Springing Seeds
It's time for the first Spring Seed planting!
The time has come to start the first round of indoor seedlings for 2018! *Party Dance*
Now is the time to start the plants that are more cold tolerant. A lot of these are normally started outdoor by direct seeding, but this year I wanted to try almost everything from seeds indoor first (mostly because I lost track of where I planted things last year...)
Our seed starting ritual usually starts with the annual seed inventory (which we should really start doing BEFORE the annual seed buying, which happened a few weeks ago...)
2018 Seeds
Not including the potatoes.... still waiting for those to arrive!
This year we decided to go full-out and buy a seedling light. (We'd previously been using an old aquarium light, but it wasn't really bright enough and it was hard to raise and lower.)
Also included in lessons from last year, we labelled the seedling trays with numbers and wrote down where we were planting things on a sheet of paper. Last year we had an... incident.... with the kitties, who decided that our seedlings were in their flight path and knocked them all over. We actually managed to save most of the seeds, but all of the labels fell off and we had written it down based on where they were on the table. So, although we could tell tomato from spinach, we still had a lot of mystery when it came to planting time!
Fortunately, my mom knew about my problems writing things down, so she gave me a nifty garden journal to use this year! (See above!)
Because remember, kids:
“The Only Difference Between Screwing Around and Science Is Writing It Down”
We had two seedling trays to work with, for a grand total of 122 cells.
In Tray 1 (72 cells) we had: Lacinato Kale, Integro F-1 Cabbage, Speckled Lettuce, Red Velvet Lettuce, Long Standing Spinach, Mixed Orach, Slow-bolt Cilantro, Vates Collards, De Cicco Broccoli, Red Chard, Rainbow Chard, Potato Onions, Perpetual leeks, Batavia Broccoli, and Italian Cameo Basil.
In Tray 2 (50 cells) we had: Purple Basil, Dill, Italian Parsley, Strawberry Spinach, American Spinach, Arugula, Historic Pansy Mix, Garlic Chives, and Chives.
Seeds are basically magical. We put them into soil, added some water, and just three days later we started to have plants!
After three to five days.....
