starting seeds

Our 2024 Garden: pre-germinating seeds (videos)

/ Re-Farmer / 9 Comments

Talk about making a difference!

Recently, I was going to start some new seeds in pots, but at the last moment, changed my mind. We had such trouble with these last year, and these seeds were anywhere from 2 to 4 years old. I decided to try pre-germinating them, and if some of the seeds turned out to be dead, I’d know right away. Plus, I could avoid our situation last year, where so many seeds didn’t germinate, or died soon after.

Here is a video from Maritime Gardening about the planting process.

Typically, pre-germinating seeds is done in slide lock baggies, but he does it in reusable plastic containers, and I liked that idea better. The take-out container I used was big enough to hold all the seeds I wanted to start, and they are all so different there was no concern about getting them mixed up.

Today – after only 4 days, with only a couple of those on the heat mat (I had the container elevated, so the wouldn’t get too hot) – they germinated! When I turned the lights on this morning and checked them, I saw a few little roots poking out. By the time I was ready to put them in pots this afternoon, every seed either had a root emerging, or just visible.

Before I got to that, though, I saw this new video from Gardening in Canada. Excellent timing.

Almost all plastic containers have that triple arrow reduce-reuse-recycle symbol, with a number in it. She goes through all of them, from 1 through 6. All the plastic containers she looked at are considered food safe, but some are better than others, though the green tray sets with the LED lights, which I now have, too, have no number on them at all.

When it was time to plant, I made sure to check the bottoms of the pots I’d bought for these, and was happy to see a number 5. Discovering that the Red Solo cups (which have a 6 on them) are made of a plastic that is among the worse for shedding was a bit of a surprise. I still have a lot of those!

Honestly, though, I’m not too worried about it. If I worried about all it all, I’d never do anything. Still, if I am in a position to choose one over the other, I now have the information to made an educated decision.

Thanks, Ashley!

So here is my little video of today’s progress!

The seeds had already been soaking for a while when I decided to take clippers to them and scarify the outer shells. Normally, I’d have used sandpaper. All the emerging radicles found their way through the clipped openings. It likely would have taken several more days for them to break through, otherwise, and even longer if they’d gone straight into pots.

I’m quite impressed that every single seed sprouted. The luffa are the oldest seeds of them all, so I was really expecting to have at least a couple of duds.

So now they are on the heat mat, and I expect to see them emerge from the soil in a few days. Theoretically, I should have given each seed its own pot, but we’ll see how they do, first.

Before I was able to get started on this, though, I had to finish cleaning up after my near disaster with the San Marzano tomato tray, yesterday. The remaining soil spilled onto the floor had finally dried enough to vacuum, though I was actually able to salvage some of it, first. As everything was put back in front of the window, I made sure to top up the soil on the onion tray that got knocked over. Mostly, it was filling in around the edges, since the roots held the soil together in the middle.

I’m really at a loss as to how I’m going to set up more seed trays as they get moved out of the big aquarium greenhouse. We won’t be able to do the same set up as we did last year. Hopefully, things will stay mild enough that I can start using the sun room, early. The outside cats won’t be happy, though. They’ll be losing their lounging spaces! We’ll probably have to start closing the sun room door completely. At least for the night.

If the door can close all the way. Things are still shifting, and I recall having trouble getting the outer door to fully close because of it.

The sun room certainly gets warm enough during the day – today, I saw the thermometer at about 25C/77F – but it loses pretty much all that heat, overnight, and that would be cold enough to kill seedlings. It’ll be a few weeks before we’re going to need the space, though, so it might be warm enough overnight, by then. We shall see.

For now, I’m really happy with how pre-germinating these seeds worked out. When it comes time to start things like the melons and winter squash indoors, I think it would be worthwhile to do it again!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2024 Garden: getting next seeds ready

/ Re-Farmer / 3 Comments

I had a much interrupted night last night, so the girls took care of the morning rounds for me, so I could sleep in.

Well. As much as the suddenly cuddly cats would let me! 😄

I did end up having to go to the post office to pick up some packages, and ended up going into town to run some errands while the post office was closed over the lunch hour. I finished too quickly, so I used up time by going to the local dollar store – I forget which franchise it’s actually part of.

The tomatoes and peppers on the heat mat are ready to be moved aside, so today I prepared the next batch of seeds to start.

Oops on the labels on the left and the centre!

