I popped through the sun room to chase a skunk out of the kibble house, which gave me a chance to check on the seedlings (and give Potato Beetle some cuddles.
As I write this, it’s 3C/37F outside, but 20C/68F in the sun room.
Here are before and after photos. Look at what a difference the temperature has made!
The Cup of Moldova tomatoes were all drooping in their bin – or held up by the protective sheet of insulation on the side (I’m glad I put that there, as Potato Beetle has been sitting on the other side of it!), but now they’re all standing tall again!
I honestly didn’t think the three Cup of Moldova tomatoes in between the Crespo squash and Canteen gourds would make it, they looked so shriveled, but they too are standing at attention once again!
Perhaps the most dramatic difference is in the smaller Wonderberry. They’re looking just fine right now!
It’s supposed to start snowing again tonight, but the low is supposed to be just 0C/32F. Even if we end up a few degrees colder, that should still be warm enough that the sun room will be much better tonight, compared to last night. If they survived last night, they should have no problem with tonight! In a way, this is hardening off the seedlings, I suppose. Just in a very brutal way!
I am so happy now!
Meanwhile, I decided to check on the Sophie’s Choice tomatoes. The remaining ones from the second planting are still quite small, but getting tall enough that they could be “potted up” by adding more soil to their Red Solo cup pots.
There were four cups, each with two seedlings in them. Three of them were thinned down to one, but in one of the cups, both where equally strong, so I transplanted one of them to its own cup. They are now back in the mini-greenhouse, safe from leaf eating, dirt digging, pot crushing kitties.
Most of the other remaining seedlings in the mini-greenhouse are tomatoes – the squash and gourds we repotted after the Great Cat Crush did not survive, so we have only those from the second seeding, in the big aquarium greenhouse. Of the other survivors of the Great Cat Crush are three cups with eggplants (one has two strong seedlings in it that I’m considering dividing), and two peppers, one of which is very weak and spindly. We do have the new seed starts of those in the big aquarium greenhouse, and their true leaves are just beginning to show. We shall see how many we finally end up with, by the time we’re ready to transplant them outside.
Today, we are also finally seeing the tiniest seedlings among the ground cherries. Of the six pots, two of them has a single seedling showing up. I hope more germinate. I really like ground cherries, and would love to have quite a few plants of those.
One of our planned projects is to build a wire mesh barrier, with a wire mesh door, in the opening between the living room and dining rooms. We’ll be able to keep the cats out entirely, and the living room can be our plant haven, so we don’t have to struggle so much to protect them anymore!
Okay, so yesterday, I moved a number of our seedlings into the sun room. These were the largest seedlings that had out grown their spaces in the living room set ups. The overnight temperatures were supposed to go below freezing again, but the sun room is usually about 10 degrees Celsius warmer than outside.
The problem is, the overnight temperatures were lower than forecast, which means even at 10 degrees warmer than outside, it still would have gotten pretty cold in there. We currently have no safe way to set up the ceramic heat bulb, but we at least had the warm light fixture in the plant shelf, as much for Potato Beetle as for the seedlings!
When I went through the sun room to do my rounds this morning, I checked the seedlings and everything was looking pretty good. A little bit droopy, perhaps, but just a few leaves here and there. I was quite encouraged.
I didn’t see a lot of outside cats this morning, though I did find a lot of orange fur on the ground in front of the sun room! Clearly, there had been a fight, but of the three orange cats that were at the kibble house, none looked injured.
Rosencrantz is looking very, very round.
With the morning rounds done, I made a quick run into town to pick up a prescription refill for my husband that we couldn’t get delivered last week, due to the storm.
Since the pharmacy is across the street from where I found the bins we’re using for the seedlings, I swung by to see if I could find some more of the large size I got. They were still out of stock, but I took advantage of some good prices and picked up some canned meats and clam chowder for the pantry. On the way home, I swung by the dump to get rid of our garbage and recycling that was still in the van to keep it away from the critters, then headed home.
In the length of time it took me to do that, this happened.
Everything I brought out yesterday was drooping.
