Recently, I saw this video from Gardening in Canada.
I liked what I saw with the seed starting kit, and her review of it. The main thing being, each tray has its own grow light, and we have lighting issues. The price was in the Cdn$30 range, which isn’t much more than getting a seed starting greenhouse kit, with the 72 pellets and dome, making it well worth picking up. So I logged into my husband’s Amazon Prime account and put it on my own wish list. I was planning to get it on our March budget, and the first disability pay was coming in soon, so I put it in the cart, too.
What I didn’t expect was for my husband to place an order before the end of the month! He saw it in the card, and included it with his own order.
It came in today.
Here are the contents.
As you can see, the cats were very interested, too!
At the top, under Cheddar, are the 5 green base trays for bottom watering and the 5 clear growing cells. Next to Soot Sprite are the tall cloche lids, each with an indentation for the lights and openings to allow moisture to escape.
Bottom left are a pair of tiny little garden gloves. Okay, tiny for me and my wide, simian hands! On top of the gloves are the label markers. Above them are a pair of very interesting looking tools!
Bottom right are the LED lights, tops and bottoms showing. Once inserted into the covers, they can be turned to cover or uncover the openings and control moisture levels. There’s the instruction sheet, and finally the cable to power the lights.
It was the cable that I was unsure of, and this is why.
It’s USB, with octopus cables for each of the lights.
We are going to not only need an adapter to plug this in, but an extension cable. A long one. There are no outlets anywhere near where we can set these up, and the one power bar we have with USB slots on it, both are being used for phone different chargers.
I’m pretty sure we already have both the extension cable and spare adapters. I’ll have to check with my husband, as he tends to have things like that with his computer stuff.
The one surprise for me is that I somehow expected the trays to be bigger. I don’t know why, since I saw them being handled in the video.
We don’t need to start seeds again until after mid March, so we have time to arrange a set up for the trays in the cat free zone, then work out getting power to that USB cable.
For us, building our raised beds is a matter of using what materials we can get without having to buy anything. We’re scrounging and salvaging whatever we can.
If, however, you are in a position to actually purchase raised beds, there are a lot of options, kits and companies out there to choose from.
Gardening in Canada covers some of the things to think about – and a few things I didn’t think about at all, since they’re pretty irrelevant to our situation. This video is well worth a watch.
After we’ve built more of our raised beds, I think I might do a video about them. Everyone has their own very individual situations to consider. Perhaps it might be useful to people if I go through my thought processes as to why we made the choices we did, and apply that process to their own situation.
The German Winter Thyme has sprouted. Gosh, they are so tiny! I actually had to wait a day before I could get a picture where they could be seen for what they are.
I expect the oregano to sprout next – unless we have problems like last year. It will be a while longer before I expect to see the peppers sprouting.
We made the living room a cat free zone to protect our house plants. It has a huge east facing window and gets lots of light for a brief period in the morning. After that, it’s a pretty dark room. It’s not too bad for the plants near the window, but our huge jade tree… well… one of them… is against a wall in the middle of the room. We have another that’s gotten just as big, but with needing the window for seedlings, it’s off to one end of the shelf it’s on, and no longer in front of the window. The only light it gets is from the shop lights I have over where the seedlings and small plants are.
Then there are the aloe Vera. They’re on plant shelf near the older jade tree, which puts them pretty low down.
The old jade tree is not doing well. I regularly rotate the pot, so all sides eventually get light – not easy to do, with such big branches, so close to the wall! Unfortunately, I can see the leaves are getting thinner and less succulent, and a lot of leaves are simply shriveled up. It does get adequate moisture, and is in a self watering pot. It’s just not thriving in this location.
There is no room for it, anywhere else.
What we need is a light fixture along that back wall. When we moved here, there was a light fixture in the corner where the big aquarium greenhouse is now. It reaches floor to ceiling, held in place with pressure, and has 3 lights that could have their directions adjusted. It’s in the storage shed now. If that thing still works, we could set it up with standard bulb sized grow lights, near the Jade tree. Those types of grow bulbs are more affordable, anyhow.
Looks like I need to trek through the snow and see what I can find in the storage shed. I hate going in there, though. Every time I do, I’m afraid a cat might sneak in behind me and accidentally get closed in. That shed is so full of my parents’ stuff, we can’t even access most of it, anymore. Lots of places for a cat to hide!
I should grab a daughter to go with me and stand guard!
