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.

September Harvest

Such a long dry summer for a yard and gardens that are all hand-watered. No rain, week after week into months, and hours of hand-watering weren't enough. We will have to figure out something else next year. Eggplants surprised me by being  more resilient than tomatoes. Rosa Bianca and Listada eggplant, and the long purple Japanese eggplant kept producing all summer too.

September is harvest month, and we still have some tomatoes. This was a year of early hail storms that stripped seedlings to the stem, and an unusual explosion of hungry rabbits. And then waiting all summer for rain and watching for the monsoon season, which never came.

Still, we got some gorgeous eggplants.

Rain Garden

A whole night and day of drenching rains, finally. Everything is perking up.

One of the front yard beds is looking better, thanks to my friend Tom and his gift of columbine and snapdragon yesterday. I got them planted just as the rain started falling. The little grassy things are thrift from Tom, I hope they take. Behind that is the pretty white flowers of bacopa, one perennial that came back for me this year. And way in the back, the Shasta daisies. I love the dark green foliage even before they bloom. These came from one seedling I started under lights indoors three years ago.

Charlie gets a wet head from the dripping bushes. Still a handsome gentleman.
Peas planted on St. Patrick's Day, loving the rain.

Magenta Swiss Chard.

Mesclun ready to be planted.

Charlie in the spot where he dug up all the grass. That stage didn't last very long, he is mostly a good dog now.

Georgia O'Keefe in the salad greens.

The dwarf blue spruce planted all around with purple alliums is my favorite thing in the backyard. I wish I could go back three owners ago and say thank you.

Allium and a peony bud in the back yard.
So many things bloomed this year that had been sulky or just absent in the four years we've lived in this house. I think it was the first year without a late killing freeze.

Tom's columbine. I always think of them as blue, I love this creamy color.

I have been planting out the winter sown milk jug seedlings. I'm following the instructions, we'll see if anything actually blooms. That will be another post.
Dandelion skeletons are lovely. I will still work to eradicate them.

Front yard peonies just ready to burst open.

Wild rosa eglantina by the front door. I wish whoever planted these could know how much they are appreciated years later. Who knows how old the gorgeous peony is, how many owners back it goes.

Buds on our Home Depot David Austin rose from last year. I have been fertilizing and watering and putting epsom salts and coffee grounds around all the roses, mostly out of shame for how I neglected them last summer.

April Rain Song 
by Langston Hughes

Let the rain kiss you.

Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops.

Let the rain sing you a lullaby.

The rain makes still pools on the sidewalk.

The rain makes running pools in the gutter.

The rain plays a little sleep-song on our roof at night—

And I love the rain.

Seedling Update

The upstairs seedling room has been through several iterations since my last post. A lot of the cold-hardy seedlings have been spending time outside hardening off.

Salad greens, pansies, Johnny jump-ups, leeks, sweet peas and stock flowers.
Some have been moved outside to the cold frame and hoop house that D built for me. I'm putting in more lasagna beds (no fun to put down the newspapers on a windy day, but we wanted to get it done).

Some of the wintersown seedlings in jugs are starting to come up. This is spinach.

Cleome and alyssym.

Stock.

The asters I planted in January.

Salad greens moved from the front window to the garden, and herbs moved in.

Newspaper pots in the upstairs seedling room.

Genovese, spicy globe and opal purple basil. The basil has really taken off in its heated beds.
 
Japanese eggplant just sprouting. The peppers and tomatoes are still waiting.

Gorgeous mesclun. Botanical Interests Valentine Mesclun, one of my favorites.

Although I promised I wouldn't, I started a little colony of seedlings in the basement.

Impatiens, phlox and rainbow coleus.