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Although we are extremely busy building our home, we decided to try growing a few things this year. We couldn’t resist. So much of our mission at Moosicorn is about knowing exactly where our food comes from and how it came to be. The depth of understanding and appreciation for our food can only be achieved through growing our own.

After I picked up organic seeds for Bell Peppers, Corn, Pumpkin, Carrot, Tomato, Watermelon, and Broccoli, I went looking for potting soil. Dirt was one of those things that I used to buy without hesitation or much investigation because what could be in a bag of dirt that I would care about, right? Well, in the process of looking for dirt, I learned a new word. Surfactant. Surfactants, or Wetting Agents, are organic compounds that lower the water tension of liquids. Wetting agents in soil encourage moisture absorption and prevent the dirt from getting hard. Every bag of dirt I picked up (even the Organic varieties) contained surfactants. These wetting agents sound like they might be very beneficial in gardening, but some surfactants are toxic to humans and animals and disrupt ecosystems. I could assume that the harmful types of surfactants would not be allowed into dirt available to me as a consumer and I could just buy it. But assuming someone else, like a government health agency,  is going to keep me safe is not a good bet to make in my opinion. So I didn’t buy any dirt.

It seems silly anyway; buying dirt when we own 44 acres. What’s wrong with the dirt we have? It’s brown, it smells good, and although we haven’t made any compost yet, I think the natural world is probably creating some pretty nice compost all by itself! So I grabbed a shovel and ventured over to the spot we plan to put the garden some day. I scooped up some dirt, put in the wheel barrow and brought it over to the house. But what was I going to plant my seeds in? I almost added some of those little segmented plastic strays to our hardware store shopping list, when I realized we could easily make something ourselves.

I figured the dimensions my trays would be to best fit in our little greenhouse and from the woodpile I salvaged a few fairly strait pieces of wood. I measured and marked them and got to cutting.  Then Scott came by and noted that all the pieces of wood I had cut where different sizes. Let’s just say, I like to color outside the lines. Anyway, Scott swiftly fixed all my mistakes and we got to work building our little boxes.

The seed boxes ended up turning out really nice and I felt good about all of our decisions. We used soil from right here on the property, we didn’t buy a product we couldn’t trust, we avoided plastic and we recycled scrap wood. Our soon to be vegetable garden is now sitting in a our little greenhouse in the sun. We’ll see how they do.

Update 5/5/10:

Things are starting to sprout! Now we have to figure out where we’re going to put them once they grow out of their starter boxes…

Update 8/5/10:

To see an update on our garden, see “Garden Update”