This is the time of year many are starting their seeds indoors, and there are many growing mediums available. Some swear by ordinary garden soil, straight compost or the compressed pellets of peat or coconut coir – though I hear many in my local gardening groups with a definite hate on for the pellets!! Then there’s potting soil and seed starting mixes.
What to choose? Let a soil scientist explain!
I currently have two different brands of seed starting mix, because those were the ones available at the time I was there to buy them. So far, I don’t see any difference between them.
After marking out the weeks backwards from our June 2nd last frost date on our calendar, I then went through my bin of seeds and organized them by when they need to be started indoors. Then I picked out the ones I could get started now.
We won’t be starting everything that we have seeds for.
Starting from the 3-4 weeks list:
I still haven’t decided if we’re going to plant any gourds at all this year. There are several I really want to grow, but we just don’t have the space. With the winter squash, we have the new packet of mixed winter squash seeds to try, plus one type for pies my daughter asked for. With the mixed seeds pack, we will of course want to plant the entire package, and see what we’ve got! I would still like to try the Honeyboat Delicata squash again; the few we got didn’t get a chance to fully mature, but they were great in the pie my daughter made! We also really liked the Pink Banana and Georgia Candy Roaster. There are other varieties that didn’t do well that I want to try again, just so we can decide if we like them or not, but that will depend on how much space we have. The problem is, there are a LOT of things that need to be started in that 3-4 week time span. I’m still not sure if we’ll do cucumbers this year. I’d rather use the space for the melons and winter squash. We’ll be skipping the hulless seed pumpkins this year, but I really want to try the Crespo squash again. Last I saw, Baker Creek didn’t carry the seeds anymore, so I want to successfully grow at least one to collect seeds from!
As for the tomatoes in the 6-8 week list, we’ll not be planting all that we have seeds for. We’ll do the San Marzano paste tomatoes for preserving and the Black Cherry for fresh eating. The free seeds we got are tempting me greatly, and I always want to grow more Spoon tomatoes! They’re just fun. I want to start quite a lot of the San Marzano, but not as many of the cherry tomatoes. I don’t want a situation like last year, where we ran out of space and had to give away so many transplants!
From the 8-10 week list: the Butterfly Flower is a type of milkweed, so I definitely want to get those going. We have three varieties of “early” peppers that I waited to start last year. They have such a short growing season, technically we could direct sow them. It didn’t work out. They didn’t get to produce, though with most of them I now know that the grow bags they were planted in were invaded from below by roots from the nearby Chinese elm. So we’ll definitely need to keep that in mind, when deciding where to transplant them this year. I will be starting fewer seeds, shooting for at least 2 plants per variety in the garden, but between the 6 varieties I’ll be starting this year, we’ll still have plenty for our needs. Hopefully, my family will have peppers of each kind to try, so we can decide which varieties we like enough to keep growing, year after year.
You’ll notice there are no summer squash on my list. Those got moved to the direct sowing bin. I’m not going to have the space to start them indoors. As long as I can keep the slugs away from them, they should be okay to start outdoors.
There were four things I could start today. Since I was after fewer plants per variety, I decided to go with the Red Solo cups to start them in, rather than the larger trays with smaller grow cells.
With the herbs, I’m just doing the oregano and German Winter Thyme again. The chamomile we planted last year should have self seeded, and we’ll see if the spearmint survived the winter in their pot. We ended up not using the lemongrass at all, so I’m not trying them again this year. We’ll plan out our herbs more, as time goes by. The herb seeds are so incredibly fine – especially the oregano! They got surface seeded over the pre-moistened seed starter mix, then covered with a light dusting of dry starter mix to just barely cover them, followed by a spritz to moisten the tops. Vermiculite would have been better, but I don’t have any. The herbs went into two cups each. With such tiny seeds, there’s no way to know how many I managed to sprinkle onto them. I still had seed left over, too, so if they don’t take, I can try again. The oregano really struggled last year, and I ended up with only one surviving seedling to transplant. That one plant did well, at least! They were started in the little Jiffy pellets last year, so I hope they do better in the larger cups and a different growing medium.
I decided to go ahead and plant the last of our Purple Beauty seeds, which are two year old seeds. The first time we planted them was a year of drought and heat waves, and they did very poorly. Last year, what was planted in that bed also struggled, so I think it’s more a problem with the soil in that bed. I split the last 7 seeds of Purple Beauty between two cups.