The tomatoes seemed to be hit the hardest, which I’m a bit surprised about. I thought the gourds and squash would have a harder time. Then there’s those two Wonderberries.
The first Wonderberry is just fine. It’s been there long enough to have acclimated to the room, I guess.
So… what do you think? Did I kill them? Or do you think they might recover? I think at least some of the tomatoes might recover, but… *sigh* I don’t know. We’ll find out over the next couple of days.
I am just so frustrated right now. It’s been such a struggle to start these in the first place. We have more than enough space to start seeds, but having to protect them all from the cats – and they still managed to get at and damage a bunch – means they’re basically crowded into a few small areas and poor air circulation. If we didn’t have to do that, we wouldn’t have to rely on the run room at all. We could turn our entire living room into a growing space.
As for the sun room, it still should have been fine, if the temperatures had only dropped as low as forecast. Before bed, I was seeing lows of -7/19F. The sun room, with the warming lamp, should have been just fine at that temperature. Looking at the records for the past 24 hours, we actually hit -11C/12F. Which means the sun room, without the warming lamp, would have dipped below freezing. The lamp can only add a few degrees of warm in a very small area, though we’ve got the added protection of the sheets of rigid insulation, and the reflector would help, too. Not enough to help the Wonderberry on the window shelf, on the other side of the doors, but it should have been enough to protect the seedlings on the plant shelf.
I just feel so… defeated. Having to fight the cats is one thing, but the forecasts have been so off lately, and not in our favour. It would bother me less if this wasn’t stuff we are trying to grow to feed ourselves.
Well, there are still some smaller Cup of Moldova tomatoes in the mini-greenhouse, and none of the Sophie’s Choice were large enough that they had to be moved. We still have some seeds for the canteen gourds and Crespo squash that we can try starting, though it’s getting late for those.
At least most of the seeds we need to start indoors won’t actually be started for a couple more weeks, along with the varieties we will be starting this week.
It just feels like such a battle, and it’s a battle we shouldn’t be having.
You know how it gets, when you start one thing, then end up doing more, or go to check on something only to find yourself doing a bunch of other things, just because you’re there, anyway?
Yeah. That was most of my day. :-D
One of those things happened while preparing to write my previous post, and I noticed some deer on the security camera, running up the driveway. I went to check on where they were going and, sure enough, one headed for the kibble house.
The sun was blinding me while trying to take the photo, so it wasn’t until I went out to chase off the deer from eating the kibble, that I finally saw the skunk!
The skunk quickly ran off and, within moments, the cats were back in the kibble house, eating.
Then Potato Beetle politely asked for cuddles, so I stayed in the sun room holding him, which is why I was there to see the deer try and return, several times!
This deer was going for the kibble house because it had been chased away from the feeding station by the three deer I’d seen running up the driveway!
Then, since I was in the sun room anyhow, I started working on the shelf we’ll be moving seedlings onto. With Potato Beetle still being kept in there, I moved the warming lamp to the bottom shelf, which we will leave clear for him, then emptied and set up a higher shelf. That shelf doesn’t get as much light, so the little bins with the tulip tree and paw paw seeds in them got moved up (still no idea if those will ever germinate).
Once that was ready, it was time to go through the big aquarium greenhouse and the mini-greenhouse to collect the largest seedlings and transfer them to the sun room, using some of the bins I picked up.
The two Wonderberries turned out to be too tall for the shelf!! so they got put into buckets and joined the first one on the shelf. They are in biodegradable pots, and I didn’t feel like fussing with aluminum foil, like we did for the first one.
I also had to prune flower buds off the little Wonderberry plants!
It’s not in the photo, but while clearing the extra shelf, I brought down the pot that my daughter buried the cucamelon tubers in. I set it up in the window with the Wonderberry and watered it. Who knows. We might have some cucamelons this year, after all!
Here, the Canteen gourds, two of the Crespo squash, and three of the Cup of Moldova tomatoes got set up next to the trays with the onion seedlings.
A bin with all Cup of Moldova tomatoes got set up on the next shelf down. If they look all bent over, that’s because they were starting to get crowded in their shelves in the mini-greenhouse! A piece of rigid insulation that had been laying on the shelf next to where the bin was placed, got set up to create a wall.
