Gretchen and I have decided to try starting our vegetable garden plants from seed this year. We borrowed some grow lights from Gretchen’s Dad and bought some trays, seeds, and planting mix.
We started out by moistening the planting mix. We just used an old (cleaned out) soda bottle as a watering can.
We filled up all the little partitions in our planting tray without compressing the soil too much.
We used a pen with a little piece of masking tape on it to make holes of the desired depth for each type of seed.
These are Leek seeds. They’re pretty small, but ended up being just about the largest seeds we started.
With seeds that small you have to be careful about how many you plant in each hole. For the most part, we planted more than one seed per hole. We’ll come back and prune later, leaving just the healthiest plant.
Since they just look like dirt until the sprout — and even then aren’t too easy to distinguish — we made sure to carefully label each of the blocks of seeds.
We went ahead and put the newly planted seeds under the grow light on a timer so they’ll have good light as soon as they come up.
You go. We’ve been doing seeds fer years, but usually don’t have much luck. I don’t think California has a decent climate for growing fruits, vegetables & herbs.
Biggles
Thank you for the support Biggles. I must be confused about your opinion on the California climate. I thought most of the food we eat in the US came from California. Eh?
oH that. I think it’s just the fact I’m a lowsy gardner and my wife doesn’t have time. We never get started early enough in the year. See, you’re already going! We haven’t even thought about what we want to plant. I do know that I would like a lime tree and a large patch of cilantro. I’ve got flat leaf Italian parsely volunteering each year and it’s spreading. Even coming up in potted plants now. Red worms near the surface, very nice. Plus the standard lineup of herbies. Rosemary grows crazy here, like a small tree it is. Yum.
Psst! HEY YOU!
Post more, I’m bored.
This is so strange. I have not been able to post to blogger for a while. I still get an “Internal Server Error” message when posting from Safari on my Mac (my normal browser). I just tried it from Firefox on my PC at work and it worked. I think they must be doing some browser sniffing and sending Safari users off to neverland. Sorry about that!
Hey,
Really? I figured Safari was pretty stable. Well, I’m using Opera as my main browser and there’s a handful of things I cannot do. I have to pull up IE on a regular basis. Grrrrr.
This is useful stuff. I am attempting to grow a vegetable patch as a project with the kids. So thanks for the tips!