Category Archives: seedlings

seedlings, seeds

Onward~!

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I meant to post a few weeks ago when the seeds arrived in mid-February.  In the past, Pine Tree has shipped our seeds in a padded envelope.  This year?  We got a box:

And because we purchased so many items, we got a free reusable tote:

Currently we are storing the seeds in the box in the tote.  I will eventually appropriate it for grocery shopping.  What constitutes a lot of seeds, you ask?  Observe:

And not everything has arrived yet.  And we still have some seeds left over from last year that we’ll be using.  Still missing are the two types of potatoes, garlic, and hops – basically all the root plants.

This year I am going to try and grow all the flowers for my flower boxes and pots, as opposed to purchasing seedlings from the nursery.  But of course, once I started poking around in the flower section, there were so many new! and exciting! options for flowers.  I somehow ended up with lupin seeds (which always remind me of Monty Python) foxglove (which is making Himself nervous, as it is poisonous if ingested) and some unordered poppy seeds.  I hate poppies.  I’m going to plant them anyway, that’s a $1.35 of free seeds!  I can always Freecycle them.

Also on the purchasing agenda?  A larger seed-growing rack.  This is the one we purchased last year:

And this year’s upgrade:

Bit of a difference, no?  The added advantage with the new system is that the lights are standard sized and so we can steal them from our attic, insert new bulbs, and use them during the growing season.  J was telling me the other day about how the bulbs he just purchased have different UV spectrums, which are supposed to be good for seedlings.

This is such a complex setup and process for growing seeds.  If the Mayans are right, and the end is coming in December, we’re going to have a really hard time getting the seedlings started next year without electricity.

Especially if there are zombies.

Books, gardening, seedlings

Psst! Hey kids, want some free seedlings?

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Now that the garden is established, we had a dilemma as to what to do with the leftover seedlings that didn’t get planted.  We had tentatively discussed putting them on Freecycle, and last night J announced he was sick of tending to the unplanted seedlings and I should post them to the list.  He put the trays out on the front porch last night, and wondered if anyone would be interested. My experience with the list has been there is a taker for everything. 

Particularly free seedlings.

I posted this morning just before 8:30.  It’s now just over two hours later, and I’ve had over 30 responses.  It helps that we offered a lot of variety – tomatoes, eggplants, zucchini, summer squash & peppers.  The first respondant sent her email within 2 minutes of my post and has already picked them up.  I reposted that the seedlings were taken, but the emails still keep coming in.  I’m the kind of person who responds to everyone, so I’ve been letting people know that they’re taken.  Several people have mentioned in their emails that they’re behind with seedlings this year and they wouldn’t have a garden without getting seedlings, so I’ve recommended our local nursery.  This is so much more fun than focusing on work.

Only one set of our plants is from a nursery – I purchased Brandywine seedlings when I was picking up flowers for the pots I have all over the front porch.  When I read The $64 Tomato the author went on and on about how good Brandywine tomatoes taste, so I asked at the nursery while I was there.  Sure enough, they had some, so I bought a flat of six and we planted five.  Bradywine tomatoes are an heirloom tomato, which I’ve discovered is code for “might not look so pretty.”  I am okay with that, if they taste as good as that guy said they do.  If they don’t, I’m totally writing him a letter.  False advertising!

The potatoes, carrots and lettuce have all sprouted.  I’ll try to get some photos tonight, even though the carrots and lettuce can hardly be seen (and I can’t weed right now, for fear of accidentally mistaking the carrots for grass blades.) The potatoes look really good.  I should really figure out what the signs are that the potatoes are ready to harvest.  I think I read someplace that the plants die, and that’s when you harvest them.  You would think, being Irish, I would have some idea.  But I’m pretty sure I’m the first person in my family to grow potatoes since we left the Old Country.

back forty, housekeeping, seedlings

Looking on the Bright Side…..

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Things are looking up for the cocktail farmers.  J managed to liberate the grow lights from UPS’ clutches yesterday on his lunch hour and installed them last night.  They look great, and apparently use half the electricity of the ones we filched from our attic. 