The Sweet Chocolate peppers were the one pepper that we were actually able to harvest mature peppers from last year, and they were also the only ones I started quite early. We saved seed from them, too, but there was still plenty in the packet, so I used those. There was enough to plant three seeds into each of three cups, with plenty of seed left over. I had intended to do just two cups, like the others, but the bin they’re in for bottom watering holds 9, and I just had to fill in that last space! Yeah, it’s a bit OCD, but I have an excuse. If there are gaps in the bins, the cups tend to fall over more easily when the bins get moved around.
So these are now in the big aquarium, on the warming mat.
The next seeds don’t need to be started until the second half of March, at the earliest.
I have just enough time for a quick post, before heading to my mother’s.
Check it out…
I had actually forgotten that I had a whole 9 seeds left from last year’s package of Cheyenne peppers until I saw this, this morning. The last two cells in the tray have two seeds each, and all four are now germinating. What makes for a 100% germination rate on seeds from last year. Which is awesome!
Unfortunately, the Red Wethersfield onions are not doing as well. Since putting them in the big aquarium greenhouse, there have been more sprouts and they are definitely getting bigger and greener, but there aren’t all that many of them. The conditions in that little aquarium greenhouse may have killed off some of the seeds. That tank isn’t as warm as the big one – even without using the heat mat, one of the light fixtures adds a bit of warmth – but onions like cooler temperatures, so that’s not likely the problem. I’d say it’s the light on that tank. It’s definitely dimmer, even from when we used it last year, and the light is more blue than red.
So for now, at least, we’ve got just one usable aquarium greenhouse for seed starting.
I’m really thrilled at how well everything else is doing, though!
While checking on the seedling this morning, have to say, I am very impressed with our germination rates!
It’s hard to judge the percentage with the onion seeds, since I don’t know exactly how many were sown in each section of their growing trays, but I know exactly how many seeds were planted in the big tray.
With the Classic Eggplant in the middle, there were just enough seeds left from last year to plant two to a cell. We have a 100% germination rate!
The Cheyenne peppers, in the row closest to the window, had just enough seeds left from last year for one per cell. Five are up, and one is just breaking ground, so we’ve got 6 out of 7 germinating.
The Little Finger Eggplant are a mix of old and new seeds. The cell on the bottom left has 3 new seeds planted in it. The other six cells have 2 seeds from last year, plus one from this year, in them. All but one seed has germinated – and that one might still emerge soon.
I’m rather impressed by this!
Of course, we don’t need anywhere near that many eggplants. We’ll thin them to one per cell. I’ll have to resist thinning by transplanting. I hate “wasting” a seedling! Still, even if we’re just down to 7 of each type of eggplant, that’s more than enough, even if they don’t all survive transplanting in the spring. With eggplant, we’re still working out if these are something we will want to plant regularly or not. The first time we grew the Little Finger eggplant, one plant barely managed to fruit, but even those little eggplants were enjoyed. Last year, none of them grew much after transplanting. Last year, we had only one Classic Eggplant seedling survive and it did remarkably well, though we ran out of growing season and had only a couple small eggplants to try out.
As for the Cheyenne peppers, if we have only one surviving transplant, that would probably be enough for our needs; the one that was able to produce peppers last year had lots on it, though we had to harvest them while still green. Hopefully, by starting them early like this, they’ll have time to mature on the plant.
We shall see how they do over the weeks again, but I do like what I’m seeing so far!
Another gardening video from Gardening in Canada, about whether you need light to start seeds or not.
Considering the differences between our big aquarium greenhouse and the little one, light is definitely an issue. Unfortunately, we’re not in a position to invest in lights – especially not full spectrum lights or red grow lights – right now. The bright LED shop lights I was able to get at Costco, however, do seem to be helping a lot, once the trays move out of the aquarium greenhouses.
Things got moved around so I could set the mini greenhouse frame at the window, and the new seedlings have been shifted out of the aquarium greenhouses.
Also, we’ve got a massive jade tree in a large, square, self watering pot that is very awkward to move! And it has to be moved in order for the shelf it’s on to be moved, because the shelf cannot be moved with the weight of the jade tree on it. Aside from the weight of shelf and plant together, it sinks deep into the 1970’s shag carpet! 😂
It’s not even our biggest jade tree.
Anyhow.
Here is the new set up.
