Spring Is (Finally) Here

After a week of the wettest, coldest spring weather I've seen in a long time the sun is finally shining and the air is warm. So it seems like a fine time for a garden update.

We've been eating mesclun salad since Easter Sunday and are enjoying the fresh greens very much. The first radishes came up about a week ago-- they are spicy, tender, and tasty. Just a few days ago we ate the first of our leafy red-green lettuce. Carrots have their green tops up, the peas are blooming white flowers, and the chard, which I nearly gave up on several times, should be ready for its first harvest soon.

Thanks to a neighbor with some extra chicken wire I have a nice new fence and will soon have a freshly tilled plot to put my tomato and pepper plants in. At this moment they are going through the hardening off process near the back door. I think the squash, cucumbers, and green beans will go in the ground this weekend. I have a basil plant to put out there on an experimental basis as well (the rest I'll keep inside on the windowsill, which is now nearly empty of plants).

I've been using fish fertilizer every now and then to feed the plants, crushed eggshells to ward off slugs, cow manure compost as organic matter as I've yet to master the art of the compost pile. It stays fairly weeded and adequately watered, so hopefully the plants will respond in kind.

Something happened to us when we ate those first few salads. I've been baking our bread for the last month or so, too, and I think we are liking the prospect of being more self reliant in the years to come. I'm putting myself on a ten year plan-- ten years to learn to garden properly, for one, but also to be more of a producer and less of a consumer.

Moldy Peat: The Seedling Pirate

Peat pots don't seem to hold in moisture very well. At least not on my windowsill. After struggling to keep them anything but bone dry for days I put the peat pots in saucers of water to soak up moisture over night.

Two days later I found mold spots on the outside of each peat pot.

Yet the next day there they were, tiny sprouts from both the yellow pear and matina tomato seeds. With the plastic off they seem to have maintained some kind of balance between staying watered and not being moldy.

The mesclun mix is doing okay, though some of the sprouts have fallen over. Perhaps they are too leggy from being too far from the window? Isn't that what happens when they have to reach too far for the sunlight?

After the peat pot incident I decided to console myself with a $5 Burpee greenhouse. It comes with 36 pots, has a nice sized cover, is self watering, and included soil pellets, a chart, and greenhouse sized markers. So there are two kinds of tomatoes, peppers, and broccoli in there right now.

Windowsill Germination

I bought basil seeds at the local nursery some weeks ago, just to see if my kitchen window sill is under the right conditions for sprouting seeds. The first batch of basil seeds, planted in a peat pot and covered with plastic wrap, never came up. The second round got knocked off the sill by an unnamed assailant. The third batch, in a self watering planter made of two yogurt cups, sprouted a few days ago. I took off the plastic because it seemed like the right thing to do. There are three little sprouts now making their way up to the sunlight.


Inspired by this progress I started tomato and pepper seeds. They are in peat pots, covered in plastic, and sitting in saucers on the sill. I am careful to keep the draft off them at night and have been turning on the kitchen light when it is cloudy out. Hopefully I can coax some seeds to grow so I can avoid the expense of buying plants later this spring.

A Taco Bell container is now housing some lettuce seeds. I am nervous about not being able to tell lettuce from weeds out in the garden, so I'll familiarize myself with the looks of the mesclun mix this way! Later this week, if the ground dries a bit, peas will go into the ground. Maybe some radishes too.