Vegetable Starts

We are starting a lot of vegetables and herbs from seed this year; remind me to write someday soon about the various catalogs we ordered from and how we chose. Like the chickens, they're growing fast. Here's what they looked like on March 23:



And here's what they look like today:

(Not pictured: onions.)

Unlike pretty much everything else we're doing, we actually have some experience starting seeds. For three years, we've grown at least a few vegetables from seed with varying success. But three years is really only enough time to 1) impress us with how much we don't know and 2) give us a false sense of security that things will be at least slightly the same from year to year.

Generally speaking, we plant "loose" in flats, unless the plants have roots that don't like to be disturbed (tomatoes). We reuse flats from year to year (I always mean to rinse them with a mild bleach solution, but hardly ever actually do it). Plant labels are cut-up dairy containers (yogurt, cottage cheese) written on with Sharpie. We made dividers for the flats out of masking tape, but I don't know how useful that really was.

In our new house, we are blessed with a fantastic seed starting location: a south-facing window over the "roof" of our pantry, which is accessible with a ladder. It's not the very most convenient, but it's really working nicely. In the past, we've used lights.

On February 28, we started onions (yellow sweet spanish), eggplant (Littlefingers, long, thin and purple-black ; and Lavender Touch, smaller and white/lavender), and peppers (pepperoncini, Feherozon bell peppers, Scotch bonnet, ancho and early jalapeño). First up were onions on March 3, and the laziest was the parsley that came up on March 9. As you can sort of tell from the picture, peppers and eggplants are doing really well (the tray on the right; eggplant in front, peppers in back). The onions are sort of malingering but we think we may have screwed them up by thinning them (which apparently disturbs their roots) and not trimming them. I just trimmed them yesterday to 3 inches; some were easily 6-8 inches "tall" (tall being a little disingenuous since they were all laying down). They're pretty spindly, although trimming them seems to have inspired some of them to stand up a little; we'll see how they do. We can always buy sets if we have to. All part of the idiots' learning process.

On March 15, we started oregano (the tiny "carpet" you can see in front of the eggplants and peppers), lettuce (Esmerelda butter head), and broccoli (Early Dividend, Packman and Small Miracle). They all came up between March 19-21. The oregano need to be thinned, but look at them. How on earth? The flat in the back is broccoli and parsley.

On March 17, we started all our tomatoes: Roma type (Principe Borghese and Cour Di Bue), cherries (Isis Candy and Currant), and "regular" (Big Beef, Beaverlodge, Brandywine and Pineapple). They were all up March 28.

And today we started cabbage (early and late), basil (sweet and Spicy Globe), summer savory, marjoram, and another lettuce (de Morges Braun romaine). I could have taken a picture, but it's just a flat full of dirt.

More starts pictures here.