Vegetable Starts: Update

Meanwhile, the vegetable starts just keep growing (sort of):


Left: sad lettuce, unthinned oregano, eggplants, peppers
Center Front: Onions
Center Back: Tomatoes
Right Front: Basil, Savory, Marjoram, Lettuce, Cabbage
Right Back: Parsley, Broccoli, Peanuts


Another angle (re-arranged and pre-onion trimming)

The peppers and eggplants are still going gangbusters; they really need to be put into bigger pots. The tomatoes are also doing pretty well, although they're a little leggy for my comfort. Maybe we should have pinched them. Maybe we should pinch them now. Heck if I know. I've heard that you should put a fan on them to develop thick stems; sadly we have no spare fans. Maybe next year.

The rest of our seedlings are in slightly more disarray. It's hard to say how much stems from neglect and how much from ignorance, but hopefully now that our external affairs are in a little more order, we'll have more time to focus on them. I think partly they're out of sight, out of mind on the ledge, but I don't know what we can do about that. The onions in particular look pathetic; I think sets are in our future.

Several starts really need to go outside: the various lettuces, cabbage, possibly broccoli. Hopefully we'll get to that later this week.

We've planted quite a few things outside, too -- details tomorrow.

You make me feel like spring has sprung...

Apologies for the radio silence -- non-homesteading stuff crept into our lives this week. Also, I'm not sure what happened to the text of the seed catalogs post. I assure you it was fantastic; I'll try to recreate it.


Pictured: Signs of Spring

We found a spare half hour to stop at a nursery and buy a few things: Alpine strawberries, tarragon, rhubarb, and an Italian Prune plum tree. Not pictured: rosemary (it can't sit outside yet, so it's hanging out in a windowsill). We have several more fruit trees on the way: two cherries (Hartland and Montmorency), two apples (Honey Crisp and Yellow Transparent), and a Green Gage plum. We still have pears to buy, and maybe a Haralson apple.

The weather has been fantastic the last few days, getting into the 70s and sunny, sunny, sunny. The winter wheat is coming up in fields all around us; it looks like a green haze on the ground. Spring is here!

Seed Catalogs

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.