Complete Urban Farmer

Day one: Propagation and seed saving
Today I started a 12 week short course at Ceres. We meet once a week and delve into many different topics to develop skills and gain insight into the world of permaculture and sustainable food production.
Learning to propagate and compost and grow things with efficient wonder is really exciting to me right now and feels like a good place to put my energy. Grounding myself by literally spending time in dirt and developing more practical skills is ideal yet definately challenging for someone that loves ideas and literature.
I'm really keen to keep developing this idea of food as my art practice and to incorporate more live growing plants in all my projects of the future. I would also be very happy to exist on plants grown in my garden.

Things I learnt today:
* Soil is amazing
* Seeds rot if the soil is too wet and not aerated enough or the soil is too rich in nutrients.
* Rock - pebble - sand - silt - clay (size order of particles)
* Plant leaves go yellow when the soil is low in nitrogen, and if there is too much nitrogen you will get lots of green leaves and no fruit (which is sad if you are trying to grow tomatoes but I wonder if it's okay when you are happy with an abundance of greens? Oh but I think the point was more about the importance of achieving some wholesome balance in the soil, and either extreme creates problems)
* Seeds are always breathing, they like a warm, moist, oxygenated environment in which to germinate.
* When growing beans you should water the soil first, plant your bean and then not water it again until it has germinated and the shoot sprung to the surface.
* A natural rooting hormone, if making cuttings, is honey

There was lots more, I liked planting seeds the best and seeing other baby vegetables growing in the Ceres hothouses, there was an incredible orange and purple curly kale, I think it was Russian something... I planted a whole tray of different things including lebanese cucumbers, coriander, tatsoi, basil and eggplants. They are going to hang out in the hothouse for awhile and then i'll bring them home and grow them up big.