Garden season is progressing quickly, and we're doing a much better job of staying caught up this year. Some of the early brassicas are already in the ground, and we've had much better luck overall with things sprouting this season.
I reuse as much as I can, but every year there are a few things to buy. This year it was lids and solid bottom trays. My old tray lids are so yellow you can no longer see through them, and so full of cracks and holes that they no longer hold in heat. The solid trays are necessary for bottom watering plants once they've sprouted, and generally for keeping several gallons of water off the hardwood floor. There's cement floor under the basement seedlings, so I don't mind if they leak a bit, but the ones upstairs NEED to be leak free.
Every drop of condensation can be thought of as heat that didn't escape from the soil around our seeds. Not everything needs the extra heat the lids provide. Things like the green cabbage in the pic below will sprout promptly, even if it's only 50° in the house. Other things, like the celery, prefer ground temps over 70° to sprout quickly. Some of the peppers, like the habaneros, sprout best with even higher temps, so those are the types of things we put on the seedling mats. As things begin to sprout, I'll often switch cells around to keep things that haven't sprouted yet in the warmer trays.
Like every year, there are some new herbs and flowers that Hedge Witch wanted to try out. Usually they have some medicinal or other beneficial value, but I swear sometimes she picks things just because she likes the name. I don't mind, I enjoy learning about new things and how to care for them. Even when it's a complete failure, like our several attempts to grow cumin, it's still a learning experience.
It amazes me every year how different things can behave, even from year to year. We group our seedlings based on factors we've learned about previously... temperature preferences, time to sprouting, growth rate, and other factors so that we keep plants with similar needs in the same trees. Every year, though, things go a little different than the year before, and we end up shuffling things around in the trays.
The celery this year was a good example. We've never needed to start celery on the seedling mats before, so this year we had them in the covered tray that wasn't on seedling mats. After two weeks of no results, I switched them out with some peppers that were on the mats but had already sprouted. All of the celery came up within 24 hours of having that extra warmth.
One of the new things we're trying this year is some cotton. My mother brought us back some cotton seeds from a trip she made to visit my brother in South Carolina 3 years ago. This year, we finally put them in some dirt and they popped right up. This is something that we're going to grow just for curiosity, we're not actually planning on growing enough to make fabrics. Depending on how it goes this year, we may try to do more with it next year.
Not everything we're holding indoors right now is seedlings. In the pic below you can see some of our potted rosemary and sage that we bring in for the winter. The cactus looking plant in the back (we have recently learned) is dragon fruit. Now that I know what they are, I'm hoping to get these in some bigger pots with poles to tie them to. Maybe we can grow some dragon fruit in another year or two!
Sometimes, when seeds don't sprout, we'll stick trimmings from other plants in the cells to see if they take root. The scraggly looking things in the picture below are Chain of Hearts, sage, lemon, and spider plant cuttings that were stuck in old trays. Some take root, some don't; they're all just extra plants to us, and we end up giving most of them away.
Giving those plants away sometimes brings back returns, like this pineapple that was started from seed by Hedge Witch's sister. She brought it to us about a month ago, and we haven't killed it yet, but it hasn't seemed terribly happy. We've taken a couple attempts at rooting pineapple from the fruit tops before, but with no real success.
I had wanted to add some more to this post, but it's taken me so long to get the pictures taken, everything has progressed to another level, suitable for its own post. This one has already been sitting in 'drafts' for a week, so I guess it's time to post it, even if it falls a little short of what I had planned. It is, after all, time to get started on this week's posts...
I hope you enjoyed this, and I hope you come back to see more!