Just in case Potato Beetle manages to get onto the other half of the shelf and decides to do a Susan on the seedlings, and try to eat them.
Hopefully, Potato Beetle won’t be in the sun room for much longer, and we’ll be able to use that bottom shelf, too.
This afternoon, however, he was quite content to watch the activity from the comfort of my husband’s walker!
Once everything was set up, the bins and trays got watered, the reflector was put back in position, and I turned on the shop light that’s hanging on the inside of the shelf, where things are in shadow. It was 20C/68F in there, so I left the warming lamp off. It’ll get turned on again when things start cooling down.
Hopefully, the seedlings will do well in the sun room. I’m still concerned about those overnight temperatures. There’s only so much that little light we’re using for its warmth (as is Potato Beetle!) can do, and there’s no safe way to set up the ceramic heat bulb without some sort of metal frame, since the frame of the mini-greenhouse we used before is being actively used as… you know… a greenhouse.
The mini-greenhouse now has two completely empty shelves and, after re-arranging things, there’s even room in one of the trays for more pots. There will be room for the next seeds we will be starting this week, though I think the Kulli corn, which will be in bins, will be going straight into the sun room. We’ll see how whether the bins can fit in the big aquarium greenhouse or not. There is also still the small aquarium greenhouse. Seedlings don’t thrive in it, but it should still be suitable to keep pots until their seeds germinate and, hopefully, we’ll be able to move any seedlings out to a better spot soon after.
It feels like we’re juggling pots and seedlings! Which I guess we are.
Today, I went through the mini-greenhouse to see what might need to be potted up.
It turned out that there wasn’t anything that wasn’t already potted up. However, almost all the Cup of Moldova tomatoes are getting too big for the shelves! They are certainly doing well, after the thinning and addition of more soil along their stems. Over the next day or two, these need to be moved into the sun room, just for the space.
At the furthest end of the large aquarium greenhouse, you can see the two, out of three, Crespo squash that got potted up. The third smaller one in between the bigger ones had actually been thinned out of another pot, and is going quite well. In the foreground are a pair of Canteen gourds that had shared a small pot. For some reason, when I moved these out of the mini-greenhouse, because a tendril had started to wrap itself around the shelf above, I thought they were luffa. The writing on the labels had started to fade, so I fixed that.
It took some juggling to get the bigger pots to fit into the space. They definitely need to go into the sun room soon, too!
Meanwhile, on the heat mat…
The Red Baron bunching onions are coming up nicely. I’m looking forward to these. Still nothing among the ground cherry, though.
As I write this, we are at -2C/28F, which is warmer than forecast. Warm enough that any expose ground or concrete is thawing out and melting the snow around it in the sun. We’re still supposed to reach a low of -13C/9F overnight tonight, and tomorrow we’re supposed to warm up to -2C/28F, but get more snow. Depending on what app I look at, we’re either going to get isolated flurries, or snow all day for a total of 2-4cm, or about 1/2 – 1 1/2 inches. Either way, it won’t be enough to cause problems with driving my mother to my brother’s, to meet her new great grandson. :-)
After that, we’re supposed to had daytime highs hovering a few degrees above freezing for the next while. One of my apps has a 28 day long range forecast and, according to that, we won’t start hitting 10C/50F until May. Our last frost date is June 2, so that fits. Last year, May was an incredibly warm month. May long weekend is when a lot of people put their gardens in, only for many of them to lose almost everything to one cold night, just days later. Hopefully, we will not have anything like that again!
I am really looking forward to getting to work on the garden!
Before coming back inside, I remembered to check out the flower I spotted on the Wonderberry.
Such a pretty, tiny little thing!
Then I killed it. :-(
I pinched off all the flower buds that I could find, so the plant will put more energy into growing foliage. With no insects to pollinate them this early anyhow, blooming is just wasted energy for the plant. Hopefully, it will continue to do just fine until we can plant it outside.
