Seed starting
Last year, we started some of our plants from seed, and were only semi-successful. This year, we took a short seed-starting course from the Peterson Garden Project, the organization that we are doing our community garden through. We learned a few new tricks and started a large batch of seeds- 80 to be exact. There were onions, brussels sprouts, kale, tomatoes, fennel, tomatillos, peppers and kohlrabi. We didn’t really want to go buy seed starter trays so we rigged some up from an old box lined with trash bags to waterproof, and I made tiny paper pots from scratch paper that otherwise would have been recycled. This is how it all looked:
I ran the paper through the printer so that there were lines as a folding guide and a label to write which plants were inside. We ended up with little snippits of stories on the inside. I like to think that the words kept the little seedlings company.
Then, of course, we dropped the seeds down in, watered and covered. It took several days to get sprouts, and the pepper plants did not want to sprout at all. I moved those into a pyrex dish and put them on a heating pad to coax them up and out. It miraculously worked and nearly every plant sprouted. Then we put them under the grow lights, and ended up with these little guys growing away.
We also potted them up after a few weeks, and dropped them at my parents to get hardened off. I will give an updated picture of the bigger plants next time we get up north to check out our garden.
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