marigold

Our 2026 Garden: more tomatoes, and the fennel is up!

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Today ended up being a home day. Yesterday wiped both me and my daughter out completely, so we’ve been in recovery mode. Tomorrow, I will need to go out to do the last of our Easter shopping and errand running, since so many places will be closed.

When I checked on my seed starts last night, I had a lovely surprise. The first Florence Fennel seeds had emerged! I could see at least a couple of Blueberry tomato seedlings, too.

By morning, there were more.

They are hard to see, but in the first photo, there are both Blueberry and Chocolate Stripe seedlings emerged.

The second photo shows an explosion of Orange Currant and Manitoba tomato seedlings.

The third photo, you can see more of the hollyhocks, including a couple lifting up their seed casings. I’ll keep an eye on those and see if the seed leaves need help getting out. The other roll has quite a few Florence Fennel seedlings showing, and I expect I might even see more by the time I check on them again this evening.

I added more water to the trays and realized it was time to “graduate” out of the plastic tray for the mixed stuff, onto a stronger metal tray. Moving the herb seedlings was the most delicate. These were sown into 5 cell trays, but the tarragon had only three cells with seedlings, so I removed two of them. The compostable material was breaking apart, anyhow. The summer savoury looks so long and spindly. I’ll probably end up buying transplants for those, but we’ll see how they do for now. Then there’s the sad little luffa!

The Golden Boy yellow celery, however, is going fantastic! It’s getting too tall to fit under the shop light. The marigold and Cosmos are doing very well up there.

After transferring everything to the metal tray, I could remove the plastic one, then poured the water I’d added earlier into the metal tray. The shelf sags slightly in the middle, unfortunately. I’ve added some sheets of cardboard under the heat mats in the middle, but it isn’t quite enough to make up for the sag. Ah, well. I just have to be careful to make sure that roll with the celery doesn’t dry out too much.

Normally, I would take these off the heat mat completely, but the basement is too cold, which means the soil is even colder. The metal tray will diffuse the heat better than the plastic, and the water on the bottom will also help equalize things – in theory, anyhow! Before, I had tried using a heater and staying in the basement while it was running, but between the heat mats and the shop light I’m running out of places to plug things in. The basement has three outlets in the entire space, and only two of them can be reached from the table. With the third one, though, I’ll be able to plug in a fan to get some air moving to help strengthen the stems. It doesn’t need to be very close to do the job.

So that is our seedling progress today, and I’m very happy to be seeing so many tomatoes. Especially with the ones where I’d used up the entire packet of seeds and have no spares! I was starting to wonder about the Florence Fennel, too.

Pretty happy with how things are going, considering the rather poor set up we’ve got this year.

The Re-Farmer

Our 2026 Garden: graduation, and new sprooooots!

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First up, some good news in progress that made it worth being up way too late again.

At around midnight, I was contacted by someone from the new rescue. Some spaces are opening up, and she was wondering what friendly yard cats might be available to take in for fostering and adoption?

She had a few in mind from pictures I’d sent before, but requested more up to date photos and videos that she could show to potential fosters. My daughter and I did that while doing the morning cat feeding. Unfortunately, a couple of times when I thought I was taking video, it turned out it wasn’t recording. Instead, I had a second or two of video of our feet or whatever, taken at either end of what was supposed to be a video for the rescue! We have a whole bunch of adult males in particular that are so friendly, it’s almost impossible to get still shots of them, as they are all over each other, trying to get pets.

So I will have to try again later today. If all goes well, we might be able to have our tiny girls that are friendly, but still too small to spay (even though they are almost a year old) be taken in. Or Sir Robin. Sir Robin desperately wants to be an indoor cat! I haven’t even seen some of the adult feral females in a few days which, unfortunately, means they may well have just had kittens somewhere in their hidden places.

Tis the season.

Speaking of the season, here is how our seedlings are looking.

Two snail rolls have graduated to the upper level and are now under the shop light, giving them a few more inches of space that I couldn’t give them with the gooseneck light fixture they were under.

The Golden Boy celery is thriving since being “potted up” to the snail roll! That poor little luffa is getting its true leaves, but is looking pretty sickly. The summer savoury is looking very leggy and weak, but the tarragon – the very few there are – are looking stronger.

The second picture is of the eggplant and peppers tray. Those seedlings are looking very sad and weak, and there are so few surviving. I’ve already resown them, but I won’t try again. They are short season enough that I might try direct sowing, instead.

With how few there are, I’m seriously considering “potting them up” into a snail roll. I could easily fit them all into a single roll, with room to spare. I’m just not sure how well they’d handle being transplanted. It can’t be much worse than they are doing now.

In the other snail rolls, we have more growth.

In the first picture, you can see quite a few more of the hollyhocks now. There are still two or three seedlings disguised as vermiculite in there.

