I’ve been waiting for days before finally getting a picture with the newest drum gourds, then went again and got progress pictures of the rest.
I found a new baby this morning!
The red arrows are pointing to the barely visible first zucca melon!
The new drum gourds were taking a lot longer than the first ones to break free of the soil. When the first one did, the reason became obvious. It was still completely encased in the seed shell! After a while, I very carefully removed it and just dropped the pieces on the soil surface, but the seed leaves have still not started to separate. I can now see that the other one is also still encased in the seed shell. Once it manages to break free of the soil, I will carefully remove it, too. The risk in doing that is tearing the encased parts of the seed leaves right off, as they are so very fragile in there.
The earlier drum gourds are just barely starting to show their true leaves. The luffa’s true leaves are coming out nicely. Even the lemongrass is showing some true leaves. I think. They don’t look very different, other than there being more blades. I honestly can’t tell with the thyme.
That last cell of sweet chocolate peppers finally has a single seedling germinating, so we now have a total of four. Still just the seed leaves in even the oldest ones, though.
The onions and shallots are growing very slowly at this stage. No new haircuts needed! So far, they’re all surviving, too. Hopefully, we’ll be able to keep them alive! Last year, we had some issues with the yellow onions and shallots not doing well, but we have different varieties of both this year, and they seem to be doing better so far.
We’ve got two varieties of red onions, one of yellow onions, and one of shallots.
This morning I got a picture of some of our seedlings, after refilling trays to water them from below.
There are still only two little pepper seedlings. The thyme and lemongrass don’t seem to be growing much. I think this might be part of why they need to be started so early!
The two drum gourd seedlings in one pot are still the only ones to have germinated. With using these biodegradable pots, it’s been interesting to see how the pot the germinated seeds are in dries out so much faster than the other ones. Even the square cells the herbs are in show noticeable drying out in the ones with the most seedlings. For this reason, I still mist them as well as water from below.
Last year, I remember my first zucca melon seeds never germinated, and I had to try again. I’m hoping I won’t need to do that again this year. The zucca and the drums need as much growing time as we can give them.
We’re going to have to start other seeds soon. That means rotating things out of the aquarium greenhouses and, for that, we still need to make a trip to the city to pick up the materials we need to build barriers and keep the cats out of the living room. When picking up eggs yesterday, I noticed they had lumber in their truck and asked about prices. Lumber prices have gone down a LOT in the last while, which is encouraging. The prices are still high, but not astronomical anymore.
The trip to the city will have to wait until after the van’s date at the garage to get the temperature gauge sensor replaced.
Still holding out hope that we’ll qualify for financing on the Caravan, but if I’m going to be honest with myself, the odds are not in our favour. Mind you, our situation wasn’t much better when we got financing for the Grand Caravan we got, years ago. Oddly enough, my husband being on disability gives us a more reliable income now than when he was still working. Nothing like moving to a new city for a 2 year contract, only to have the contract end after 6 months, instead!
Ah, well. Whatever happens, happens. We just need to deal with what’s in front of us.
Which, at the moment, means turning the living room into a cat proof plant room. 😁
In my last post about our seedlings, I mentioned that I thought maybe where the peppers were in the tray was a bit too cold. So I squeezed things over a bit and pulled the tray and heat mat a couple of inches away from the end of the aquarium greenhouse wall. I checked them a few hours later, and would you believe, I found peppers sprouting already! Maybe they would have sprouted anyhow, but it sure was nice to see!
As of this morning, they were noticeably bigger.
When I shut off the lights for the night, the one that is upright in the photo was like the bent one in the foreground. There’s just the two seedlings, but that’s better than none!
I’ve just come back from a long day, which I’ll write about in a separate post, but I checked them again when I got back. Not only are the peppers a bit bigger (though there’s still just two of them), there is now a second drum gourd seedling starting to show through the soil! It’s in the same pot as the first one, with no sign of seedling in any of the other drum gourd or zucca melon pots, so I hope to see more seedlings soon.
