How to Make a Hotbed for the Earliest Sowings (2020)

https://www.growveg.com/guides/how-to-make-a-hotbed-for-the-earliest-sowings/

by teleforce • 3 years ago

115 64 3 years ago

growveg.com

Eric_WVGG2• 3 years ago

From the Roman Emperor Tiberius to the Victorian gardeners of a few generations ago, hotbeds are nothing new.

I had no idea Tiberius was a farmer.

GauntletWizard• 3 years ago

Most people were through most of history. When subsistence farming was the primary way of life, it makes sense that kings and emperors were administrators of, and involved in, farming - Or as we'd call them today "Farmers" as opposed to "Farmhands".

It is from this that we get Bread and Circuses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cura_Annonae

dmreedy3• 3 years ago

While this is all true (and I think the parent is mostly a joke...), my understanding is that the Roman aristocracy that Tiberius was born into considered themselves Farmers in the same way that the modern American politician identifies with the Small Business Owner (or indeed, if you go far enough back, the Yeoman Farmer).

It was more a moral/identity narrative than a thing they actually did. They certainly owned the villas but whether they engaged in any way with the actual work (even in the capacity of "boss") of such places... maybe their servants, or their wives...

Eric_WVGG2• 3 years ago

I had no idea Tiberius was a farmhand.

sweettea• 3 years ago

Diocletian retired from emperoring to his pride and joy, growing cabbages, and refused folks' urgings to take the throne again.

hammock2• 3 years ago

Inspired Gladiator perhaps

treeman79• 3 years ago

Not my Cabbages!

Perhaps he was an inspiration to the Avatars cabbage guy.

blacksqr• 3 years ago

He did a lot of plowing.

southernplaces72• 3 years ago

Many Roman emperors moonlighted into other interests during their lives. emperor Domitian, son of the emperor Vespasian, for example, wrote what is considered to be one of the world's first known books on hair care for balding men, as a balding man himself who was quite sensitive about his look.

Also, it was a largely agrarian society, so even an emperor could have had a few turns at managing fields at some point in their life.

When Diocletian, the first of the "Dominate" era emperors, voluntarily left power (the only emperor ever to do so), he returned to his palatial fortress on the Croatian coast to pursue gardening and especially cabbage farming.

At one point after his retirement, a group of senators from Rome was dispatched to visit him and convince him to go back into the purple due to the collapse of the tetrarchic system he'd set up for Imperial administration.

While the senators argued with him, Diocletian famously brought them to his garden and pulled out one of his own cabbages. He then asked the senators how they could expect him to possibly come back to the stresses of Rome when he had managed to raise such beautiful cabbages in the peace of his new home.

saalweachter2• 3 years ago

Also, there was no Netflix back then, and, like, four books to read. What else were you going to do?

devnullbrain• 3 years ago

The awkward phrasing is SEO spam.

RcouF1uZ4gsC• 3 years ago

Take your pick from a multitude of cold-season vegetables – beets, carrots, lettuce and other salad leaves, onions, spinach, chard, radishes and turnips – and sow knowing that you’ll be picking and plucking within weeks.

Lettuce is one of those vegetables, that once it gets contaminated with bacteria, you are kind of screwed. You can really wash it off and lettuce is usually eaten raw. Having it grown in a pile of manure may make it harder to keep from being contaminated.

chongli2• 3 years ago

You can totally cook lettuce and eat it. It's healthy and tastes just fine. A quick blanch in boiling water is all it takes.

ggm3• 3 years ago

Cos or Romaine hearts cut into quarters and whacked on a grill for some charring is pretty good too.

"Horta" is any green leaves you like, blanched and served with oil and lemon. Sure, it tends to be Dandelion or Rocket or whatever, but I don't think it's specified by the greek ya-yas, its whatever is to hand.

selimthegrim• 3 years ago

I take it you have some exposure to Chinese cuisine?

Scoundreller4• 3 years ago

Usually not lettuce, but I’ll throw cut kale and spinach into soups or stirfries all the time. Sometimes fresh, other times frozen.

chrsstrm2• 3 years ago

Having it grown in a pile of manure may make it harder to keep from being contaminated

I hope you don't buy organic vegetables because have I got some news for you... Between copious amounts of manure and liquified fish as fertilizer, you could always tell by the smell which farmers were looking to cash in on organic produce.

Alex39172• 3 years ago

Between copious amounts of manure and liquified fish as fertilizer, you could always tell by the smell which farmers were looking to cash in on organic produce.

Why would anyone fertilize their crops right before harvesting them for sale? This makes literally zero sense, as it would just be throwing away money. It's like the urban legends about people lacing marijuana with 100% pure cocaine or whatever.

bagels• 3 years ago

Some ecoli outbreaks are caused by human feces on the crops due to poor working conditions on the farms.

https://time.com/3974244/cilantro-feces/

adrianmonk• 3 years ago

Huh, so that's the etymology of "hotbed" as in "hotbed of activity"!? TIL.

https://www.etymonline.com/word/hotbed

xattt• 3 years ago

Yes! It’s all horseshit!

aliasxneo• 3 years ago

Isn't the excess nitrogen going into the soil an unwelcome change?

throwaway892238• 3 years ago

According to University of Wisconsin: Fresh manure should not be used on fruits and veg beds, especially where the crops are embedded in soil, because it can transmit human pathogens. It needs to be fully composted manure - that's manure that's been processed for 3 to 4 months. (https://hort.extension.wisc.edu/articles/using-manure-in-the...)

