Tomatoes are in!

Spent yesterday morning planting the next batch of seeds. Six varieties of tomatoes (including my first attempt at saved seeds thanks to my mother in law) with the majority of them being Roma's for sauce. Also got some more lettuce going and cauliflower.

Although we are not big users of herbs, I keep trying them. We have a small clump of chives near the back door, though we didn't use them at all last year. I planted oregano, basil and coriander to create a small herb garden with. I didn't grow any last year, it would be nice to get some decent growth this year to add to our tomato sauce.

For the non-edible portion of our landscape, I started some left over forget me nots, black eyed susans, purple cone flowers, and alyssum. In addition I started some flowers to include in the veggie garden to help attract pollinators (marigolds and nasturtiums, also saved seed).

I was tempted to try the plant peas on St. Patrick's day saying, but I'm glad I didn't as we got an inch of snow today and the rest of this week looks cool and wet. Better to wait and ensure the seed doesn't rot in the ground. If the long range forcast looks good come this weekend, I may plant some just to try.

The first seeds are in!

Planted my first seeds of the season on Saturday, February 26. I had planned all along to get the onions started early, but decided to give my peppers an earlier start than usual on some hopefully good advice from the manager at Comstock, Ferre & Co. To round out my plantings, I threw some assorted lettuce seed that had been given to me (and which is several years old at this point) into a spare planter and added a 6 pack of broccoli.

I'm not honestly sure if it was time to start the broccoli, but even if it is too early, I find the idea of using a cold frame intriguing, and this might be a way to force me to try it. My only trepidation is knowing that I'm not so good at remembering to check the weather each day to ensure I open and close it as necessary to avoid freezing or baking the plants.

For this year I have started 12 cells each of green bell, jalapeno and Corno di Toro Giallo. the bell and pepper seeds are now 3 years old. To compensate for the likely low germination rate, I planted 4 in each cell. Since the Corno di Toro Giallo's are new this year, I only planted one in each.

Since I am trying 3 different varieties of onions (Ailsa Craig, Australian Brown, Noordhollandse Bloedrode), and each variety is listed as containing at least 300 seeds, I roughly split each packet into thirds and planted 1/3 of each. The onions are all planted in the bottoms of one gallon milk jugs, cut off at the bottom of the handle. I then drilled eight, 1/8" holes in the bottom for drainage.

I have struggled in the past to get good germination from my peppers. To help things along I have set up the top rack of my light stand as a mini hot house with cardboard forming the walls and roof to hold in the heat produced by the florescent lamp. To this I have added a poor man's grow mat.

This consists of two 2x4's to set the planting trays on and a string of 100 Christmas lights spread out under the tray in the gap in between the 2 x 4's. With the two lights going 24/7, the inside of the "hot house" stays in the 70-71 deg F range.

Finally, Some Peppers are Up!

It took 2 plantings and 5 weeks, but I finally have some pepper plants starting to come up. Just barely though as they aren't much more than poking up through the dirt. I don't remember having this much trouble getting them to sprout last year. Keeping them alive, yes, sprouting, no.

I only have 3 or 4 out of 2 dozen up. The rest should come along shortly, at least I hope so. Timing wise I should still be ok for a late May planting. If the spring stays as cold as it has been the last week or so, they'll WANT to be delayed to let the soil warm up.

Looking forward to getting some flowers started this weekend!

My Grow Light Setup

Starting seeds indoors requires some form of artificial light. The easiest and cheapest way to accomplish this is through the use of 40 watt flourescent 'worklight' style lamps. These can be found quite cheaply ($10-15 for a 2 tube light) at your local big box home improvement stores. In my case, while renovating our condo's bathrooms, I salvaged the old worklight style lighting fixtures and rewired them to have normal wall plugs.

It is difficult to see in the pictures, but I have two light fixtures connected with pieces of scrap wood. The wood pieces have one eye bolt each with an 'S' shaped piece of coat hanger wire to allow easy adjustment on the chain.

For chain, I am using a purpose bought dog chain. For $4 for a 15 or 20' length, it was far cheaper than any hardware store chain would have been. The chain makes it easy to change the height of the lights as the plants grow.

The picture looks clutter because I have added reflection panels to maximize the amount of light available to the seedlings. The panels are nothing more than cardboard cut to size and wrapped in aluminum foil. The aluminum foil bounces the light around the enclosed area increasing the light density. Without the reflective panels the light would spill out into the room and not be available to the plants.

An additional benefit of the panels is they help keep the plants warmer than the surrounding basement. Although flourescent lights are fairly efficient, they do produce some heat, in my case the ballast that drives the flourescent tubes also produces a good amount of heat. Although I haven't measured it, this heat definitely keeps the plants warmer than without. In fact, after the 14 hour on-time, you can feel that the basement is warmer than it started.

Some people use heating pads to warm their seedlings. I am counting on the lights to provide enough heat. I found out the hard way that this is not good enough for germinating peppers. It seems to be enough for everything else, however.

Seedling Update

Three weeks into my seed starting exercise and as with most gardening exploits, the results are mixed.

All varieties of tomatoes are up and growing extremely well. Shortly, I will start applying periodic wind (via a fan) to help promote strength of the young seedlings.

The broccoli and onions are also growing quite well. I had a bit of an issues with the onions, however. I am using the bottom of gallon milk jugs for my 'pots'. I did not put any drain holes in the bottom and managed to overwater them a couple times. Unfortunately that has led to one of the four pots losing almost all of it's seedlings. Another pot lost about half its seedlings. Lesson learned, be certain to include drain holes in all seedling pots. Be careful not to overwater your seedlings, they are very sensitive to 'drowning'.

I've had mixed success with herbs this year. Most of them have come up, however, I managed to kill off quite a few seedlings with careless watering. Today, I tossed in some additional seed to make up for the losses. In the end I am not as concerned about the herbs as I am the vegetables. We use some oregano and basil in our tomato sauce, but the remaining herbs (cilantro, parsley & chives) have not found a regular use yet.

Lastly, are our poor pepper seeds. I thought my light setup would warm the plantings enough to enable all the varieties of seed to germinate. It seems however, that it was not sufficient for the peppers. After 2-1/2 weeks they still showed no sign of germination (I dug up a few seeds to verify). I have replanted them and moved the trays out of the basement grow area to the solarium. There's still plenty of time for the pepper plants to grow sufficiently for a May transplantation. But it is disappointing that they weren't successful the first time around.

Seedlings are up!

In just over a week's time about 70% of my seedlings are up. Almost all the tomatoes, onions, broccoli and basil have sprouted. The peppers, both green and jalapeno varieties are lagging. But that is to be expected. What is unknown is if the green peppers will come up at all.

I had a bunch of seeds given to me that dated as old as 2002. So I planted several of them in each cell, we'll see how many actually come up. A year or two isn't a big deal, but 7 is asking a lot. I probably should have done a germination test in some wet paper towel, but I didn't think of it in time.

If they aren't up by next weekend I'll throw in some of the seeds from last year that I had left over.

I had also started some lettuce that is beginning to pop up. Lettuce and I have a long and tortured relationship. I had one awesome crop 3 years ago, I've tried every year since, sometimes both spring and fall to repeat that success. I might have succeeded last year but I seeded the window planter too heavily and never thinned them so they crowded each other out and died off.

I'm not exactly doing myself any favors this year. I threw the seeds into a window planter full of garden dirt from last year. Needless to say I have about as many weeds coming up as lettuce. But, I didn't want to waste a lot of effort on something that will probably fail once again.