March Seedling Progress

Here is some of the progress since I started the first seeds on February 14.

The artichokes are up! Some of them. They are pretty tricky to germinate. The cardoons keep coming and everything looks  strong and healthy.

Leeks are just poking up. 

Salad greens, kale and broccoli varieties are getting ready to go out in the garden under frost cover, and free up space under the lights for the next round: peppers and eggplants.

Spinach (Bordeaux and regular green) and cabbages in the sunny front windowsill.

I'm trying to sprout sweet potatoes for the ornamental vines. If it works, I can transplant the slips when they grow out the top of the potatoes, root them in water, and have enough for my containers and a few for the flowerbeds. Next to them is Red Russian kale.

Seed Starting 2014

If my artichokes and cardoons germinate and make it out to the garden, I will be so happy. So far only the cardoons have sprouted, after 8 days in the most perfect indoor conditions I could figure out after a lot of reading.

I have 15 wintersow jugs outside with perennials and frost-hardy annuals. I learned a hard lesson the last few years. Most things germinate and grow amazingly well in their little greenhouses, but rabbits mow down all the work -- seeding, waiting/watering for months and then transplanting from the jugs -- in one day. The places I most need flowers can't be fenced. This might be a year of container gardening for a lot of things.

Mixed orach from Baker Creek. It's so ornamental I was hoping to use it as an accent plant, but it's an edible green like spinach. The seedlings glow like Bright Lights Swiss Chard.

R switched her room with the guest room this year, so her old room is now the seedling room. I put some salad greens in seed pots, but the soil blocks are working well for everything else. Alyssum dries out and dies in the micro seed blocks, even though I water it three times a day. It's on heat mats with the petunias, which are sprouting faster than I've ever seen them with this setup. Alyssum needs another plan though. It's one of the few things that survives the conditions of our front yard flower beds, so it's worth trying again. The front windowsill has cool-germinating cole crops like broccoli and cauliflower, and kales and leeks, and they are all going to town. I learned that the secret to spinach is to germinate it in damp paper towels first.

We bought a pressurized garden sprayer this year, and it's even better than I expected for seedling watering. A perfect fine spray from a wand that you can target exactly where it needs to go, even to the far back rows of trays. I used to use a little spray bottle to mist seedlings, and my wrist would fall off after a few trays. You can't fit watering cans with big roses under the lights, and the other options would drown seedlings or leave corners dry. Now I have to make sure I'm not enthusiastically watering so much that my seeds damp off, because it's so fun and easy. It's a great investment, because once the garden is up and running, we can use the sprayer for compost tea, fish emulsion and foliar feeding, and organic bug spray. (Concoctions with Murphy's Oil soap and cayenne pepper.)

A lot of optimism in early March, when the seeding has been going along for a few weeks and things are popping up. The hard part is once the plants actually get outside in our harsh Colorado conditions. Drought and prolonged extreme heat and rabbits and bindweed, late spring and summer hail storms, it has been a rough few years lately for the garden. It's been a dry winter, so this doesn't promise to be the kind of spring that gets us off to a good start. I keep learning though, and trying again.

Sweet Peas

One year not too long ago, we had sweet peas in the front yard garden that looked like this.

They were started from seed indoors and planted out as seedlings. In the years following, I direct-seeded them, and hardly any even bloomed.

This year I want them to be spilling over the fence again, so I'm going back to the space and labor-intensive method and starting them from seed. Here they are after soaking and scarifying with a nail clipper, in their soil blocks before being covered with the top layer of soil.

I'm trying these for the first time, soil block makers for seedlings. The idea is that there are no plastic pots to buy /save/sterilize, more room for seedlings in each flat, and stronger seedlings that survive transplanting. I'm excited about using the micro blocks when it's time to plant basil and other plants that need heat to germinate. Heat mat real estate is so precious, and this should quadruple how many seedlings I can start on heat. The roots air prune, which means they reach the end of their blocks and stop growing, rather than circling around the pots. You can see how that would help with transplant shock. Eliot Coleman popularized this European method in the states. I'm diligent about saving and re-using the little black plastic seedling pots, but they eventually crack and give out, and this year mine all seem to be falling apart at the same time. So it's a great time to try something different.

I bought two sizes of block makers. The 3/4" mini blocks, and the larger 2" blocks that the minis can be potted up into once the seedlings are growing.

You fill and compact the block molds with soil, press down the plunger, and end up with perfect square blocks of soil ready for planting. There are different-sized dowel pin inserts that can be customized to make a hole just the right size for your seed. There is a special recipe for the soil block mix, because regular seedling mix won't hold together in the blocks. I think the micro might be too small for seeds as big as sweet peas, but I'm planting so many seeds that it's important to save space, so I'm giving it a try. I did one batch in the 2" blocks as a test, to see if those grow faster than the ones that start small and are potted up. Maybe one day I'll invest in root trainers, like Matt Matus in his Growing With Plants blog. His blog is so beautiful and well-written, and such an inspiration. Here's to a glorious fence-full of sweet peas again, if everything goes well.

Seed Swap Lunch

After a crazy-busy week and weekend, the payoff was a seed-trading lunch today with my high school friends Tom & Margaret. Margaret is my friend who lives near Boulder with her family and has a . . . a homestead? a farm? kind of a little of both. A big hobby garden along with chickens, goats, pet rats, and an adorable shaggy dog named Agnes who decidedly does not like Charlie. D says Charlie was "fresh," and I think Agnes is quite a lady. Charlie was dense about understanding Agnes' "enough" growls and barks, Agnes got madder, so Agnes went back out to wait in the car.

