miia monthly » Seedlings

Seed Starting – 05/10/2010

AuSable — Tue, 18 May 2010 22:28:59 +0000

Look at that sweet corn grow! And check out all the rest of the random stuff that I’ve gotten from my farmer neighbor (leeks, fingerling seed potatoes), as well as from the local nursery (white and red onion sets, sage, basil, cilantro, rosemary.)

You can also see in photo #5 the free seeds (see here) that I got from my neighbor starting to germinate.

Seed Starting – 05/05/2010

AuSable — Tue, 18 May 2010 22:26:13 +0000

Here are a bunch of pics of the discarded seedlings in the white cups. I also started a whole flats worth of sweet corn just to test to out, and so far they seem to be doing very well. The sweet corn ended up germinating a lot quicker than I thought it would (about 3 days to sprout.)

Just got some some free seeds from my farmer neighbor

AuSable — Mon, 10 May 2010 16:28:11 +0000

A couple of you might know this, but the guy that lives next door to me, works on a CSA farm on the outskirts of town. Any questions that I have about agriculture/farming, I always shoot his way. Well now that the growing season is well under way, he let me know that he had a bunch of very old seeds from Johnny’s that they couldn’t use on the farm, since they were too old (expiration date of 2005.) So he let me know that if I wanted some, that I was more then welcome to poach however much I needed.

Since the packets that he had were 1/4 to 1/2lb in size and being how old the seeds were, I only ended up taking about a 100 seeds of the two different seeds that he had. I guess we shall see in the next week or so, if anything germinates out of these seeds. Since they both looked like two very interesting seed varieties for squashes.

Links to Johnny’s Select Seeds:

Vegetables -> Squash -> Sunburst

Vegetables > Squash -> Costata Romanesco

Garden Damage Aftermath – 05-03-2010

AuSable — Wed, 05 May 2010 03:42:53 +0000

Turns out that my hunch from last night was right, and I basically lost an entire row of white cups in the salad table. But it turns out that I was a little bit lucky, in that I had tossed all the extra seedlings that I didn’t transplant onto a dirt pile in the basement. I really don’t know which is which among the seedlings in the pile. So I basically just dumped out the contents of the hail damaged crop cups, sifted out all the destroyed seedlings, and mixed the wet potting soil with some potting soil that was bone dry to equal out the moisture level of the potting mix.

For now I’m just going to leave the “survivor seedlings” from the dirt pile under the grow lights in the house. Since right about the time on Monday night that I was pulling all the dead cups into the house, it almost looked like it was going to hail all over again. So as quickly as a could, I covering up the seedlings that did end up semi-surviving in case it hailed again (which thank god it didn’t.)

I didn’t sow all the seeds from the packets that I got from Johnny’s. A lot of the herbs that I lost, I’m going to write them off as a lost cause since its getting a bit late in the season to start over again from seed. But for the Marketmore 76 cucumbers that were destroyed, since those seeds germinate in 3-4 days, I’ll just start up a new batch of those.

Damn Hailstorm! – May 2, 2010

AuSable — Mon, 03 May 2010 04:27:35 +0000

OK, talk about a freak hailstorm. On Saturday night, I finished transplanting almost everything from flat #1 into 10 oz white plastic cups. The only things that I didn’t transplant from the flat into cups were the Aji and the El Jefe, and thank god that I didn’t. Because on Sunday afternoon around 1:30pm, the sky turned dark and hell was than unleashed for about 30 mins. And during that 30 minute downpour of marble sized hail, the hail basically destroyed all the seedlings that I had left outside on a salad table that I had built.

Tomorrow afternoon, I’ll have to go through all the cups to see what is salvageable from all the plants. But so far it looks like the only survivors are some of the cucumbers and zucchini. And maybe some of the bell peppers. Man this sucks!

Seed starting – Both Flats – 04/26/2010

AuSable — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 05:28:29 +0000

Alright I ended up only transplanting 18 of 27 cells of the cucumbers and the zucchini tonight, so you’ll see a couple of before and after pictures below. Also you can see that I’m going to give growing potatoes another shot this year (more details to come on the pallet growing bins) hence why those potatoes are under the grow lights.

Seed starting – Flat 2 – 04/24/2010

AuSable — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 05:20:01 +0000

Yeah I know its totally crazy, only three days ago I planted this flat and already all the cucumbers and the zucchini have germinated. In a couple more days I’ll have to transfer them to a larger growing cup.

Seed starting – 04/23/2010

AuSable — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 05:10:16 +0000

The pics for this set came out pretty bad, since I didn’t have the camera flash turned on. So the only light, is the light coming off of the florescent grow lights. From now on for the seedling posts, I’m going to stick with just the calendar date instead of the number of days that the flat has been growing. Things are just starting to get a little bit too confusing for me trying to remember the numbers of days instead of the date.

So here is a quick breakdown of when the two flats were started:
Flat #1: 04/13/2010
Flat #2: 04/21/2010

Seed Starting – 1st flat – Day 13

AuSable — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 13:40:14 +0000

Amazing what another five days of growing will do, but it looks like I have a mixed bag of results as far as seeds that ended up germinating.

Success:
Aji Limo
El Jefe
1/2 the Bell Peppers
1/3 the Banana style peppers
1/2 the Sage
1/2 the Basil

Failed:
The other 1/2 or 1/3 of all those listed above
all the parsley
all the cilantro
all the oregeno
all the rosemary

I have to say that I’m not 100% sure that the parsley, cilantro, oregeno, and rosemary have failed. Since all those herbs take anywhere from 14 to 21 days to germinate. So before I toss out all the dirt in those flats, I’ll give them another week or so to do their thing.

Seed Starting – 1st flat – Day 8

AuSable — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 04:10:04 +0000

It’s been a little bit tricky, figuring out how to get the temperature just right on the heating pad. Since when I wrapped the whole flat in a movers blanket, the temperature inside the flat shot up to 95F. So I’m going to test out simulating the heat and light cycle of the sun in the growing area. So last night I set up a make shift growing station with a grow light on a couple of copier boxes, with the heating pad and the grow light both plugged into a timer.

The basil ended up sprouting this past weekend, which was a lot quicker than expected. And when I checked the flat this morning, I started to see some activity on the El Jefe jalapenos and the sage. As it currently stands, it seems like the heating mat is cutting down the germination time almost in half, which is pretty amazing. That is of course, with me assuming that the seeds that I saved from last year are still viable. Which is the big question mark for the garden this year.