Last night while J was busy with our new lights, I began the search for the strawberry seeds.  I remember putting them on the top shelf of the freezer.  I even took a photo, way back on March 1:

So I started there.  Now, I think it’s a pretty standard design for most systems that freezer shelves are not solid construction but more like racks with bars, so when I didn’t find them on the top shelf, I moved down a shelf, thinking that perhaps they slipped down and ended up there.  Nope!  Nothing.  Onto shelf three, with the same result.  At this point I was mystified – sure, the package isn’t very big, but it’s not like we would have pulled them out of the freezer to use in a recipe for anything.  Shelf four, also a bust, led me to pull out and empty the drawer where I keep frozen meats.  Then I removed the drawer and looked underneath it.  No strawberry seeds.  What the hell….?  I was pondering where they might have disappeared to when inspiration struck, and I looked on top of the fridge…………..and there they were!  They were obviously removed at some point when we were rummaging in the freezer and forgotten.  J swears he never saw the seeds in the freezer, leading me to belive that I am the one who removed them.  The question remains – when?  And were they in the freezer long enough to make a difference?  Risk taker that I am (with a $1.29 package of seeds, mind you) I am just going to plant them and see what happens.  Worst case scenario, I will still be purchasing strawberries at the farmers’ markets this summer.  Also, we have chipmunks and a groundhog out therre – it’s only a 50/50 chance I’ll get any strawberries anyway.

On the bright side, my freezer has not been so organized since we moved into the house four years ago.

Here’s the cocktail I drank the night we found out the Back Forty garden is on our neighbor’s property.  I decided it should be called “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” and J did not object. 

2 oz Gin
2 oz pineapple juice
1 oz Chambourd
1 oz Grand Marnier

Mix in a shaker with ice until shaker is too cold to hold, pour equally into two glasses,  Serves 2.  Or one, if you’ve had a very bad day.

Books, seedlings, seeds

When we’re not gardening, I’m reading about gardening

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Or, in this case, farming, which to me is the ultimate hard-core act of sustainable living.  A few weeks ago I read a great memoir called The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food and Love by Kristin Kimball.  She was a NYC writer in a rent-controlled apartment who met a self-taught farmer while on a writing assignment, fell for him, and move to upstate New York to start a farm from the ground up.  The book covers the good and the bad, talking about the fun of making your own cheese with the worry about money when your bank account reads nearly zero.  She doesn’t romanticize or sugar coat the hard work that she and her fiance (now husband) put into starting a farm from scratch, but you get the sense that she truly feels its worth it – she’s traded the security and lifestyle of NYC for a simpler life where they grow their own food and were able to develop a year-round CSA model that provides a complete diet to their members – they have bees, chickens, pigs, cattle and dairy cows.  They even use draft horses to plow the five acres in which they grow vegetables.  It got great reviews online, and I picked it up thinking, “Even when the garden expansion seems overwhelming, it will never be as much work as this.”  Heck, we don’t even have pets, never mind dairy cows that need milking or pigs we have to slaughter.

There’s a plan to start some of the seeds this weekend, requiring a trip out to pick up some new supplies.  J has some new things he wants to try, namely grow lights.  We’ve already been using covered trays and seed mats for heat.  This year we also have a new baker’s rack, assembled and waiting in the basement.  We’ll have more trays of seedlings this year, based on the expanded, ambitious garden plans, and it will be easier to move them from their daytime home on the sun porch back into the kitchen if we have the rolling rack.  The tentative plan is to start the eggplants and peppers now, staggering the rest of the seeds (tomatoes, squash) based on our target planting date of Memorial Day weekend.  We’re currently debating whether to put the peas, beans and cucumbers directly into the ground or not.  We did decide that the corn, pumpkins and watermelons are going directly into the ground one to two weeks before our big planting weekend.  J is planning on creating furrows in the garden and we’re going to buy hay for insulation during the germination period.  In the past we’ve used weed block, but last year’s heat and dry weather shredded the material and we ended up weeding once a week anyway.  We’re going to try and keep the weeds down with the hay and some good old-fashioned hoeing.  I also think it’s an excuse for him to buy some other piece of equipment to attach to the tractor for the plants in the open field.  Did I mention that we might need to build a new and larger shed this year? 

Tonight the alpine strawberry seeds are going in the freezer – in order to mimic nature and what they would experience if they were outside all winter it is recommended you stick them in the freezer for 4 -6 weeks prior to planting.  I have been reminding myself for weeks that I need to do this, and finally decided tonight was the night; it will be easier to remember the date I did it since today is the start of the month.  Depending on the rate of germination, I might sow them directly into the raised beds that have yet to be constructed, or I might start seedlings in about a month.  My research shows they can be somewhat susceptible to frost, so they’ll be going in the ground around Memorial Day either in seed or seedling format. 

A lot of this is guess work and trust in others’ research and experiences.  Our favorite phrase around here is, “It’s an experiment.”  So far it’s worked out fine (except for those blasted pumpkins!) but I can’t help but feel at some point there will be a failure.  We’ll see.  It’ll probably be those strawberries I’ve spent so much time thinking about.  They’ll probably get frostbite in my freezer.