MAXGXL is different from a glutathione supplement and a better alternative to helping boost your levels Glutathione the Master antioxidant

A bonsai tree is an all-natural, ecologically friendly gift.  And maybe best of all, every single bonsai is unique to start with and will become ever more so the longer it is kept. It’s true that some bonsai are worth thousands of dollars, but no one needs to spend that kind of money. It’s easy to find many lovely trees from specialized greenhouses or online for less than a hundred dollars.

The best news is that you don’t need the emerald green-thumb voodoo gift to keep a bonsai alive although it is true that there are some trees that are rare and incredibly valuable and difficult to care for.  Some trees require a considerable amount of attention and expertise and if you’re living in a cold climate, preparing an outdoor tree for the winter can be a challenge. But there are also many, many bonsai  that are easy to care for.

For the uninitiated, an easy to care for bonsai that will survive inside during the winter like any other “houseplant” is probably the best place to start. All you need to know for sure, if you’re buying a bonsai as a gift, is that your friend has somewhere to put it where it will get bright but not direct light. A big south or west facing window is, in my opinion, a necessity. If you’re thinking of buying a tree for your spouse, I’m hoping that you’ll be able to see if there might be a spot for it.

That’s pretty general information and it might not seem very helpful when you’re looking a list of trees with their botanic and common names.  So, let me help you narrow it down to some of the best beginner bonsai trees.

1. Juniper

2. Schefflera Arboricola

3. Ficus

4. Mini or Dwarf Jade – Portulacaria

5. Fukien Tea

Juniper – (juniper procumbens “nana”) The most popular bonsai in North America is the Juniper and if you buy one as a gift, unless you’re buying it for someone who already has a lot of bonsai, you need to stick with Juniper Procumbens. This is a specific type of Juniper that is ideally suited to bonsai, very easy to grow and can be brought indoors. There are some Junipers – for example the Chinese Juniper – Juniper chinensis- which cannot be brought inside, so don’t be fooled.

Schefflera Arboricola – Whether you realize it or not, you’ve seen this tree as a houseplant, or in a restaurant or office. There are a lot of them around.  Most usually known as the Dwarf Umbrella Tree, this small version of the very popular houseplant is an interesting and easy to care for bonsai. Unlike the Juniper, this bonsai doesn’t look all that Japanese, but it does look very tropical- almost jungle like and any friend you have, particularly one who likes houseplants, will be thrilled with this unique exotic version.

Ficus – There are many different types of Ficus, more recognizably known as Figs. My favorite as a bonsai gift is the Tiger bark Fig, because it’s easy to grow, with a very interesting trunk shape and bark and – well – it looks like a bonsai. Other well known fig bonsai that make good gifts are the Benjamina and the Ginseng Fig (especially good for friends with a taste for the unusual). As a first bonsai gift I should warn you that both the Green Island and the Narrow Leaf Figs are a little trickier to grow. The one thing that everyone should know about figs is that they tend to drop leaves when they’re stressed and they can be stressed very easily. However, they will grow back! Don’t give up.

Mini Jade/ Dwarf Jade – This is my personal favorite bonsai gift for people who have never grown a bonsai before. The correct name is Portulacaria afra and it’s a South African native, but since so many are familiar with Jade trees as houseplants, the Mini Jade or Dwarf Jade is probably a better name. Here’s another bonsai that will drop its leaves if it gets too stressed, but again they easily grow back and this might very well be the number one easy-to-grow bonsai. Mini jades – like their full sized namesake are also very attractive in an exotic and quite unique way. Their rounded, very fleshy leaves look like something a dinosaur would have hidden behind, although in the case the mini jade it would be a very small one. While you cannot ever let any bonsai completely dry out, I’ve found jades to be among the more forgiving of little watering slip-ups. That alone would qualify them for this list, but you’ll find that with their tiny leaves and remarkably tree-like appearance for something so small, the mini jade bonsai makes an outstanding gift bonsai.

Fukien Tea – I add this tree to the list of great gift bonsai because as far as tropical trees are concerned, Fukien Tea (sometimes called Fujian Tea) is among the classic bonsai. It needs to be kept warm and never allowed to dry out and for some reason it is very attractive to insect pests. But with its tiny-perfect, shiny, dark green leaves, white flowers and red berries, this tree is a bonsai for bonsai lovers. For anyone who treasures the classics – in anything – this is a gift they will never forget.

I said Five Bonsai, so I have to stop there, which is a shame because already I want to add in the Chinese Elm and the Zelkova and the Sweet Plum and then move to the slightly more advanced “winter outside” group of bonsai, but where you live strongly influences just how difficult an outdoor wintering tree can be. But with this list, you’re off to a spectacular head start on the gift list to end all gift lists!