Greetings all. It's been a while since I really said anything around here. I had high hopes and goals of a running commentary all along the early spring planting season, with daily updates about little seedlings and fruit buds and all the green growth that's breaking out all over the yard. It's all so exciting.
But I decided I'd rather just watch it and try to summarize each major step.
So we built raised beds. We planted things in them (sometimes even following our plans) and now we're watching things grow. Soon it'll be time to plant more, but right now I'm just going to write a little about my experience with starting seeds this year.
I really like starting plants from seeds. I get a kick out of it. Usually I really only like plants that earn their keep, but if I start them from seed I'm fascinated with even the inedible flowers. I wrote about beginning this process an an earlier post.
Now the vast majority of those plants are out in the garden and I'm looking back at the experience.
That's how the seed starting table looked about a week after starting the tomatoes and peppers and whatnot. The small dish is pansies (Incidently, don't bother. They're so cheap and nice at the store that it seems silly to start them inside 12 weeks before you plant them out.) the big dish is snapdragons, and the rest of the tray is warm season vegetables. It looks so nice and neat and organized. It's so full of promise. At this point nothing has died, nothing looks crispy and it's all about the potential.
I just like that picture. It's after we labeled all the peat pots, all the cotyledons are open and some things are getting true leaves. You're looking across the pepper landscape. The little guys are so healthy, so happy, so ready to turn into great big plants that will give wonderful, juicy, tasty, spicy, pretty fruit that I can turn into sandwiches and sauce and grilled things and, well, you get the picture. It's great to watch the tiny little seeds turn into plants, daydreaming all the while about the wonderful things you'll harvest in just a few short months.
Then you realize you're overextended. Plants sort of spill off your seed starting table. They get too close to the lights and get burned, they get all weepy as you're hardening them off, they just generally frighten you within an inch of your life that all the hard work and watching and waiting and anticipating is going to be for naught.
You get pictures like the one above. You can see all the yellowing burnt leaves and the weak stalks and the strange colors. I think it was a combination of a few factors. One was letting the tender little plants get too close to the hot lights, another was potting them in peat moss and perlite (i think that mix is too acid on its own, I added lime and things got better) and the last might have been hardening off too quickly. I took a week to get them ready for the outside, an hour more exposure each day. Then I just let them stay out all day. Then left them outside constantly. It would have probably been better to take 2 weeks. But then again, I only lost one tomato plant before I got them planted and that's a lot better then last year when I must have lost 75% of the tomato seedlings.
The strange yellow leaf thing got me scared, the fact that I planted 2 weeks before we had originally planned has me nervous and and, I kid you not, I lost sleep over the seedlings when it looked like I was going to lose them to a mystery leaf yellowing (I've since decided it was a burn from the light. New leaves are just fine.)
All the plants are great now. We planted them in the beds this weekend and lost one to some sort of creature (probably a neighborhood cat) breaking a pepper plant off an inch above the soil line and one to some sort of wilt. That's a pretty good record for me and I feel it bodes well for the gardens this year.
There it is, seed starting in overview. Hope you enjoyed it, I'm hoping to get some more bits like this one on the details of the other projects we've been working on lately.
Ryan
But I decided I'd rather just watch it and try to summarize each major step.
So we built raised beds. We planted things in them (sometimes even following our plans) and now we're watching things grow. Soon it'll be time to plant more, but right now I'm just going to write a little about my experience with starting seeds this year.
I really like starting plants from seeds. I get a kick out of it. Usually I really only like plants that earn their keep, but if I start them from seed I'm fascinated with even the inedible flowers. I wrote about beginning this process an an earlier post.
Now the vast majority of those plants are out in the garden and I'm looking back at the experience.
That's how the seed starting table looked about a week after starting the tomatoes and peppers and whatnot. The small dish is pansies (Incidently, don't bother. They're so cheap and nice at the store that it seems silly to start them inside 12 weeks before you plant them out.) the big dish is snapdragons, and the rest of the tray is warm season vegetables. It looks so nice and neat and organized. It's so full of promise. At this point nothing has died, nothing looks crispy and it's all about the potential.
I just like that picture. It's after we labeled all the peat pots, all the cotyledons are open and some things are getting true leaves. You're looking across the pepper landscape. The little guys are so healthy, so happy, so ready to turn into great big plants that will give wonderful, juicy, tasty, spicy, pretty fruit that I can turn into sandwiches and sauce and grilled things and, well, you get the picture. It's great to watch the tiny little seeds turn into plants, daydreaming all the while about the wonderful things you'll harvest in just a few short months.
Then you realize you're overextended. Plants sort of spill off your seed starting table. They get too close to the lights and get burned, they get all weepy as you're hardening them off, they just generally frighten you within an inch of your life that all the hard work and watching and waiting and anticipating is going to be for naught.
You get pictures like the one above. You can see all the yellowing burnt leaves and the weak stalks and the strange colors. I think it was a combination of a few factors. One was letting the tender little plants get too close to the hot lights, another was potting them in peat moss and perlite (i think that mix is too acid on its own, I added lime and things got better) and the last might have been hardening off too quickly. I took a week to get them ready for the outside, an hour more exposure each day. Then I just let them stay out all day. Then left them outside constantly. It would have probably been better to take 2 weeks. But then again, I only lost one tomato plant before I got them planted and that's a lot better then last year when I must have lost 75% of the tomato seedlings.
The strange yellow leaf thing got me scared, the fact that I planted 2 weeks before we had originally planned has me nervous and and, I kid you not, I lost sleep over the seedlings when it looked like I was going to lose them to a mystery leaf yellowing (I've since decided it was a burn from the light. New leaves are just fine.)
All the plants are great now. We planted them in the beds this weekend and lost one to some sort of creature (probably a neighborhood cat) breaking a pepper plant off an inch above the soil line and one to some sort of wilt. That's a pretty good record for me and I feel it bodes well for the gardens this year.
There it is, seed starting in overview. Hope you enjoyed it, I'm hoping to get some more bits like this one on the details of the other projects we've been working on lately.
Ryan