The packages across the top of the photo were my dollar store find. After watching the Gardening in Canada video about useful Dollarama garden finds, I went looking to see if they had clear plastic drop cloths. They did, so I picked up three of them; one for each of the raised bed covers we have, with the curved tops. This plastic is quit thin – about half the thickness of actual greenhouse plastic – so I don’t expect them to last more than a season but, at 12′ x 8′, they should be just the right size to cover the frames. If we can get at the frames and cover them early enough, they will made nice little greenhouses for the three low raised beds next to the spruce grove. The sooner we can warm up the soil, the sooner I can direct sow those seeds that can be planted before our last frost.

Until then, I got my gardening fix by preparing Crespo squash, drum gourd and luffa seeds, all of which have a long growing season. There were only 6 luffa seeds left in the package and they’re pretty small, so I’m using all of them. With the drum gourds, I still had some left in an open package, plus I have an unopened package. Because the seeds are so large, I chose only 4 of the drum gourds and the Crespo squash seeds. There are still more seeds left in the Crespo squash seed package, too.

Yes, I did catch on that the plant labels are under the wrong seeds! The smooth seeded Crespo squash’s bowl is on the correct seed package. The drum gourd seeds look like they have a rough texture, but have a soft surface that’s almost fluffy.

Usually, I would scarify the seeds and plant them after only a short presoak, mostly because I would forget to let them soak overnight. Last year, I had such trouble with them and had to reseed the pots several times. This time, I am making sure to do a longer pre-soak. I got them going in the mid afternoon so, by morning, they should have about twice the soaking time compared to leaving them overnight.

I plan to split the seeds between two pots per variety. Hopefully, we’ll have decent germination. If only one seed each manages to germinate and survive transplanting, I’ll be happy!

Now that I think about it, this would be a good time to try doing it the way Maritime Gardening suggests; leaving the seeds on wet paper towel until the start to germinate, the planting them. Hmmm… Yes. I think I’ll do that – after they’ve had their overnight soak. With big seeds in particular, I think that would be especially helpful.

I really look forward to seeing how these do!

The Re-Farmer

Something to try?

/ Re-Farmer / 5 Comments

I just watched this video from Maritime Gardening and wanted to share.

The next seeds I plan to start will be quite large, and I plan to let them soak overnight first. The next time we’ll be starting smaller seeds, I might experiment with this method. Not that we have had much problem with germination rates, but that waiting until they show, and wondering if any will germinate at all, is the thing. Right now, in the tray with early peppers, two varieties have start to emerge, but one still has not, and we still have just one Butterfly Flower seedling.

The thing will be to remember to start the seeds like this, about a few days, or even a week, in advance!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2024 garden: more seedlings!

/ Re-Farmer / 1 Comment

Shuffling the trays around has certainly helped! Check this out.

When I turned the lights on yesterday morning, there was nothing in the tray. When I turned them off in the evening, all the cells on the far right of the photo had seedlings breaking ground. By morning, they were opening their seed leaves, and I could even see one starting to break the surface in the middle row, though it’s not visible in the photo.

That row of seedlings on the right are the Black Cherry, which are new seeds for this year. The middle row are the Chocolate cherry, which are seeds from previous years. The ones on the left, which we got this year as a freebie with our order, are a completely different type of tomato, so I expect those to take longer to germinate, compared to the cherries.

I will wait until there’s more sprouts before I raise the tray off the heat mat. I’ll just put one of the dome lids under it, which will raise the tray about 5 or 6 inches off the mat and closer to the light. I don’t want to unplug the mat until the peppers start germinating, which will take longer.

The tray with the San Marzano seeds has been a bit of a surprise. There weren’t many seeds in the packet, but it turns out that there were more than I thought. There are seedlings in all the cells in the tray, but in the row where I had enough to plant only one seed per cell, there’s extra, and in some of the cells where two seeds had been planted, there are three seedlings! These would have been seeds that had stuck together in the package. Some are so close together, I’ll just cut away one, rather than thin by transplanting, as removing one would damage the other.

This weekend is 10 weeks before last frost.

Must resist starting more seeds too early!!!!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2024 Garden: starting tomatoes, peppers and milkweed (video)

/ Re-Farmer / 4 Comments

Okay, so I’m really a week early for this, but I decided to start more seeds, anyhow!

It was also an excuse to finally get my video making software up and running on the new computer. That was far more complicated than it should have been, but once it was all set up, everything went well.

Plus, PBC makes a cameo appearance.