The sunroom was about 16C/61F at the time I did this! That’s over 20 degrees Celsius warmer than outside! If the temperatures didn’t drop down to about 3C/37F overnight in there, all our seedlings would be set up in the sun room right now. I’m hoping, as things warm up over the next few days, we’ll finally be able to start doing that. After Easter, we’ll be starting the seeds that need to be started at 6 weeks before last frost. That will be the Kulli corn and the remaining tomato varieties; yellow pear and Chocolate Cherry. We have a very few Spoon tomato seeds left. Maybe we’ll finish those off, too.
It’s the four week seed starts that are going to need the most space. These include: – the remaining gourds we’ll be doing this year (Yakteen and Apple) – all the summer squash (Endeavor green zucchini, Goldy yellow zucchini, Madga, Sunburst yellow pattypan and G Star green pattypan) – and pumpkin, including three types of hulless seed pumpkins (Styrian, Kakai and Lady Godiva), the Baby Pam from last year that didn’t germinate at all, but I hope will work if we scarify the seeds first, plus some giant pumpkin seeds that were given away for free that I’d like to try. – all the winter squash (Little Gem/Kuri and Teddy from last year, Georgia Candy Roaster, Winter Sweet and Boston Marrow) – all the melons (Halona and Pixie, from saved seeds, Kaho watermelon and Zucca, plus some seeds saved from grocery store melons we liked) – cucumber (Eureka)
These are all things we do want to plant quite a bit of each type, since they are being grown more for preserving than for fresh eating. Except the melon. We might freeze or pickle some, but mostly, we’ll be eating those fresh, and I can hardly wait!
We’re also going to be using many of the squash in particular to reclaim portions of the old garden area. Anything that is doesn’t need to be trellised, or their fruit is too big to trellis, we’ll take advantage of their spreading habits and large leaves to shade out the weeds beyond the hills and mulch we’ll be planting them in.
After that, we’ve got the stuff we’ll be direct sowing, some of which can be started before last frost. We’ve got 4 types of turnip (I ordered 2, but got 2 more as freebies), 2 types of bread poppies, strawberry spinach, I think 2 types of beets this year, 3 types of pole beans, including 1 shelling type, 2 types of bush beans left over from last year, 2 types of peas, 4 types of carrots, 2 more types of corn, including a popcorn, 3 types of radishes, which I still want to grow for their pods, not their roots, 3 types of spinach from last year, 4 types of lettuce from last year, and 2 types of chard from last year. Then there’s the stuff that will be shipped when it’s time to plant, including 3 types of potatoes, sunchokes and sweet potato slips.
I don’t know where we’re going to plant a lot of this. We do have a general sort of map set out. Quite a few things will be planted in temporary beds to help prepare the soil for future plans, and some things will be interplanted with others, so they’ll be sharing beds. We will likely need to build more temporary trellises, too. In the end, though, we’re still figuring things out, so we have no fixed plans. Almost everything is going to have to be flexible.
Getting this all in is going to be a wonder in itself!
Well, I’m happy to say that the Wonderberry that got moved to the sun room did survive it’s first night.
It had been on a plant stand that was being stored on that shelf anyhow, but I had to take that out and place the pot lower, as the height put it under the shadow of the eaves. From what I could tell, the temperature did stay a few degrees above freezing in there, even without the “grow” lights on, and what little warmth they provide.
The true test will be at the end of the week, when a blizzard is supposed to hit, and daytime highs are supposed to be below freezing.
Today, I went into town to pick up the last few things we need for our Easter basket – though how much we’ll be doing on Easter is going to depend on how accurate the forecasts turn out to be!
Walking into the grocery store, I immediately spotted the back of a new display near the door. Even from behind, I knew exactly what it was and headed right over.
Yup. I bought sets! Just in case the onions and shallots we are growing from seed are not very successful, though they do seem to be doing better now that they’re in the sun room.
The boxes are by weight rather than quantity, so I took a look in the boxes of yellow onions and shallots to see, more or less, how many sets were in there, then decided to get two boxes of each. I stuck to just one box of red onions, because we don’t use those as much as yellow onions. Plus, we have two other varieties of red onions from seed. I remember from last year that, even though the seedlings were quite small, the surviving onions we grew from seed ended up being just as big as the ones we grew from sets, so we’ll see how it goes.
