The garden is a Memorial Garden, a garden of benevolence, a garden of love. It is a gift to our community from the God of Love, Jesus the Christ. The first “seeds” for our garden have come from members of the congregation and a designation from the congregation’s memorial funds. These seeds have brought us to the beginning of a journey that will last for many years. Guided by the Holy Spirit we will plow forth until row upon row of our work is accomplished and our community is better nourished. The Lord invites you all to be part of His work on earth strengthening and feeding His children. The garden is made possible by generous donations from the community, and grants from the ELCA Domestic Hunger Grants, the Alaska Food Policy Council through the Municipality of Anchorage, the Alaska Women's Giving Circle, The Alaska Master Gardeners of Anchorage, the generous support by the congregation of Lutheran Church of Hope, and support from the Alaska Synod of the ELCA.

Food from the garden in 2019 was sent to Lutheran Social Services Food Pantry, the Tudor Road Gospel Rescue Mission, and to Bean's Cafe.

Saturday, January 22, 2022

How Much Seed Do I Need?

How much seed do you need to plant a 10 foot row or a 100 foot row for that matter? I had no idea, people have really worked this out. Please don't laugh too hard, I was new at this. At least one seed catalog I received this year has that information. I'm sure most of the others do as well. I had just never looked for the information. In the 2021 catalog from Johnny's Selected Seeds there is a chart on page four.
You can call the seed companies and they will be ahppy to tell you especially if you order from them. There are a number of web sites that have the information you can use your favorite search engine to find different ones if you like. You will need to be careful though as a lot of the charts you find on the web are for farmers and they only talk about seeds per acre. Seeds per 100 foot row are easy to break down into smaller units, however, seeds per acre is much tougher. I was surprised by the number of seeds needed. The chart at the right comes from Johnny's  Selected Seeds catalog.

Here are just a few examples of seeding requirements for a 100 foot row. It takes 800 beans to seed a 100 foot row, 1500 beet seeds, 3000 carrot seeds (sounds like a lot), 1.25 pounds of peas, 1.5 ounces of radish seed and a third of a ounce of turnip seeds. Turnip seeds are really small and light. Planting will be so much easier this spring. Or I should say knowing how much seed to purchase will be easier.

Most of the sites give the information and I think assume that you have a planter and are not doing it by hand. Obviously they are also set up for use in the lower 48 states.

Many of the seeding suggestions just will not fly in Alaska for planting in an outdoor garden. Things like squash will never mature if you direct seed them. The soil is way too cool for them to germinate unless maybe if you put clear visqueen over the row. That being said, you should be willing to experiment with "marginal" species. You might live in a micro-climate within our zone 4 area. Yup, most of Anchorage is classified as zone 4b. But be careful, there are places in town, especially on the east side that are probably lower.

If you are going to try to grow fruit trees, yes they grow here, be sure they are grafted to root stock that is hardy to zone 3. Pears will grow just fine when grafted to crab apple root stock. Be sure to find out what the root stock is before you buy or plant.

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