In order to supplement the nutrient content of fully composted manure, you can age and then dilute human urine (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/01/200122080500.h...) assuming you aren't sick or on medications (https://morningchores.com/urine-as-fertilizer/).

wjnc• 3 years ago

The difference seems to be application “on” versus application “under”. In the hotbed there is a layer of soil on top of the manure, not manure on the plants.

euroderf2• 3 years ago

A note to be careful with chicken poop. It is VERY high in nitrogen and can "burn" your plants.

Scoundreller4• 3 years ago

I see this as not great from an environment point of view: the anaerobes in the unturned manure will go, well, anaerobic and generate a lot of methane.

thomasjb• 3 years ago

I wonder how much methane you could capture from a domestic-sized greenhouse, fertalised with manure? I'm really not sure what paths there are for manure which don't release methane and other emissions, at least here the effect is useful

Scoundreller4• 3 years ago

what paths there are for manure which don't release methane

Aerobic digestion. Ie: with lots of airflow/oxygen (lots of heat also helps!)

HeyLaughingBoy• 3 years ago

That will happen whether you do this or not.

Scoundreller4• 3 years ago

Not in aerobic digestion. Then you get much less greenhouse-gassy CO2 (with the side benefit of being great for immediately nearby plants).

kleton• 3 years ago

Be careful what manure you bring to your garden. Sometimes, hay is from fields sprayed with grazon, which is persistent in manure. It will kill any dicots you grow in that manure.

fy20• 3 years ago

Later on in winter, with less time to wait till the return of spring, you could get away with a stack 30-60cm (1-2ft) in height.

One thing I hate about gardening articles and videos is they often use terms that are not consistent with different locations. Where I am in Northern Europe, what we consider 'spring' is going to be very different from what someone in Southern California considers 'spring'. 100 years ago where you audience is going to be in a small location near your printing press this may have been acceptable, but today when your audience is global it really is not.

asteroidz• 3 years ago

Personally, in my locale March is usually when the crocuses start peeking out and the robins return... first signs of spring. But just 100 miles east the landscape might still be a winter wonderland well into April.

If I had to hazard a guess, this article was probably written with a British audience in mind, where "spring" loosely corresponds with March through May.

7952• 3 years ago

For planting people develop more nuance than just a binary season change. They look at the condition of soil, temperature, likely weather looking forward etc. Right now it is spring where I live. The soil is a bit wet and clumpy. We may still get a frost but probably won't.

And in the natural world things can be really spread out. Plants have different niches based on being early or late. Shoots will come up in the winter. And some plants will be dormant until much later.

maxerickson• 3 years ago

So no one should write anything without accounting for everything?

I wonder what better term you think there is where spring is used? Like in context it obviously means the start of the growing season. The suggestion is thus that the technique would be used that way before the start of the local growing season.

Here we get several feet of snow and frost into May, so it might be something I would do now. It probably wouldn't work good in February when there's piles of snow and temperatures well below freezing.

gadders• 3 years ago

In terms of whether the bed is warm enough to plant out in, the advice frequently given by Christine Walkden [1] on Gardeners Question Time [2] on how to judge whether it is warm enough is to sit on the soil with your bare bottom.

[1] http://www.christinewalkden.com/

[2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qp2f

KaiserPro2• 3 years ago

Hotbed are grand, but the article is a bit scimpy on important details

You will need a layer of something over the raw manure to make sure it doesn't scold/burn/kill your seedlings. Its not just the heat that will kill, but the raw piss. You will have difficulty putting seedlings in raw manure.

https://plantura.garden/uk/garden-design/hotbed this has better pictures.

You will still need to think about thermal management.

The victorians used to have hotbed out the front of green houses. They were made of brick, angled at about 120 degrees. They had a bed for the manure, that ran around the outside and took up ~50% of the space, and a bed inside that was just soil. This allowed them to change the manure to keep the temperature even.

Liquix• 3 years ago

... add a 15cm (6in) layer of potting mix into the cold frame to begin warming up – you will be sowing or planting into this, not the manure.

Is another layer between the soil and manure required?

KaiserPro2• 3 years ago

depends on the plant. If its something that sends down long roots, you will need a barrier.

For something like beans, you would traditionally dig a deep trench (as in 4foot) and put a layer of manure, with news paper on top, by the time the roots got that far it would be rotten enough.

It might be better to use coffee grounds or fine wood chippings, as they are equally as warm but less toxic in the raw state.

jfranche• 3 years ago

Now we know where the phrase, “Grandma, this salad tastes like $hit” comes from.

How to Make a Hotbed for the Earliest Sowings (2020)

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