Yes, we want lots and lots of onions. Depending on how things go, I wouldn’t mind having enough to not only store in the root cellar, but to dehydrate, use in various preserves and so on. Of the ones we bought seeds for, I would like to save seed, as some are rarer varieties. Onions produce seed in their second year, so we’ll have to plant those somewhere where they can be overwintered.
We are going to have a much larger garden this year, but for things like the onions and a few other things, we will be interplanting them with other things, for efficiency of space and – hopefully! – to help protect them from any critters, should the temporary fencing we’re planning to put up, fail.
Though we have three varieties of potatoes on the way, I was sorely tempted by the bags of seed potatoes that were also new on display. In the end, I decided against it. At least for this trip! As with onions, it would be really hard to grow too many potatoes! I think if we do pick up more seed potatoes, it will be different varieties I’ve seen elsewhere, though. The ones I saw today where the same basic varieties we normally see in the grocery store that are still pretty inexpensive, even with the increases in prices.
For all that the soil is in pretty bad shape and we’re breaking new ground for a number of things, I am thankful that we do have the luxury of space for gardening. Planting in less than ideal conditions is better than not being able to plant at all!
One of the first things I do in the morning is check on the seedlings, turn on the lights, and do any tending they might need.
The newly transplanted and potted up plants seem to be doing very well – with one possible exception.
The Wonderberry we have left from the first planting is just too big for the top of the mini greenhouse.
I mean, look at this beast! It’s getting huge!
And what’s that I see???
Yup. Those are flower buds!!
I planted these really early, after doing some online research, but it seems it was too early.
So what do I do with the poor thing? We can’t leave it out, or the cats will destroy it.
The only safe place for it is in the sun room.
Except…
Yeah. It’s too big for the shelve space, too.
There was only one thing left to do.
I now have it sitting in the window on the other side of the door, which is a pair of smaller windows with a shelf in between. It’s actually a great spot for a plant like this. The problem is mostly the temperature, though it also gets less light. In the other shelf, there is at least the lights provide a bit of warmth. This spot is too far away for that to be any help.
I don’t think the sun room dipped below freezing last night. When I first looked in, in the morning, it was at about 8C/46F, but I expect it to get above 20C/68F in there as the day warms up. However, we’re supposed to start cooking down again, with a high of -5C/23F by Thursday – and more snow on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. The Southern parts of the province are even getting weather alerts, as a Colorado Low swoops in, potentially bringing as much as 20cm/8in of snow. That, in turn, is leading to flooding alerts in regions to the North.
None of which is anywhere near us, but we’ll still be affected by the system with cooler temperatures and more snow.
At least the current warm weather is reducing the amount of snow we have now, so if we do end up with more, it’s not going to be as much of an issue.
The receding snow is starting to reveal that we are going to be picking up quite a lot of fairly large branches, once we’re able to do the spring yard cleanup.
The new beds along the chain link fence are now clear of snow, including the asparagus bed. Which, unfortunately, has a lot of grass and weeds already starting to grow. There’s less than half an inch of thawed soil on the top, but that’s enough for the weeds.
There was a surprise, though.
There are onions growing!
We had transplanted the tiniest of seedlings around the asparagus bed last year, mostly because I didn’t want to toss them. They established themselves, but hardly grew at all, and we just left them. Even when cleaning up in the fall, we just let them be.
I found about 8 or 10 of them, starting to grow!
It should be interesting to see how they do. As this would be their second year, if we leave them, they should go to seed.
Speaking of onions and seeds, the seedlings we moved to the sun room seem to be doing rather well.
In fact, I think they’re actually perking up and getting stronger. Well. Maybe not the shallots. It’s really hard to tell with what’s left of those! But the red and yellow onions seem to be getting bigger and stronger.
We might have something to transplant, after all!
I might still get sets, though. In this household, we just can’t really have too many onions! :-D
With our average last frost date of June 2, today works out to be 8 weeks for seed starts. In addition to starting new seeds, our replanted Cup of Moldova seedlings were ready to be thinned and potted up.