On the top shelf, we’ve got the mulberries next to the coffee tree. The yellow onions are in the round tray beside them. The shallots are underneath, and the eggplants and hot peppers on the bottom. The red onions got shifted into the large aquarium greenhouse for a little while, and I swear, in the space of an hour or two, I could already see more onions sprouting, and more green, rather than almost white.
The thermometer in the living room is pretty consistently at 17C/63F. I think, in the evening, I’ll run the little space heater for a while. That big picture window may be triple pane, but it still gets pretty cold beside it at night!
After getting that done, I made a run into town where I picked up my new card reader. I can now finally upload trail cam files again.
I really don’t like Windows 11.
Unfortunately, as I tried navigating through Windows Explorer, it kept “not responding” on me. Just as frustrating was navigating to where the pictures fold should have been, but it’s not there.
Turns out it’s now in OneDrive. Windows 11 wants images to be uploaded to the cloud. Which I absolutely do not want to do.
I ended up managing to upload them to the new external hard drive, until I can figure out where I can set up a folder for my image and video files.
I haven’t been doing much in trying to set the new computer up with what I had in my old system. Partly because it feels rather overwhelming – and I’ll probably have to link up with my old computer to get some of the most recent data. The other part is learning the differences in Windows 11. Even cut and paste is suddenly a pain.
My husband, sweetheart that he is, fussed with it for a while, and it seems my suspicions are correct. There just isn’t enough RAM. Not that there was much choice in the matter. When researching a new computer, I noticed they all seemed to have much less RAM and must less memory on the hard drive. Granted, I got my other computer more than 10 years ago, so it’s been that long since I’ve even looked as this stuff, but it seems most computer are 8G of RAM with 500G hard drives. If you want a terabyte, the price jumps dramatically.
It’s that lack of RAM that is making it a pain to navigate in Explorer. Yeah. The RAM is already almost completely used up.
The good news is, this system has extra slots, we have room to add more RAM.
Not that we can do that anytime soon, as far as the budget goes, but at least it’s an option.
Meanwhile, my husband went looking through task manager to see what was running that could be making the machine more inefficient. Windows 11 has a lot of stuff running in the background, that’s for sure!
Ah, well. I’ll get used to the new user interface.
For now, I will enjoy thinking garden thoughts, while the snow starts to fall more heavily outside.
I went to bottom water the seed trays and turn the lights over them for the night, when I made a happy discovery. Our first Cheyenne hot peppers have sprouted!
The peppers are in the row of cells on the left. It’s hard to see, but there is a second one barely visible in the cell at the top of the photo, just breaking ground!
Now that those are starting to sprout, I’ve unplugged the heat mat. Tomorrow, I want to set up the mini-greenhouse frame near the window and above the heat vent – we’ve got some shelves to move out of the way, but we now have a portable AC unit stored in the living room that we might have to move, too. Once these trays are out, the next batch of seeds will be started and set up in the aquarium greenhouses.
One nice thing about using those fruit and vegetable trays for starting seeds. They have a smaller, round space in the middle that had either a container of dip in it, or some strawberries, that’s not deep enough to plant anything in. I’ve got their lids under the trays, which is handy, as they have recesses that fit each section of the trays, but there’s not a lot of space to reach for bottom watering. Instead, I’ve made drainage holes in the empty spaces in the middle, and pour the water in there. They then drain slowly into the lids below. Bottom watering from above! 😁
The red onions are still very sparsely emerging, and not very many of them, so I want to put them into the big aquarium for at least a few days.
Once everything is ready, I’ll have to make some decisions on what long season seeds to start next. Some herbs, for sure, but they don’t need to be in the remaining new tray with the larger cells. I want to save that for larger seeds. I should have room enough to start some tomatoes, I think. I don’t think they all need to be started this early, though. I’ll probably start more peppers, too. Yes, they are supposed to be short season varieties, but the only ones we had a really good harvest with last year were the ones we started much earlier. I don’t want to start as many pepper or fresh eating tomato seeds this time; we had such a high germination rate last year, we ended up giving away lots. Space for the trays will be an issue this year, as we were gifted a nice big armchair that is now the most comfortable chair in the house – but now we don’t have room for how I set up an extra “table” for seed trays like we did last year!
Setting up the living room as the cat free zone has become way too handy. The room is getting way too full of things we need to protect from the cats, because our house plants and seed trays!
The Re-Farmer 