I’m just happy to finally be seeing some peppers showing up!
I spotted a hint of green while spritzing the pots in the aquarium greenhouse last night, so I was quite eager to check this morning.
This, my friends, is our very first African Drum gourd seedling!
I’m rather surprised that this sprouted first. The peppers we’ve got planted have yet to germinate, but here we’ve got one of the massive gourds breaking ground!
You can see the big, remarkably fuzzy, seeds on the far right of the above photo.
I’m quite excited by this! It’s going to be a challenge to get these to grow to full maturity, so the gourds can then be set aside to cure and dry for at least a year. The zucca melon are also supposed to get huge, but they are for eating, not crafting.
The inside of the tank is lined with insulation, and the tray is on a heat mat, but I do wonder if it’s still too cold for the peppers. They’re at the end of the tray right in the corner. I’ve considered rotating the tray, but if it’s too cold for peppers, then it would be too cold for the drum gourds and zucca melons. We have time to try again with peppers, if it comes down to that, but not the drum gourds or zucca melons. Maybe I can find a way to rearrange the onions and luffa seedlings, so I can shift the tray on the heat mat closer to the middle.
Check out this handsome lady I found in the trail cam files this morning!
The critters much prefer the paths humans have cleared, including the trailed packed down by snow mobile-ers! This piebald seems to be the only deer that is visiting us regularly this winter, even though we’ve stopped putting food out this year, to raid our compost pile.
Yesterday, I decided it was time to crack open some of the hulless seed pumpkins. All the pumpkins and squash seem to have handled curing and storage pretty well. All the ones that were green or green striped have turned yellow and orange, with some of the hulless seed pumpkins turning more yellow with green, rather than green with yellow.
One type of hulless pumpkins (Styrian, I think. I’ve lost track!) have turned completely yellow and orange. So I decided to open up the two largest ones, first.
One of them was already being stored in the kitchen. It had a very hard shell and took some doing to break into!
There were fewer seeds than I expected, but that might be just the variety. The seeds looked nice and plump at least. I did try one, and the tasted was… meh. I’m sure they’d be much better, roasted and salted. After taking the seeds out, this was all there was.
So I went and got another one, which was larger.
That one did not have as hard a shell on it and was much easier to cut into. Which I actually took as a bad sign.
It had plenty of seeds in them, but they were all flat. Which suggested the pumpkin was still too immature when it was harvested. Considering the growing conditions of last year, that’s not surprising. I left them out as long as I could. I did go back and check the rest, and some are softer than others, but I’ve left them for now.
I know these pumpkins are supposed to be edible, not just the seeds, but in the end, I cut them into smaller chunks and set them on the compost pile for our visiting deer and the birds.
Later on, I was going through seed sites (because I can’t help myself!) and checked out the descriptions for things I’d already bought from other companies, including the hulless seed pumpkins. A couple of them noted that, while the flesh is edible, it’s not really table worthy. One of them even said that they are good for livestock!
Can we count a deer as livestock? 😄
As of this morning, I could see that the pieces were knocked about in the snow, but were still there. Something at least tried to eat them!
When I last posted a photo of our newly emerged thyme, a very close examination showed the tiniest of green hairs emerging in another row of grow cells. I waited a few days for them to be more visible before taking this photo.
Yes, the lemongrass has also germinated! So far, in just three of four cells, but even if the fourth one never has any seeds germinate, we should still have a decent number of seedlings for eventual transplant into a large pot (or two?) in the microclimate we will set up for them outdoors. We’ll be growing the luffa in the same area, so things are going to get crowed in that protected corner of the hosue!
While turning off the lights on the aquarium greenhouses last night, I noticed the tiniest specks of green in one of the herb grow cells. This morning, there was a bit more, but still so tiny, I didn’t even try to take a picture.
A few hours later, there was more. Still hard to see, but here they are!
All four German Winter thyme cells have sprouts! They are so incredibly teeny – matching the teeny size of the seeds!
