Zuke, Strawberry and an Amazing Gardening Tool

The zucchini seedlings and the transplanted strawberry plants are super robust.  I love the way the zucchini sprout throws off the seed cover. Looks like a pumpkin seed shell that someone spit out onto the ground. (photo here and at bottom of this post).

The two strawberry plants clearly survived the transplant well – this berry was green a couple of days ago when I did the transplant.

And below an extremely cool garden tool for creating small square stamps of planting soil. Using this you can sprout seedlings without using any little pots or plastic cells.

I bought it on Sunday from Justin Dervaes at a community gathering/pot luck dinner organized by his family, the owners/operators of Dervaes Farm in urban Pasadena. They produce around 6,000 lbs of produce yearly on a property almost exactly the same size as mine (8,700 sq ft). They have tons of great information on their website urbanhomestead.org

I haven’t used it yet but Justin was demonstrating on Sunday and I loved it. You immerse the tool in a big basin of damp potting soil, pushing it firmly into the soil a few times to get the tool nice and packed solid. The you take the tool, place it over a plastic tray around 24” x 36” with a perforated bottom, press down to release the tightly packed little cubes of soil. You end up with a tray of what looks like a tray of brownies in which you can plant your seeds. I’ll take some photos of it in action this week – much easier to describe how it works with images…