Basil sprouting!

As promised, here is a picture of my indoor seed-starting setup. It's in a spare room on the second floor of my house. The lights are both lit by compact fluorescent bulbs, on a timer.

On the left are the hot peppers and sweet peppers. I also planted some Romanesco broccoli and Brussels sprouts this weekend.

Here is a close-up of the basil. It's sprouting! I'm going to thin the seedlings in a week or so.


And the first wee hot pepper seedling has just pushed up, as well:


Also planned for this past weekend was planting onions. That did not happen. Thanks, partying until 3 AM.

last post about planting for today

For completeness, here is the rest of my planting plan.

Starting indoors, soon (next week or two): cool-tolerant plants.
Romanesco broccoli
Brussels sprouts

Direct sow as soon as I get the seeds/starters:
Onions
Rainbow lights Swiss chard
Potatoes
Parsley

Starting indoors in mid April: fast-growing cool-intolerant plants.
Cherry tomato
Cherokee Purple heirloom beefsteak tomato
Tall vine Brandywine heirloom tomato
Yellow squash
Pie pumpkin
Cerinthe purple bells*

Direct sow in mid- to late May: cool-intolerant plants with sensitive roots.
Rattlesnake and Purple Pole heirloom climbing beans
Nasturtium

Note that this leaves out the watermelon radish. The folks at Agway suggested this as an autumn crop. Any thoughts as to what to grow in their place until then? Maybe more beets? It has to be something that'll be harvested by August.


*An impulse purchase! There's so much sunlight that I fell confident that anything will give, at the very least, a decent showing. The picture on the seed packet at least showed rather unusual, luxurious drooping purple flowers on bluish leaves. A bit of reading online makes me optimistic that this plant will do well.

and starting some hot-weather crops indoors

I forgot to mention that I started a few slow-growing hot-weather crops indoors today as well! I have a grow-light setup in a small spare room of the house. The light is on a timer, so the plants get 12 hours of light a day. They're just CFLs but plants grow fine under that: a friend grew pepper plants from seed to harvest under CFLs.

Basil plants grow very slowly to start. Last year even after two months in a sunny indoor window the plants were under and inch high. This year I started many seeds each into a small yogurt container of potting soil. As they grow I'll thin them by pinching off the weaker seedlings (not uprooting so as to not disturb the roots of the stronger ones). I'll probably get 3-5 plants to transfer per yogurt container, and I have around ten containers. Of those 30-50, I'll plant however many fit!

For the rest of my indoor seedlings, both the ones I started today and the ones I'll start in the future, I have 3" square peat pots. I started 12 pots of peppers, each with three seeds. I'll thin to the healthiest one after the sprout. I have either 9 or 10 (have forgotten already) sweet peppers and the rest hot thai peppers. Last year I planted a dozen hot pepper plants: too many!

My excitement is growing! Last year I underestimated the size of my garden and planted too many plants of too few varieties, so I was deluged in just a few things. This year I'm planting as many different things as I think will do well, and am being much more conservative about how much space to give each. There is so much sunlight in the plot, and the soil is so good, that even a few, crowded plants produce bumper crops.

Planting root crops

I planted five root crops today. In my own section of the garden, I planted two rows each of garlic, carrots, and radishes. In Mom and Dad's section, I planted two rows each of beets and rainbow carrot mix.

The garlic I bought as three heads, from Lowe's. The directions on the package were rather useless, so I just guessed: I divided the heads into cloves, and planted each clove individually.

My carrots were a stubby variety, for rocky soils. The soil is pretty good in my garden, but I certainly wasn't planning on passing it through a fine mesh as Crockett recommends for root crops like carrots and parsnips; and the soil is relatively clay-y as well, which Michael Pollen suggested could be a challenge for carrots to push through.

The beet package was much more helpful than the garlic one; apparently each beet 'seed' can actually be several seeds! I need to read up on this more.

Before planting, I dug through the soil and took out weeds. The north section -- where my garlic, carrots, and radishes went -- had quite a few crabgrass roots pushing horizontally through it. My neighbors to the north are not terribly fastidious about weeding, unfortunately, so there's a crabgrass colony right on the other side of the shared fence. They'll keep growing all summer, so I'll just do my best to kill the blades as they grow through the soil.

The soil was good and light, moist. I worked in almost two cubic feet of composted cow manure, which I'd bought at Agway a few days ago. It's good soil and good seeds; now we just need to add warmth, sunlight, and some rain!

First sprout

The first peas are sprouting! They're the edible peas I planted and not the sweet peas, yet. I'll keep checking back.

It's been warm enough that I think I could do more planting this weekend: radish, onion, spinach, carrot.

Planting peas!

I planted my own edible peas, and Mom's sweet-peas, this Sunday. It was a warm, sunny day, and the spring weather has stuck.

The garden, before any work had been done. This picture is taken facing north. As you can see, there are grass paths on either side (west and east) of the garden; I was also standing in a wider grass path to take this picture. There is also a short wire fence between my garden and the one to the north.


Gardening supplies for today: plastic mesh for the peas to climb on; stakes for the mesh; a shovel to loosen the soil; seeds; scissors; twine; and a measuring tape.



After planting and staking!

The soil was excellent already: damp but not heavy, loose, cool but not cold. I'm very excited to see peas grow.

Garden outline

Here is the semi-final outline of how the garden will be laid out. Apologies for the ugly MS powerpoint picture. I have a nice hand sketch but, alas, no scanner.