Gosh, it’s so exciting to see green things growing when there’s still snow on the ground! We’re supposed to reach 2C/36F this afternoon, and the warmer temperatures have me absolutely bouncing, wanting to get outside and do things. Things we still can’t do until the snow is gone and the ground at least somewhat dry!
So for now, I’m enjoying teeny little thyme sprouts.
You’d think a city shopping trip would be more tiring than running errands with my mother, but nooooo…
We are having another beautiful sunny day, though the wind has certainly picked up. I counted 23 yard cats while doing their kibble and warm water this morning.
I was just coming back to the house would I saw these two, finishing off the kibble on the cat house roof. I tried to get a good picture of Brussel, but she moved around and sat with her back to me.
I swear, that fuzzy butt of hers is bigger than the little guy beside her!
She won’t let me anywhere near her – I had to zoom in quite a bit to get this shot – but she’s less shy than her sister, Sprout, who runs off as soon as she sees me and doesn’t come back to eat until I’m back inside.
Sadness.
When planning today’s outing with my mother, I brought up getting Chinese food for lunch again. She said no, made a big deal of the cost, and that she could make lunch for us, etc. Well, I didn’t listen to her. I left early enough to pick up some parcels at the post office before they closed for 2 hours over the lunch period, so when I got to her town, I picked up lunch anyhow and showed up early. She laughed and nattered a bit about my not listening to her, so I told her that I wanted a treat. Only later, while we were eating, did she say that I must have heard her thoughts. She had been poking around her fridge for something to make for lunch, didn’t find anything she wanted, and wasn’t up to cooking, anyhow. She’d been regretting telling me not to bring food! The next thing she knew, there I was with lunch for both of us! So that worked out.
After lunch and a bit of a visit, we headed out to do her errands, getting groceries last of all. I stayed long enough to put everything away, then started getting ready to head home. My mother was all ready to make tea, but I told her I had to go. As usual, she started going on about how, if we visit her, we should plan on staying for a long time. I told her I do – that’s why I come over so early! So we can get a visit in, first. I must say, I was pretty tired by then, anyhow. My mother is 91 yrs old, has a bum knee and uses a walker, but that hardly slows her down at all! It takes quite a bit to keep up with her, that’s for sure. She didn’t push for me to stay, though. I know she was tired, too, and would probably go for a nap as soon as I was gone!
Once at home, I found one of our backordered seeds from Veseys was in the mail.
I’m looking forward to these. I keep hearing about how great Delicata squash is, but it’s not a good storage variety. This new Honeyboat variety is described as good for storage, so I figured it was worth trying. At 100 days to maturity, it’s going to be one of the earlier ones to start indoors.
This leaves one more packet of seeds on back order to come in from Veseys.
While at the grocery store with my mother, I noticed they had a couple of seed displays up. I was so tempted to get more, but we already have so much, and in varieties better suited to our needs.
What a beautiful day it is today! As I write this, we are at -1C/30F, and have yet to reach our predicted high of 0C/32F.
It’s a good thing it’s getting nice and warm. Yesterday evening, I went to set up the one of the new ceramic heat bulbs in the sun room. Before I did, I screwed it into the fixture and plugged it in, in the old kitchen, to test it.
It didn’t work.
So I took the heat bulb and removed one of the bathroom light bulbs to test it there.
It works.
Looks like the old light fixture is toast. This was something my brother had attached to a board so that he could use the heat of a light bulb to keep pipes from freezing in the kitchen, when this place was empty. We might have some other portable light somewhere that I could safely set up in the sun room, but if we do, it would be in one of the sheds or the barn, where we won’t have access until spring.
The sun room is above freezing, however, so the kitties will be fine. This morning, I counted 25!
Today I went through the packets of seeds to start indoors and selected these as needing to be started very early.
I was finding contradictory information about the Sweet Chocolate bell peppers. The package says to start the seeds indoors 8-12 weeks before last frost – but the days to maturity I found maxed out at 86 days! We could potentially start though by direct seeding by that, if the soil were warm enough right after our last frost date. I am considering planting more of them, when I do the other peppers, but we have so many varieties to try, I don’t want to take up the space, if we don’t have to.