This time, I started the three varieties of short season bell peppers left over from last year; Early Sunsation, Dragonfly and Early Summer. When it comes time to transplanting them outdoors, we need to try a completely different location. Definitely well away from those trees along the north side of the low raised garden beds! Hopefully, by starting them indoors this early, as well as planting them in a better location, we will actually get ripe peppers to try. With the peppers we started last month, this will make for 6 varieties, only one of which was able to ripen outdoors last year. None of the seeds are new.

I ended up starting 4 varieties of tomatoes. We were intending to only plant a couple varieties, originally; one paste tomato variety and one cherry tomato variety for fresh eating. Then we got some free seeds I wanted to try, too. When going through the tomato seeds we had, I decided to grow the Chocolate Cherry tomatoes again. I used the new seed starting trays for the tomatoes, which have only 12 cells, so I’m going for more variety over quantity of plants. I know the cherry tomatoes should be prolific (if they do well this year), but the free Forme de Coeur we got are also supposed to be quite prolific. I planted only 2 seeds per cell. If we end up with only a few plants of each variety, all together should be adequate to our needs. If we do end up with a high germination rate, I’ll might thin by transplanting, but we’ll see when the time comes.

The San Marzano tomatoes went into my remaining new style of tray I got this year, with the larger, deeper cells. There weren’t a lot of seeds in the package, though, and I used them all up. I filled the cells only half way for now, and will top them up as the seedlings get bigger. With this, if we do have a high enough germination rate that they’ll need thinning, I will definitely thin by transplanting. As it is, I only had enough seeds to plant a pair of seeds in two rows, and the last row got only one seed each. It’s entirely possible that thinning won’t even be an issue.

Last of all, I started some Butterfly Flower, which is an orange variety of milkweed. That one had plenty of seeds, so I might also try direct sowing in the spring, too. I had a small tray with Jiffy Pellets left over from last year, so I used that. The seeds are pretty big, compared to all the others I started today, and each pellet got only one seed each. That’s still a dozen seeds, so not bad. Since these are perennials, we will need to be selective on where we transplant these.

Starting these seeds meant a bit of rearranging needed to happen. The seeds starting in the Red Solo cups were still in the big aquarium greenhouse, and that was going to be needed for the large tray of tomatoes.

Zero oregano seeds germinated, so I took those cups out completely. With the Purple Beauty bell peppers, one cup had all 4 seeds germinate, while the other had none, so I transplanted two of them into the empty cup. The German Winter Thyme doesn’t seem to be growing much bigger. I’m not sure what to make of that. The bin with these went into the mini greenhouse in front of the window. The two trays with the LED grow lights on them went into the mini greenhouse as well, and are now plugged into their USB cables. For now, I can still use the remaining three lights to supplement the tray with the eggplants and hot peppers.

The trays with the tomatoes and peppers are set up above the heat vent. Hopefully, that will be enough, because we’ve only got one heat mat, and that’s now being used with the San Marzano tomatoes. The milkweed is in the big aquarium greenhouse, too, but off on the side. These shouldn’t need the extra heat, anyhow, but the warmth from the lights themselves should be adequate for them.

Now I’m really going to be getting antsy. We are at 11 weeks before last frost and with these seeds started, the seeds I have left don’t need to be started until 2-4 weeks before our last frost date. Unless I decide to start some gourds, but even they all are recommended for starting at 2-4 weeks. That means having to wait until the start of May, at the earliest!

Well, before then, I’m sure some things will need to be potted up or something, so I should still be able to get my gardening fix! 😂😂

The Re-Farmer

Our 2024 Garden: new sprouts, no sprouts, plus possible cat adoptions!

/ Re-Farmer / Leave a comment

While shutting down the lights in the big aquarium greenhouse, I spotted a bit of green. By this morning, there was more!

In one of the two cups they were sown in, all three Purple Beauty bell peppers have started to sprout.

In one of the three cups the Sweet Chocolate bell peppers were sown in, there’s one sprout emerged, and another pushing its way through. There may even be a third, under a piece of perlite, on the right. If it is, we’ll know by the end of the day.

With the thyme sprouted for so long, but nothing else, I had unplugged the heat mat some time ago and just hoped the tank would still be warm enough for the other seeds. There is NO sign of the oregano. We had issues with oregano last year, too. I’ll give it a bit longer, then decide if I want to try sowing them again, or just give up on the oregano from seed this year. It might be better to buy a transplant when the garden centres open in the spring.

