Good morning, and Spring is in the air! Welcome to Saturday Morning Garden Blogging.
While all ya'll who were "fortunate" enough to attend the Inauguration were freezing your collective asses off, here in Denver we were basking in spring-like warmth. Tuesday the high was 66°; Wednesday it was 72° downtown. So neener, neener, neener: we may not have witnessed history live on the Washington Mall, but on the 16th Street Mall we were gloveless, hatless, bootless, and coatless.
Of course it is January: yesterday the high was 50° at midnight; by noon it was below freezing. We got a few spits of snow, and the forecast is for cloudy and cold for the next several days. Unfortunately there won't be much snow with that, and we desperately need the moisture.
But Wednesday's weather, and the promise of spring, prompted me to get some seeds started, and Caligula — of course — was anxious to stick his little pootie nose in everything.
In last week's garden blogging I wrote about using indoor lights for starting plants. This week we'll do the second part — actually starting the seeds.
The first consideration is what the hell to plant them in. You can spend a fortune on seed cells, or jiffy pots, or flats, or what have you — I know; I have. But there are many other inexpensive alternatives. Lee Valley sells a potmaker which uses strips of newspaper to form planting cells. A couple of weeks ago Morrigan showed us how to use toilet paper tubes to make starting cells. As for me, I'm really lazy, so I’ve settled on using Dixie cups for the initial growing.
What I like about Dixie cups are that they are cheap, flimsy, disposable, and they come in graduated sizes. At Sam's Club I can buy 600 3 oz. bathroom cups for just a few dollars. I use a bamboo skewer to poke a couple of holes in the bottom, and use a Sharpie to mark the side with what kind of seed I've planted.
The next consideration is what to put in the cup. You can, if you want, buy "seed starting mixture" but, quite frankly, I don’t think it’s necessary — beyond being unreasonably expensive. "Seed starting mixtures" generally are composed of vermiculite, perlite and/or peat — no real soil. The advantage is that, because they have no soil, they can be sterile, which is a protection against damping-off disease, which is caused by a fungus. However, because they have no soil, they also have no nutrients, meaning you’ll have to feed your seedlings after just a couple of weeks — and, if you’re using an organic fertilizer, you may be canceling out any advantage of having the sterile seed-starting mixture. Rather, I use a good quality, standard potting soil. If it seems a little on the heavy side I might add a little extra vermiculite to make it lighter. To guard against damping off disease make sure the seedlings have adequate ventilation — an electric fan does the job (and also will build stronger plants by moving the stems about).
My seed-starting set-up also has a heat mat; but you can make do without that — it’s just handy. Now, some seeds demand cool temperatures to germinate; others have to have that heat (it’s almost impossible to start moonflowers without a source of warmth); most plants are in the middle and can really use the extra help. If you don’t have a heat mat, you can use a heating pad set on low, or put your potted seeds on top of the refrigerator, or near a heating register.
But remember — heated pots will dry out fast. Some recommend covering the seeds and seedlings with a plastic tent to retain moisture — but then you’re inviting damping off disease. What I do is put the pots in a shallow tray, and night and morning add water to the tray to a level of ¼ to ½ inch. By adding water to the bottom, you allow the pot to draw up what moisture it needs, without compressing the soil, or knocking over your tiny seedlings, by watering from the top.
So, you’ve got your containers and your potting mix. Dampen the mix well, then scoop into the pots. Pour water over to settle the soil, add 2 or 3 seeds per pot (just in case one is a dud), then cover with more damp soil — not too much (the package will tell you the correct depth; I just play it by ear anymore). Then put your pots under your grow lights, check the water level twice a day, and wait for the magic to happen.
Over the last several years I've come to appreciate the advantages of pre-sprouting seeds on damp paper towels before putting them in pots. It's invaluable for peas in particular, but I also sprout cucurbits, corn and, this year, I did morning glories (I'm getting an extra early start on morning glories, hoping to get blooms before late August!). For large numbers of seeds, such as peas, I line a shallow tray with several layers of paper towels, dampen them well, spread out the seeds, then cover with several more layers of paper towels. Where I'm just starting a few plants, I fold the towels over the seeds and slip into a plastic bag. Just be sure to check every day to see if the seeds have sprouted — you may be surprised, as I was yesterday evening with the morning glories, to discover that the damned things sprouted faster than you expected: the seed pack said it would take 10 to 15 days to germination!
And that is an important thing to do: read the seed packages carefully. Because my tomatoes and eggplants have to share space under the fluorescent lights, it's helpful to have them at about the same height, but eggplants generally take more time than tomatoes to germinate — so I start the eggplants a few days earlier. The seed package will also tell you how long before last frost to start your seeds, or if you even need to wait until after last frost before planting the seedlings outside.
I also did a face-palm on Wednesday, as I finally figured out how to get just a few teeny-tiny roman chamomile seeds in each pot: I barely-dampened the end of a toothpick, dipped it into the seed pack, then tapped it over the pot to shake the seeds off. Yowza!
I’m going to talk specifically about tomatoes now. Tomatoes are kind of weird — all those little hairs that grow out of a tomato stem will form roots if they are buried. So, by planting tomatoes in successively larger cups, and burying all but the top set of leaves each time you re-pot, you’ll get tomato plants with huge, healthy root systems — which is what you want to plant outside.
Once the tomato seedlings have a set or two of true leaves, it will be time to transplant them into the next size Dixie cup — I think they’re six ounce size. Slip one of your seedlings — still in its original cup — inside an empty cup and, if the top leaves are poking their heads over the rim, it’s time to re-pot. Put a little soil in the bottom of the new cup and, if you have two plants in your pot, keep the strongest one and pinch off the other one. Rip the old Dixie cup off your remaining seedling, set the whole shebang into the new cup and, if there will be leaves below the soil line, remove them. Add damp potting soil, tap the cup on the counter to settle, and return to its space under the grow lights.
And that’s about it. With the first repotting, you’ll probably want to start giving your plants some very diluted fertilizer once a week; or just add a little compost to your potting mix when you repot them . And then, just keep moving the plants up to larger cups, and burying the stems. The last stop for my tomato plants is quart-sized milk cartons (well, actually cream cartons), that I start saving in January. I cut the tops off and poke a hole in the bottom, to get a nice, deep narrow container, which doesn’t take up too much space under the metal halide light down in the basement. I also ensure good air circulation (and help strengthen the stems) by leaving a box fan, set a few feet away, blowing on the plants at a low level.
The final step is "hardening off". See, your little babies have been coddled, away from the cold, and away from the harshness of full sunlight. They need to be gradually acclimated. I’m always amused by narratives of how to harden off plants — like, how many people are around to move their plants out of the sun after 2 hours on the first day, and 3 hours on the second day? You can accomplish the same thing by making use of shade. I set my plants out on the back lawn, which is northern exposure. The first day they stay close to the deck, where they’ll only get an hour or two of sunlight, and I bring them in an hour before sundown. Then I move them away from the house a few feet at a time, and leave them out a little longer each evening, until by the end of a week, they’re spending the day out in the veggie patch where they’ll make their final homes, and, if the weather isn’t expected to get too cold, they can stay out all night.
That's what's happening here. What's going on in your gardens?