The lemongrass will eventually end up in a large pot, while the thyme will be going into a raised bed in the old kitchen garden. They, and the peppers, will eventually need to be potted up at least once before going outside, so I decided to put them in the degradable square pots, so that can be done without disturbing the roots.
Because of the size the Zucca melon and drum gourds will get before transplanting, those went straight into the largest degradable pots I have for now.
But first, I needed to make space in the aquarium greenhouses.
I could fit only two trays of the onions in the small aquarium. The problem is, there’s nothing we have that fits in there that can be used as a drain tray for bottom watering.
We have a large jade tree that we had to cage with hardware cloth because the cats wouldn’t stop digging in it. I had to remove the top of it because the jade tree was starting to grow through the openings, so I used that to rig a cover for the tank. Last year, we used salvaged screen windows, but they were larger than the top of the tank and, even with weights, the cats kept knocking it about. I’m hoping this works. On the one hand, the openings are large enough that the cats could reach through and dig at the trays – the first year we used this tank as a greenhouse, the cats destroyed our onion starts by reaching through the filter opening in the tank’s lid. They were incredibly determined to get at those trays! However, the larger size mesh also means it’ll be harder for the cats to walk on it, so maybe they’ll just stay off?
We’ll see!
The luffa seedlings have joined the remaining tow trays of onions. I wanted to keep them in this aquarium greenhouse, since it’s warmer than the little one, thanks to the two lights above. One of the seedlings seems to have stalled and isn’t getting any bigger. The second seed in the pot hasn’t germinated at all, and probably won’t by now. I thinned out the extra seedlings that were in two of the pots. So we are probably down to three luffa. Hopefully, they will survive long enough for transplanting!
We now have four cells each of lemongrass, thyme and Sweet Chocolate peppers – those thyme seeds are so incredibly tiny! While I was sowing the seeds for those, I had six each of scarified zucca and drum gourd seeds soaking in water, and now each round pot has two seeds. The seed starting mix was premoistened and the surface got spritzed with water after the seeds were planted, but I also made sure to add a lot of water to the tray, once it was on the warming mat. I want those pots to absorb water from the tray, not the soil.
It should be interesting to see how these do, with being started this early! We won’t need to start more seeds until probably March, though I’ll have to double check on some of them. I think things like the Crespo squash and Boston Marrow could use an earlier start. We’ll have time to move things around in the living room to make space for trays as they get rotated out of the aquarium greenhouses while need seed trays go in.
Since the fixture used for the heat bulb in the sun room is broken, I won’t need the frame of the mini greenhouse to support it anymore. The mini greenhouse can be brought in and gotten ready, too. Plus, we should be able to use some of the plant hooks in the ceiling to hang the shop lights we’re using for grow lights, and generally have a much better set up than last year.
Which means we’ll have to make building a cat barrier a priority over the next few weeks!
The second seeds in two of the pots are actually germinating!
When it comes time to thin them out, I think I’ll try transplanting the smaller ones. I know squash and gourds don’t like being transplanted, but the more seedlings there are, the more survivors we’ll have once they finally go outside. We’ll see.
In the next few days, we’re going to have to shift things around again. The small aquarium greenhouse will get set up and the onions will get transferred over. The luffa will be moved off the warming mat and set where the onions are now. The warming mat will then get the next batch of seeds.
While peppers and eggplant are often started this early in our climate zone, the varieties we have can actually wait a bit longer. What needs to be started next are the zucca melon and drum gourds, since they need at least a month longer to mature than we have between average frost dates. I’ll have to go through all the varieties of seeds that need to be started indoors and sort them by days to maturity to see what else we need to start this early.
And we still need to pick up lumber to build a barrier to keep the cats out of the living room, so we can turn the whole thing into a greenhouse. I’ll have to talk to my daughter about that, since she’s the one paying for it.
Well… time for me to start heading to the city and do some stock up shopping!
