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.