Last Sunday we planted seeds ~ finally. 314 seeds, to be exact. In eight pounds of potting soil which was, in turn, in 234 - 3" round pots and 4 - 10 square flats. Sounds like a lot, but there's still more to do. We had to stop because we ran out of table room for them all
In fact, where you can see the seed box in this picture there now sit two more of the plastic trays. They hold the 4 - 10 square flats. One set of 4 is Genovese Basil, the other is Greek Oregano. The 13 trays hold: Red Brandywine Tomatoes, Yellow Brandywine Tomatoes, Red Pear Tomatoes, Yellow Pear Tomatoes, Russian Pickling Cucumbers, Marketmore 76 Cucumbers, Waltham Butternut Squash, Early Summer Yellow Crookneck Squash, Costa Romanesca Zucchini (I love that name.... ), Table Queen Acorn Squash, and Long Island Cheese Pumpkins. The plug you see in the wall coming up from behind and beneath the pots is for a heater - the seeds won't germinate if they're not warm enough. They also need light - more than they're getting from the windows (there are 2 in the room and you can sort of see one of them at the top left of the photo) so we will be hanging grow lights. Before we do that, though, we are building shelves for more layers of seeds. There will be at least two more tiers of seeds, with grow lights attached to the bottom of each for the tier of seeds/pots below, before we're finished. I'll post pictures of it all as we go along. In the meantime, I'm excitedly anticipating germinating seeds. As soon as something sprouts, you'll see pictures. I will be happy to see sprouts when they finally poke their little heads out of the dirt, because I've never planted this many organic/heirloom/untreated/open pollinated seeds before and I will breathe a little easier knowing they are coming up. It will be interesting to see what our germination rate is.
Because we are putting so much into this, I was pretty meticulous (oh, ok,..... anal) about how I planted them. I had previously created a measuring stick to use when planting seeds because, let's face it, can you really tell how deep a 1/4 inch is when you're sticking something that small into the dirt?
It's not very deep. In fact, it barely looks like the seed is in the soil
but, being one to follow directions, I did what it said on the seed packet then covered them over and am hoping for the best. The bigger seeds, like squash and pumpkins, go down a full inch. That's a little easier for me to be a little less compulsive about because, conveniently, my first finger joint is about an inch from the tip of my finger so I could just push those babies in and be done with it. The herbs, on the other hand, were a whole 'nother story! OMG! The seeds were so fine it looked like pepper. Like, what you have in a shaker on your table to put on your food. Wow. I've never planted anything with seeds that small before and I'm a little worried that they won't come up. I think they got a little too flooded when we watered them. In fact, it was that experience that prompted me to go out and buy a new watering wand attachment for the hose with a "mist" setting. That's about perfect in the way it delivers the water but it may be too late for those poor little herb seeds. Time will tell. I've got the flats covered with plastic and keeping warm, so if they're going to make it that's the best I can do for them.
I'm anxious to get finished planting everything that's going to be started indoors because I still worry that we're behind where we need to be but life has intervened, once again. In this case, it was in the form of the computer crashing yesterday. We had a heavy thunderstorm the night before and when I went to plug in and turn on the computer yesterday morning what happened was.... nothing. That was NOT A GOOD THING! It took all night (and much later than we really should have stayed up on a weeknight) to restore things to working order. It was a little dicey when we turned it on this morning, too. I'm almost afraid to shut the thing off but we are having more storms today and will have to shut it down soon. This time, I think I'll unplug the phone line in addition to unplugging the power cord. That's the only thing we can think of that might have caused the problems. Wish me luck!
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