We also needed to make space.
While the sun room’s daytime temperature neared 20C/68F, while the outside temperature reached a high of 4C/39F, the overnight temperatures dropped to just above freezing.
We decided to take the chance, and move the onions and shallots to the sun room. I’m not very encouraged by how they seem to be doing, and I figure we’re going to need to buy sets later on, anyhow. More on that, later.
We also had to pot up the Wonderberry. The only one that survived from the first planting is large enough that it can only fit into the top of the mini-greenhouse, where the frame comes to a peak. The second planting had two that were getting pretty big, so they got separated and repotted, too. There was also a whole lot of removing of pots where the seedlings did not survive, and re-arranging the big aquarium greenhouse so that the new seed starts could go on over the heat mat.
Eventually, we were able to start the new seeds!
There were only two things that needed to be started, as the others on the list were for 8-10 weeks, and we’d already started them at 10 weeks.
One was Aunt Molly’s Ground Cherry. The seeds are so small and few, they came in a separate envelope in the packet. Still, my daughter divided them up, and planted 6 pots with them.
While she worked on those, I started on the Red Baron bunching onions.
They have such pretty seeds!
These were densely planted in a repurposed grocery store salad container.
These are now on the heat mat.
The pots that had been on the heat mat got shifted over, but are still in the big aquarium.
Here we have our squash and gourds, and the second planting of eggplants and purple peppers. There are a few survivors of the first planting, but the way things are going, I figure extras will always be a good idea!
This tray had the second planting of the Cup of Moldova paste tomatoes, planted in Red Solo cups. A couple of them had only one seedling in them. For the rest, I gently removed all but one from each cup. The cups were only half full of seed starting soil, so my daughter potted them up by simply adding more to fill the cup. While she worked on that, I filled more cups and transplanted the tomatoes that had been removed, burying the stems until they were much like the others. I ended up doing a dozen cups, on top of what my daughter filled.
Hopefully, most of these will survive to be transplanted!
We were able to fit them all into the mini-greenhouse, though a bit more re-arranging needed to be done. The Sophie’s Choice tomatoes are much smaller, and not ready to be thinned or potted up, yet.
The largest Wonderberry is now in one of those Jiffy pots that can be buried directly into the ground, as are the two smaller Wonderberry. The smaller ones are in the tray, where they can be watered from below, but the big one was on its own. To allow for watering and not making a mess, my daughter wrapped the pot with aluminum foil.
Since we have to keep the mini-greenhouse enclosed, I have the mini fan set up to blow are up one side, so it can circulate under the cover without blowing directly onto any plants. A salvaged window screen gets set across the bottom, then the flap is brought down, its bottom tucked under the screen, and the zippers pulled down as far as the screen, so hold it in place. It’s the best we can do to keep it from getting too hot in there and to allow fresh air in. For seedlings this big, the cover would be removed completely, but certain cats would simply destroy everything.
It will be good when all the plants can finally go into the sun room! These are, however, much more fragile than the onions.
I had a couple of spare oven liner trays that I picked up for inside the small aquarium greenhouse. We’re not using that right now, as anything that goes into it seems to struggle. That’s where these onions had started out. They should be quite a bit bigger, and there should be more of them.
That one tray that looks the sparsest is the shallots. The soil even looks dug into. I suspect one of the cats actually managed to reach through a gap in the cover flap over the screen we put in front of the mini-greenhouse.
Concerned for the overnight temperature drop, I remembered a small light that we’ve used in the sun room before. It has an incandescent, full spectrum bulb in it.
It also gets quite warm, and we’ve made use of that heat for everything from keeping plants warm, to keeping recovering cats warm!
So that got set up on the empty shelf under the onions. The shelves all have scrap pieces of rigid insulation on them. Most of the inside of the shelf is covered by the reflector we made using a larger piece of rigid insulation. So the space should hold warmth a fair bit. The light fixture would help, plus even the LED shop light does warm up, just a bit. Between all that, I’m hoping the shelf itself will hold a pocket of warm compared to the rest of the room.
We’ll see what difference it makes.
