seed trays

Our 2026 Garden: starting tarragon and summer savory

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I had been thinking to start more seeds tomorrow, but I expect to be out and about and decided to just go ahead and do some today.

There are flowers and herbs that can be started in February in our climate, but I had only four in mind. After reading more on what the flowers – cosmos and hollyhock – needed to be started indoors, I decided to hold off on them. Instead, I went through two of my herb seeds that needed the longest start up time before our last frost date. Russian Tarragon and Summer Savory.

The seeds for both are very tiny and would have been ideal for the seed starting kits I got a couple of years ago. The cells are quite small and there is a USB powered full spectrum light disc for each dome.

I couldn’t find it.

It had all been stored in the original box in the sun room, but the sun room got completely emptied and cleaned out in the fall. I thought I’d put it in one of the storage shelves or one of the storage bins, but I couldn’t see it anywhere. I didn’t pull the bins out completely to look, as that would require far too many cat-blocking things to be moved out of the way, but they are semi-transparent, and I couldn’t see anything through the sides. It’s possible the box was buried in one but, for the size of it, it is highly unlikely it was in one of the bins and I wouldn’t see it.

I also didn’t want to use my new 72 cell tray for just two items. In the end, I grabbed a biodegradable seed starting strip I had left from previous years. It had two rows of five cells that I separated.

The drain tray with the cardboard buffer between it and the heat mat had space available, so I removed the buffer. The strips got filled with seed starting mix pre-moistened with hot water – which cooled down fast, but was still warm by the time the seeds were sown. With their tiny size, I scattered tiny pinches of seeds over the surface, then topped them with vermiculate. I keep a smaller amount of vermiculate handy in a covered container I refill as needed. Over time, a vermiculite dust has started to accumulate, and I tried to use more of that, rather than all larger chunks.

I also made sure the drain tray had water in it for the peat cells to absorb. One of the issues with the biodegradable pots and seed strips is that, as they dry, they tend to suck the moisture out of the growing medium inside. I try to keep them moist through bottom watering to prevent that. It does mean they become pretty fragile and difficult to move around, but that’s something I can work around.

Without the cardboard buffer over the heat mat, I wanted to have some sort of buffer for the things that are already germinated – the celery and the one luffa, in this tray. Something that wouldn’t disintegrate in the drain tray’s water. You can see in the photo that I put a piece of rigid insulation under the celery, but I was not happy with that, as it prevents bottom watering. I ended up rearranging things so the celery was on the far side, with the one sprouted luffa beside it, and then put a carboard buffer under the heat mat only on that side. That helped to push the water in the drain tray more towards the biodegradable strips, which will help them retain moisture longer.

Over the next few weeks, there will be more herbs started, plus there are some that I intend to buy as transplants rather than try to start them from seed, myself. We’ll see if the thyme, sage and oregano from last year were mulched well enough to survive the winter. Little by little, the old kitchen garden will be mostly herbs with a few vegetables, rather than mostly vegetables with a few herbs. 😁

The hard part for me will be not starting too many of any one variety! It’s always good to sow extra and then thin the seedlings, but I have this terrible habit of repotting the “spares”, because they’re usually all really strong and healthy looking! 😄

My biggest concern is having to use the basement for all this. It’s just too cold down there! Granted, the temperature is very steady, but the ambient temperature should be about 20-24C/68-75F, not 13-15C/55-59F. Even if we were using the living room, like we’ve done in the past, it’s only a couple of degrees warmer, but at least we could use the aquariums as greenhouses to keep a controlled area at a better temperature until things got large enough to handle being moved out.

Aside from not being able to safely move the tanks to the basement, we have got to figure out what to do with all the “stuff” that’s being stored in the “cat free zone”. We can barely move around in the living room anymore. Some things will be moved into the storage house, but they still have to be gone through, first, and the storage house is where my mother’s furniture went, so it’s got barely any room left – and I have very strict instructions, not to throw anything out!

*sigh*

One thing about gardening, starting seeds and planning it all out. It is a healthy distraction from the other stuff and keeps me from feeling overwhelmed!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2024 garden: seedling shuffle

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What a strange day we are having out there! I just got back from a quick trip into town, but I’ll get to that later.

First, the seedling shuffle!

The San Marzano tomato tray got moved to the other half of the big aquarium greenhouse. You can see there are quite a few more seedlings in there now, too! This side is elevated quite a bit compared to the side with the heat mat, so the seedlings are now quite a bit closer to the lights.

