Starting seeds: A new beginning

Well, the trials and errors of last season are behind us. With a new year comes a new beginning, a fresh start for our little garden. We have all our little seeds, left over from last season. Growing from seed always seemed like such a mystery to us, especially since we failed so miserably at starting seeds in the past. But after studying gardening books all winter, by mid-January we had caught the dreaded garden fever! So, we decided to start a few seeds of some "cold season" crops. Some vegetables do well in cool weather, and can even survive a frost, so you can plant them very early in the spring. We chose broccoli, swiss chard, spinach, parsley, cilantro and pansies for our first experimental guinea pigs. There are several different ways to go about starting seeds. All techniques require the same basic elements: seeds, soil, water and, once the seeds sprout, light. We will experiment with different methods throughout the season, but for this round we began our seed starting adventure with peat pellets.

They're little disks of dried, compressed peat moss growing medium for seeds. Each pellet is wrapped in a really fine netting that holds the soil pellet together. So, you just soak the disks in warm water until they expand into a small plug of soil, then you put your seeds in. There is usually a small dent on the top where you can put the seed, but we found it helpful to spread the top of the pellet flat because some seeds are tiny and shouldn't be sowed more than a quarter inch deep. When the seeds sprout, the roots can grow through the netting, so you can plant the pellet right in your garden when the seedling gets big enough. It's great because you don't have to fool around with pots when you're sowing the seeds or when you transplant them. Works really well.... in theory. Actually, the pellets that we found were on sale 100 for $20, but then we figured out that the reason they were such a great deal is that they are about half the size of a regular peat pellet! They were just fine for getting the seeds to sprout, but the amount of soil there pretty much required immediate transplanting into a small cup of soil. The pellets definitely worked, though.

On January 19th we started small, just three pellets of each plant, except for the pansies which we sowed into twelve pellets. On January 22nd, we got our first sprout! A little broccoli! The chard soon followed, then parsley and pansies. Sadly, the cilantro and spinach didn't sprout in that first round of pellets. Oh, well. We were so happy with the sprouts we got!

So... now what?
How the heck were we supposed to keep our new sprouts in the sunny window, yet protect them from the fiercest of predators...
...the domestic cat!?

Mufasa is ready to nom these little plants!

We found a medium size aquarium at a thrift store to use as a home for our little seedlings. It sits on a table by our south-facing window and gets just enough sun.It's important to make sure your seedlings get enough light. If they don't have enough, they will grow really long stems trying to get closer to the light source. Gardeners call seedlings in this condition "leggy", and it happened to some of our broccoli sprouts right away because it was cloudy outside for a few days in a row. We ended up transplanting them into a deeper cup, burying them a little bit deeper so they could stand up better. All the sprouts had to be transplanted quickly anyway, because of the small size of the peat pellets. For now, we'll go ahead and pronounce our latest attempt at seed sprouting a success! Yes, we are quite proud of ourselves! We'll be nursing these little guys for 6 or 8 weeks, 'til they're big enough to go into their container homes. Cross your fingers and stay tuned...