Tom lives in Denver and has the most picturesque easement garden I have ever seen. He is an artist, so he's a master of the small space and the visual impact and the clever solution.

I took hardly any pictures. I made a turkey mole that took forever and had a million steps, none of which I documented. A really pretty salad with avocados and citrus and strawberries and watercress. Gone now--never to be documented. Margaret brought deviled eggs from her own chickens, Tom brought homemade chocolate-covered salted caramels that made the world stand still when you ate one.

These kids are great friends from so far back. R insists that she remembers when they were babies together.

We divided up our seed envelopes and ended up with so much more variety than we would have had on our own. This is going to be a fun summer and growing season. They are both amazing gardeners and I can't wait to see what they do this year.

We tried this for the first time, a wooden tool that makes little seedling pots out of newspaper. I love it so far. I wonder if they will dry out as quickly as my egg carton seed pots--those were so frustrating, never again.

Old friends really are gold, just like the Girl Scout song says.

Windowsill Seedlings

Mint, chives and thyme in the front window, along with some salad seedlings.

In the end, I could not carry off the pea brush.

In theory, I like the idea of pea brush. Overlapping birch saplings thrust into the ground behind your peas, so they will twine around it as they grow. But I think to carry off pea brush properly, you need to be either an elderly and crotchety Scottish gardener, or better yet, a grand lady who employs one. My pea brush was ridiculous from the beginning. It wasn't tall enough or sturdy enough and we don't have any birch trimmings.

So I took it down and put up some netting strung between two bamboo poles. It seems to be working fine. The peas are growing, and in the foreground the radishes and arugula planted from seed are popping up. Back toward the peas, there is spinach/mustard and some mesclun, chives and sorrel and ruby chard.

Spinach/mustard and peas.

Looking the opposite direction, from the bed in the back of the yard. The bed in the foreground has, left to right: space for the bok choi seedlings I am hardening off; rainbow chard; Texas sweet onions; and bunching onions. The bed in the middle has butter and salad bowl lettuces, and some cress, Japanese mitsuba and carrot, spinach and radish seedlings just coming up.

Mesclun from transplants I grew under lights indoors. It made it through two deep snows and freezes.

So beautiful. I wonder why the rabbits aren't bothering it. We see wild rabbits in the yard every day, and so far, I haven't seen any trace of them in the garden.

Under the bushes all around the backyard is this shade-loving vinca groundcover.

Red tulips pop up here and there. I wonder how long ago they were planted. It's been so long since anyone took care of this yard. We did find a long-handled bulb planter under all the leaf debris last summer.

Peony buds ready to open.

Robert Frost "Pea Brush"

I came across this Robert Frost poem when I was Googling pictures of pea supports.

Pea Brush

I walked down alone Sunday after church
To the place where John has been cutting trees
To see for myself about the birch
He said I could have to bush my peas.

The sun in the new-cut narrow gap
Was hot enough for the first of May,
And stifling hot with the odor of sap
From stumps still bleeding their life away.

The frogs that were peeping a thousand shrill
Wherever the ground was low and wet,
The minute they heard my step went still
To watch me and see what I came to get.

Birch boughs enough piled everywhere!—
All fresh and sound from the recent axe.
Time someone came with cart and pair
And got them off the wild flower’s backs.

They might be good for garden things
To curl a little finger round,
The same as you seize cat’s-cradle strings,
And lift themselves up off the ground.

Small good to anything growing wild,
They were crooking many a trillium
That had budded before the boughs were piled
And since it was coming up had to come.

***

Trillium is a wildflower in the lily family. Here is a photo from Wikipedia:

You can imagine them climbing the fallen birch boughs that were piled on their backs and crooking them.

I love the line,
"They might be good for garden things
To curl a little finger round,"

That's exactly what the peas are doing to my trellis of twigs.

Peas and spinach-mustard went into the ground earlier this week.

And we spent all day Saturday building two more raised beds for vegetables. I double-dug the ground, D built the beds.

We filled them with good soil and compost.

Next to the peas, I seeded some arugula, French breakfast radishes and mesclun. My neighbor came out to tell me it was too cold for anything but peas and spinach--definitely no seeds. She was kind not to laugh at my version of pea brush. We didn't have any birch boughs "fresh and sound from the woodman's axe."

Seedling Update

We are not even pretending this is a guest room any more.

The plan is for all this to be dismantled and the plants safely in the ground by the time we get summer visitors.

Carrots don't like to be transplanted, but some people say it's ok if you do it in the cool early spring and when they're small. This is all a grand experiment.

The mesclun is such a radiant lemony green, the color of spring.

Pea shoots, intricate and beautiful.

Pea couture!

Tatsoi, or spinach/mustard. Growing its second set of "true" leaves, ruffled and just unfurling.

Pumpkin seeds are big and easy for R to handle, and I thought they would give her some hands-on planting experience. I didn't plan ahead for when they all germinated and grew like labrador puppies. It's way too early to put them in the ground; they are sensitive and don't like transplanting after they get their second set of leaves; they are just about to get root-bound. And of course, now she is attached to them and believes she's going to have a harvest of pumpkins. What should I do? Move them to a bigger pot, thin them out, of course. But how many times can you move their sensitive roots?

Getting the first bed ready yesterday. Snow had started to fall lightly.

A professional landscaper lived in this house years ago, but by the time we bought it, it was foreclosed and neglected. This is our first spring here. We are working through the layers of overgrowth to find the hardscape structures and perennials worth saving. Digging out vegetable garden space, and trying not to ruin spring plantings that we can't see yet. Trying to remember the shade patterns of the big trees when they're leafed out. This will be an interesting first garden.