Seedings to transplants, and the first few pots!

It generally takes 6 or 8 weeks for a seed to grow into a plant big enough to transplant into the garden. We started our cool season vegetables in mid-January, aiming to transplant them in late February. On February 4th we started another round of seeds, including tomatoes, kale, marigolds, and basil with a goal planting date of April 3rd. Within a few weeks, we had so many little seedlings we ran out of space in the terrarium!

The terrarium sits in our south-facing window, so the seedlings get lots of light on sunny days. We nursed all the little guys until it was time to put out the first few pots near the end of February. About a week ahead of our first goal planting date, we began to set our broccoli, spinach and pansy seedlings outside for a few hours a day, to help them get used to the cruel outdoors after living inside their cozy terrarium for so long. We had planned for February 27th to be our planting day for pots 1 and 2 (see previous post for the garden plan) and that turned out just perfectly. All our seedlings had four or six leaves, they looked a little smaller than the size of the seedlings we have seen at nurseries, but we figured they'd be happier with plenty of room to grow in the big pots. If we had learned anything from our seedlings over that six week period, it was that plants WANT to live! They want to live way more than they want to die! Especially the pansies... they're tough!

We only had one spinach seedling to transplant, it went into the middle of pot 1 along with several pansy transplants around the outer edge. At the back of the first pot we anchored a pretty trellis and planted our sugar pod pea seeds, which we had soaked in water overnight to soften them. Three broccoli transplants went into pot 2. A few days later, we added pots 3, 4 and 5. Pot 3 is a large shallow bowl-shaped planter into which we sowed our mesclun lettuce mix (in the back of the picture on the steps). Pot 4 was planted with three red russian kale seedling. We sowed seeds for dill into pot 5. So, by March 3rd our container garden was up to 5 pots. We're off to a good start and it looks so cute! All that's left to do is water and wait...