So this is where we are at, 8 weeks before last frost. We have a few more seeds to start at the 6 week mark, but it’s the 4 week mark that is going to be a doozy. The fast majority of our seeds, both in variety and in quantity, are supposed to be started by 4 weeks. This includes the winter and summer squash, pumpkins, remaining gourds, melons, watermelons, and the last of the tomato varieties. We don’t plan to start many of the tomatoes, but we do intend to plant quite a lot of the various squash and melons.
Finding the space for everything is going to be quite the challenge. It’ll be May by then, though, which means the overnight temperatures in the sun room should be warm enough that we could even start some seeds in there, and not just in the large aquarium greenhouse. Some of what we’ve started will be ready for hardening off, too.
Looking at the long range forecast, we’re going to have a rather chilly Easter weekend, and things aren’t going to warm up very much after, either. I’ve been looking at the 30 year averages, though, and these temperatures are pretty much bang on for the average.
It always amazing me just how fast some seedlings grow!
It’s like they’re bigger, every time I look in the tank. Just look at those Crespo squash!
These two pots each have 3 seeds in them. Two that were scarified, and one that was not. I think the scarification made the difference!
To the left is the Ozark Nest Egg gourd, and…
… you can see a Tennessee Dancing Gourd emerging, too. In the background, the luffa are starting to develop their true leaves.
What is interesting is that, while these squash and gourds are germinating, there is no sign of germination in the pots with eggplant and peppers seeded into them.
Last year, it took forever for the squash and gourds to germinate, and many pots never did. This is a huge improvement. I think there is a combination of reasons. One being the scarification of the seeds – except the dancing gourds, which were too small – and the other being the use of a heat mat.
I know we’re supposed to thin the seedlings down, but I’m thinking we’ll thin them by transplanting the extras. When it’s time to transplant outside, I want to have extra, just in case some don’t survive transplanting, or in case critters get to them. The more we plant, the better the chances of having at least one survive!
Today is 10 weeks from our average last day of frost, and we had a few seeds to start.
But first, we needed to make space. These would be going into the big aquarium greenhouse, on the heat mat, which meant the Sophie’s Choice tomatoes had to be moved. All the pots have seeds germinating in them, so it’s okay to take them off the heat mat now.
Space was made for them to fit onto the tray in the small aquarium greenhouse, which is where we have a few rescues. At the bottom left is the only luffa we’ve got so far. The seed leaves have wilted away, but the true leaves are still holding out. In the top left corner is the rescued Canteen gourd. It had seemed to be doing well, then suddenly it started wilting and the seed leaves started wilting away, but it has actually perked up again. If it can manage to develop some true leaves, there’s hope for it. With the Canteen gourd, however, the replacement seeds we planted are doing much better. The two plants with the largest leaves in the photo are Canteen gourds, as are the not quite as robust pair in between the luffa and the original Canteen gourd.
There’s also one surviving tomato plant in there; I can’t remember which type is it. There are a few others in the mini-greenhouse, too.
The one Wonderberry that sprouted from the first planting has gotten big enough that it was too tall for the lower shelves in the mini-greenhouse, so I couldn’t put it in one of the trays with other pots. So it got double cupped and tucked in with the bulb onions at the very top, where the mini-greenhouse has a peak. It didn’t like my attempt to put it in a lower shelf, but it should be standing tall again, soon.
Here we have the pots that my daughter and I started today, joining the luffa pots that we planted a couple of weeks ago. Still no sprouts. :-(
Everything got two pots each. Two types of gourds got started today; the Tennessee Dancing Gourd, and the Ozark Nest Egg gourd. Both did surprisingly well last year, in spite of the drought.
The Crespo Squash was also started. Then, we decided to plant extra eggplants and peppers. We do have surviving ones from the first planting that seem to be recovering all right from being flattened by a cat, but we’ve decided to play it safe and plant extra. The last of the Little Finger eggplant seed were planted, but we still have a few left of the Purple Beauty pepper.
The next batch of seeds should be started about 2 weeks from now. Hopefully, we’ll be able to move at least the onions to the sun room. They can handle cool weather better than anything else we’ve got started right now.
The Re-Farmer 