In the next picture, you can see a second Orange Currant tomato is up – plus there’s another elbowing its way up that I didn’t even see until I looked at the photo, later.

It’s the same in the next picture. I could see one Manitoba tomato had emerged, but looking closely in the photo, I can see the stem of another, pushing it’s way up.

Still no sign of anything in the Chocolate Stripes or Blueberry tomatoes, and still no Florence Fennel visible.

All in good time.

Tomorrow is the last business day of the month – payday – so we are expecting to do our Costco stock up trip in the city. I’ll see what they have for seed starting mix. I only got one bag and it’s pretty small. I might only get four seed snails out of it. I won’t be starting more seeds for a couple more weeks, but I will probably be starting more. Costco carries the big Pro Mix bags, which would last me for the rest of the seed starting season. I might have to sift it before using it. I haven’t heard people talking about needing to do that with their seed starting mixed this year at all, though, so it might not be an issue. I might need to get more potting soil, too. I still have some but, with so much material getting sifted out, I don’t have as much potting soil as it appears in the bag! Any time I pot something up, I would be using potting soil rather than seed starting mix.

We really need a better set up for starting seeds indoors.

The Re-Farmer

Our 2026 Garden: new sproooot!

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After all the running around we did yesterday, today has been mostly a recovery day.

It’s also been a day of reminders to get that doctor’s appointment rebooked, now that we’ve tested the truck out and it seems to be holding out fine.

But first, the cuteness!

My husband has to be really careful before sitting on or getting into his hospital bed. Big Rig all but lives in it, burrowing under his covers, with just the tiniest bit visible. In this case, just her nose was visible, until I got right down to mattress level!

She’s such a giant slug of a cat!

Anyhow…

Today, while checking on the seed starts in the basement, I found another first.

You can just barely see in the first image above, our very first tomato seedling. This one is an Orange Currant tomato. Hopefully, that means we’ll be seeing more tomato seedlings coming up over the next few days.

The next photo in the slide show above has the Crackerjack marigolds (left) and Cosmos (right). These are starting to get tall enough that I will soon move them up to the shelf under the shop light. The tray the single luffa, herbs and the celery that was transplanted into a snail roll has room for at least two, potentially four, snail rolls, depending on how thick they are. I might end up taking everything out of that plastic tray and setting them on another metal baking sheet, like what these snail rolls are on. Less space on the tray, but it can hold the weight of those seed snail rolls.

In the last photo, you can see the hollyhock seedlings. It looks like only three, but there are four more seedlings hidden in the roll. The seed leaves are still encased in the seeds’ outer shell, so they look a lot like the vermiculite. There are two near the centre seedling with the green of their stems just barely visible. There are two more in the outer part of the roll, center and left of centre. Honest!

I didn’t take any pictures, but the pepper and eggplant seedings are not looking particularly good. One of the eggplant seedings simply died off. It was right in a corner cell, on the far side of the tray, and I suspect it was just not warm enough for it there, even with the heat mat under the tray. With so few survivors, that’s a lot of wasted space in the tray, too.

In hind sight, I’m now thinking it would have been better to do those in seed rolls, too! Chances are, they wouldn’t have been eaten by mice or whatever it was that killed most of them, either.

Ah, well. Live and learn!

I’m just happy to see my first little tomato seedling. This variety might even be a type of tomato I can eat raw, like the Spoon tomatoes. We shall see!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2026 Garden: a seedling explosion

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My goodness! When seedlings start to germinate, some of them do it incredibly quickly!

Last night, checking on the seed starts before going to bed, I spotted a single marigold seedling that had emerged. I could also see a hollyhock elbowing its way up.

This is what I found this morning.

On the bottom right are the Cosmos that had already germinated. There are 11 seedlings – I think I planted only 12 seeds in there.

On the bottom left are the marigolds. I counted 7 seedlings, 6 of which there had been no sign of at all, last night.

Above the marigolds is the hollyhock roll. At first, I could see just the one seedling lifting its head (these are the seeds that the instructions said not to cover at all). When I looked closer, though, I could see three more little green elbows.

Still no tomatoes or fennel, but I’m not expecting to see any of those quite yet. Heck, I wasn’t expecting to see the flowers emerge this quickly!

Hopefully, this is a good sign for the garden this year. From the amount of snow we have on the ground right now, we should at least get a good start before the heat hits and everything dries up. I believe we are supposed to have drought conditions again this year. Which is actually the “normal” for the prairies.

Meanwhile, I watched this video from Self Sufficient Me this morning. I really find videos like this the most inspiring – the ones where things have gone all “wrong”!

Granted, an overgrown jungle like that would never happen here. We’re more likely to have everything baked and dry. Still, it comes down to the same thing: having a bad year is not being a “failure” or a “bad gardener”. It’s just a bad year. Things will never be perfect.

If we waited for perfect conditions and the “right” circumstances, we’d never accomplish anything – in the garden, or in life!

The Re-Farmer