These guys, on the other hand, are quite a bit lower now! I considered putting things under the heat mat to raise them higher, but for now, there is no need. They need the warmth more than the light. Once there is germination, the heat mat will be unplugged, anyhow. At that point, I can either put stuff under the trays to raise them closer to the lights, or put them on the mini greenhouse frame in front of the window. They have better light in the tank, but better air circulation in the window.

I look forward to when we can build up a dedicated seed starting area in a cat free zone! Which can’t be the living room, because there’s just not a lot of space. We might have to find a way to use the new part basement. As long as we can keep it warm enough and bright enough. Since bringing Peanut Butter Cup indoors, we closed up the new basement (the old basement isn’t safe for the cats, so it’s always closed to the cats), because we didn’t want to crawling around under stuff down there, right after being spayed. Since then, we just haven’t bothered letting them down there again, and that doesn’t seem to be a problem for them. We might actually be able to reclaim the space as a workshop again. There’s space at one end where we could set up tables or shelfs and hang the shop lights from the ceiling, but once things start melting, the floor there starts getting damp. The weeping tile at that end isn’t doing it’s job anymore, ever since someone left a rain barrel to overflow outside that corner, during a couple of months of heavy rain. When my brother found it, that whole corner was molding, and it took him a long time to get it cleaned. My daughters had been working hard to keep that end cleaned and bleached but, for some reason, cats would ignore the four litter boxes and crap on the floor against that wall. Which cats, we never saw. If we can turn that basement into a cat free zone, that would make a big difference in where we can do things! Come summertime, though, we’d have to start opening the door, as the basements help keep the house cool. We’ve got a hardware cloth door for the old basement door – which is currently being stored by using it as a cat platform in the sun room. We’d have to pick up some lumber and made another one for the new basement door.

Ooooh… If we can keep it a cat free zone, then we can remove the hardware cloth “door” we made for the opening between the two basements. I can’t really call it a doorway, since it’s just an opening that was broken through the old basement wall that’s now an odd shape and size. We’d put in the barricade in such a way that, if we wanted to go from one basemen to the other, we could just unhook the bungee cord holding it in place and slide it to one side.

We didn’t consider just how determined the cats would be, in trying to get through. Not only did we have to barricade it with whatever we could find from the old basement side, to keep them from simply pushing through, we had to use more hardware cloth above opening, to cover a gap between the floor joists and heat ducts above.

The end result is, we basically can’t get from one basement to the other right now, without having to dismantle the whole thing. The old basement is where we have the water taps from when the laundry used to be there. Now, when we need water to mop the floors or whatever, we have to get it from the bathroom in the old part of the house and haul it through pretty much the entire ground floor to get it to the new part basement.

There is a lot of space down that that isn’t being used right now. The only down side it, my knees and stairs do not get along, but I’d learn to live with it!

Things to think about, and set up for next year, perhaps.

In other things…

As I write this, we’ve warmed up to -10C/14F, with a “feels like” of -9C/16F. However, it is also bright and sunny. Which means that anything dark out there is warming up more, and things are starting to melt around them. Things are both freezing and melting, at the same time!

It also means the snow is starting to soften.

When I got back from town, I drove the truck into the yard to unload, since I was not about to carry those water jugs across the icy path. The snow drift the truck had no problem climbing over yesterday was still manageable, but the truck did have a harder time of it, since the tires started sinking this time. Then, while backing up in the yard so I could turn to the gate and leave, I felt the back end of the truck suddenly sink, and I almost got stuck. It looks like the frozen “lake” of water behind the garage extends quite a bit further under the snow than I thought. The tires broke through the snow covered ice. The “lake” is deep enough that our recent cold hasn’t been enough to freeze it solid, so there is still liquid water under there that the truck is heavy enough to break through to.

Which means I may not be able to drive the truck up to the house again for a while! At least not without digging out a couple of spots, first. We’re supposed to stay in this general temperature range for at least a few days.

No matter. As long as I can get to the house when it’s time to unload our stock up shopping, and that’s more than a week from now.

On a completely different note…

Do you have any idea how hard it is to type while a cat insists in laying across your wrists and rolling?

The Re-Farmer

Seed tray purchase is in!

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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.

I’m quite looking forward to testing these out!

The Re-Farmer