Recent Articles
John & Bob’s Grow Green Review and Giveaway
13.8 years ago fertilizer, giveaway, product review 33 Comments
If you have been growing organically for several years your garden is probably beaming with beneficial bacteria and various microorganisms. Though if you are just starting a garden using bags of sterilized soil/compost or are starting with soil that has undergone many decades of chemical fertilizers, John and Bob’s Grown Green might be just what you need.
The product comes in four parts: Optimize, Maximize, Penetrate, and Nourish.
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Optimize adds humus to neutralize the pH of the soil and also adds nutrients such as calcium and iron which is benefits cellular wall plant growth but important for feeding beneficial micro-organisms (fungi and protozoa) to encourage activity to break up hard soil and fight plant disease. |
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Maximize also includes some minerals to feed fungi and protozoa but also brings in the microscopic plant helps as well. This is where you can quickly start adding abundant life to your previously sterile soil. Below are microbial contents:Aerobic Soil Bacteria: 150 micrograms per milliliter.Soil Protozoa: 4,000 per gram.
Soil Fungi: 230 micrograms per milliliter. Beneficial Fungal Mycorrhizae: – Glomus aggregatum: 154 propagules/lb* |
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Penetrate is a liquid bio-tiller that contains powerful ingredients that work together to break up hard, clay soils. This comes in two parts, the first is a highly concentrated compost tea with dormant beneficial bacteria (150 million per ml) that are awakened when you combine with the food from the second bottle which provides food to get that bacteria awake and start rapidly reproducing. |
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Nourish is an organic fertilizer made from 100% vegetable sources. Specifically the vegetables this is derived from is Soybean meal and cottonseed meal. This organic fertilizer provides the normal NPK nutrients your plants needs but also includes organic matter to support all these microorganisms you have been working hard to get established in your garden. This is a fast acting organic fertilizer which your plants can benefit from immediately but unlike chemical fertilizers will not burn your plants and can be used anytime during the growing process. |
Typically when I do a review I will include some of my own experiments to prove or disprove the products I am reviewing. Provided this is a product which can at least a few months to prove its effectiveness I will be doing the following experiment this spring/summer. My lawn contains very bad clay soil (thank you home developers) and is a challenge to keep life growing on it. This seems like a great challenge for the Grow Green products and will do a this half treated, this half treated with my normal alfalfa pellets and we will see which side thrives the most. Though my vegetable garden plots should have good number of microorganisms already established I will also use the product on half of one of these plots where I will be growing tomatoes and identify the benefits for a more established garden.
The great people at John and Bob’s Grown Green have also agreed to giveaway the same sample of the products I have pictured above with include all four Optimize, Maximize, Penetrate, and Nourish products.
There are multiple ways to enter:
- 1. Add a comment to this post
- 2. Like CheapVegetableGardener on Facebook (add an additional comment to the post)
- 3. Like this contest in facebook (add an additional comment to the post)
- 4. Mention this giveaway on your site/Twitter (add an additional comment to the post)
A winner will randomly be picked on 02/21/11.
GrowVeg and Urban Farmer Seeds Giveaway results
13.8 years ago garden planning, giveaway, seeds 4 Comments
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The winner of the Flower and Vegetable seed kits is Luis Tobon. You should have a email in your inbox requesting you mailing information |
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The winner of the GrowVeg one year subscription goes to Ragnar. I have passed on your contact info to GrowVeg and you should receive your gift certificate for your one year subscription shortly. |
For those you didn’t win, no worries we have more giveaways coming up this weekend.
Urban Farmer Seeds Vegetable/Flower seed kit giveaway
13.8 years ago giveaway, indoor seed starting, seeds 51 Comments
They great people at Urban Farmer Seeds have graciously offered their Flower Seed Kit and Vegetable Seed Kit to giveaway to the readers of CVG. Like many seed companies Urban Farmer Seeds is environmentally conscience, one unique thing they do is use recycled magazines to make their seed packets as you can see in the picture below.
We will pick a winner on 02/12/11, as usual there are multiple ways to enter:
- 1. Add a comment to this post
- 2. Like CheapVegetableGardener on Facebook (add an additional comment to the post)
- 3. Mention this giveaway on your site/Twitter (add an additional comment to the post)
Computer grow box gets 120 watts of LEDs
13.8 years ago computer, indoor growbox, LEDs 12 Comments
Always running out of room in my grow box I needed to expand it some. Though the CFL lights I was using worked great for my 3 square foot space, though by nearly tripling the square footage CFLs wouldn’t scale out anymore. Looking at my other options such as HPS (High Pressure Sodium) or Metal Halide I really didn’t want to deal with ballasts and cooling I decided on going with LEDs. After doing some research I came upon the 120w Extreme Flower LED grow light and after talking to the great people at Advanced LED Lights they were gracious enough send me with one of their lights to try out.
Now as soon as I opened the box I noticed the sticker that said "Do not look directly at light.” Being a moron I just had to plug it in and test out this warning, now it was not like staring at the sun but it was definitely much brighter than my Christmas grow light and I would not recommend others to do this.
The light offers a unique blend of 11+ wavelengths of color ranging from 380nm to 760nm and if you read my post of the importance of wavelength to plant growth this is critical for vegetative and flowing plant growth. The great thing about growing with LEDs if you can pick the specific wavelength produced for maximum yields, though other lights also provide this spectrum they also produce much in the range that is appealing to our eyes (yellow and green) which the plants could live without. This is the reason why this 120 watt grow light can produce the results of a comparable 250w High Pressure Sodium light.
I still have some work to do on my new bigger grow box before I can move this years plants in, but I am excited to see the results this new light will bring. Stay tuned for more updates.
First seeds started: onions, leeks, purple cone flower
13.8 years ago indoor growbox, indoor seed starting, LEDs, seeds 2 Comments
My youngest daughter has been patiently waiting all winter to plant some seeds (as have I) Finally it was time in my area to start planting the “start 8-10 weeks before first frost” seeds. Which for me included onions and leeks, though as I was picking up the leek seeds my daughter talked me into getting some purple coneflower seeds as well.
After carefully mixing my special blend of 3 parts normal potting mix with 1 part perlite we filled some trays, sprinkled on the seeds, applied some light pressure to ensure good contact, and placed them in my small Christmas light grow box.
This provides me a small of convenient location to care for these seedlings until they are big enough to move into the computer grow box which if all goes well should be getting a slight makeover this weekend, which I should post about soon.
Garlic growing in my driveway
13.8 years ago garlic bulbs, spring, sprouting 4 Comments
Just to show our level of rain in the Pacific Northwest, I must have misplaced a couple of garlic cloves when I was braiding my garlic last summer since I noticed 4 garlic plants growing in the gravel next to my driveway.
Even with the less than ideal “soil” they were growing in they have some decent looking root structure. Provided my garden has a no plant left behind policy I dug up each of these garlic plants and found a place for them next to the garlic cloves I intentionally planted in my garden last fall.