In other news…

I was contacted by the Cat Lady a couple of days ago. She has been able to find open adoption spaces at a couple of shelters in the city for us. After much discussion, we’ve decided that both Ginger and Toni will go to one shelter. They have a set up just for special needs cats, and apparently three legged cats are extremely popular. In the city, at least! The other shelter specialized in Siamese or Siamese looking cats. I sent a picture of Ghosty’s face, and she was identified as a Lynx Point Siamese. My daughters figured she was a tabby with albinism! Either way, this shelter tends to have rather high end clientele, so Ghosty will likely find herself in the lap of luxury before long!

As I write this, I can see the live feed from the garage cam. There are 6 cats milling about. It’s that time of year again. There’s been a lot of baby making going on, and the males are starting to fight over the females. I’m so frustrated that we haven’t been able to snag any of the females to get fixed! They simply will NOT let us near them! I think the super fluffy little tabby that is sibling to Patience outside, and Peanut Butter Cup, the Beast, and Soot Sprite, inside, is female. It’s hard to tell with all the fur, and I can’t get close enough to check, anyhow, but the way I see her behaving around the males right now…. *sigh* Why are all the females so skittish, but the males so friendly?

Anyhow.

If all goes to plan, we might be down three indoor cats on Friday! I’ll be driving them out half way to meet the Cat Lady, and she’ll take them the rest of the way.

This morning, after giving the outside cats their food and warm water, I did a bit of shoveling. I’m much less stiff and sore than I expected to be, after yesterday! I made sure to have some Golden Milk before bed, which I think helped a lot. Lord knows, the painkillers aren’t doing much. We now have paths to the compost pile, the back of the garage, the outhouse, and the litter pellet compost behind the outhouse.

What I am NOT going to bother doing is clear a path to drive into the inner yard. I don’t see the point.

We are getting snowfall warnings for this evening, though – another 10-15cm/4-6 inches – so we might need to clear the driveway again tomorrow, so we can meet with the Cat Lady on Friday. Hopefully, the gravel roads will be plowed, too. I thought it was done already, but when I cleared our driveway, I found that what I though was a plow ridge visible on the garage cam was just tire tracks from the one vehicle that managed to make its way down our road. !! I don’t expect to have troubles with the truck on the road, but our driveway tends to drift a fair bit. Mostly right in front of the garage.

We have several packages to pick up at the post office, which closes at noon today, so I will be heading out soon to get those, then keep going into town with a couple of water jugs to refill, and pick up a few groceries. I’ll have to snag a daughter to help me bring things to the house from the garage, since I won’t be able to pull up to the house. Either that, or reclaim the wagon from the storage side of the garage. It’s got our chainsaw and other tools I was using to clear trees and work on the first trellis bed stored in it. With the paths in the snow, though, it might be easier to just carry things in. We’ll see.

As I write this, we’ve already warmed up to -13C/8F, and we are expected to reach a high of -5/23F after the snow starts to fall. We’re expected to stay below freezing for a few more days, but the forecast is now saying we should reach of high of 2C/36F on Sunday, and be staying with highs at or above freezing from then on.

We’ll see what actually happens! I just want that snow to melt away slowly, so we don’t get any flooding aside from our usual moat around the garage. 😁

Well, time to get ready to head out, and see what the roads are like!

The Re-Farmer

Seeds to start in March

/ Re-Farmer / 6 Comments

What better thing to do when winter is asserting itself, is watch gardening videos?

Gardening in Canada has put out another excellent video for us short-season gardeners. Here, she talks about the seeds we should start now, or can get away with starting now if we do it right, and which she would advise against starting until April.

I believe she lives a bit further North that we do, but her last frost date is earlier than mine, so she can actually start seeds about a week two earlier than me.

I appreciate that she says that no one knows your garden in your area better than you, and to take that into account when deciding what to start. Everyone has their different soil conditions, microclimates and other factors that will affect how things grow – and what will grow at all! I also like that she recommends new gardeners take advantage of the wealth of knowledge among people in the comments section. You’re bound to find someone living in your part of the world that can answer them far better than she can, living where she does.

I suspect I’m going to be sharing her videos here regularly over the next while!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2024 garden: teeny tiny thyme

/ Re-Farmer / 3 Comments

We have sproooots!

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!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2024 garden: herbs and peppers

/ Re-Farmer / 2 Comments

Today, I did some seed organizing.

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.

Must… resist… starting too early!!!

😂

The Re-Farmer

Our 2024 garden: first peppers!

/ Re-Farmer / Leave a comment

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