New pots in the garden!

Transplants in the terrarium

With our cool season veggies well established, the time for planting our warm season veggies had arrived! Warm season veggies are those that cannot live through a frost, like tomatoes, peppers, and squashes. We learned that here, in hardiness zone 8a, our latest probability of frost is around the middle of April. Our winter was very mild and spring arrived early, so we thought it might be safe to transplant some tomatoes in early April. We set April 1st as our goal date for adding pots for tomatoes, zucchini, cow peas, basil, catnip, nasturtiums and marigolds. Just like the rest, we're growing them all from seed. The tomatoes, basil, catnip and marigolds should be started early indoors, so we started those seeds in early February, about 8 weeks ahead of our planting date. We planned to sow the rest of the seeds directly into our garden pots.

Pot 10

Well planting day finally arrived, the transplants were ready as planned, and pots 10-15 went out into the front yard! Pot 10 had been planned for tomatoes, marigolds and basil, but the basil got cut at the last minute in favor of having more space for the tomatoes. Besides, we had reserved a pot especially for basil, pot 12. Pot 11 was for zucchini, cow peas and nasturtiums. We anchored trellises for the zucchini and peas and planted the seeds directly under them. We're hoping the nasturtiums will trail over the edge of the pot. Pot 13 was planted with only marigolds. Pot 14 became home for the catnip transplants.

Top right: pot 15, middle right: pot 14
 and random flower pots

We had a 15th pot planned for more dill, however pot 5 had already been devoted to dill and it has performed very poorly, so we decided not to plant any more just yet. Instead, we picked up a couple of strawberry transplants at the nursery and planted those in pot 15. Hopefully one day we will be eating fresh berries from this random addition! We also added three other pots at random, one planted with zinnia seeds, one with morning glories, and the last one planted with "flower balls" that a little hippie girl gave me, which are flower seeds rolled into a ball of clay. It'll be nice to have a few extra flowers around! With the seeds sown and transplants in place, it's time to sit back and let Mother Nature do her thing for a while...
stay tuned... (Click pics to enlarge)

Side view of the expanded garden. It's reached about two thirds of its total size.

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...

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...