Failures and Successes

It's 10:30am and I have already eaten breakfast, drank some coffee (and a little more coffee), and sowed peas, kale, spinach and radishes. Oh, and we had our first sprouts this morning! It's sunny outside today, partly anyway; it's been back to rain and muck the last few days. Tomorrow the rain starts again until the end of time, also known as July. I grew up in Central Texas, a place that doesn't really have distinct seasons. Well, I take that back. It's a place that has two seasons, Spring and Summer. Year round it's either pretty mild, or it's really hot. Winters sit in the 60's most of the time, with gross fluctuations on either side for a couple days, but when Spring comes around there you know it from the wildflowers and the fact that it's 90 degrees before 10am. I'm living in a place now that really has all four seasons. It may not snow here in the winter, but it does rain, and winter has a very distinctive feel to it. It's so amazing to be someplace where the entire city collectively rejoices when Spring starts to poke through. There is such eagerness and excitement and you just feel in your bones that it's time to start growing things, to start things fresh. It's instinctual.

On that note, I would like to recommend the blog of a friend of mine from back in my college days. She is living a couple hours outside of the other Portland in Maine with a very similar goal and similar end to me. But she is a lot more eloquent than I am.

So, the first sowing of kale, spinach and radishes was about a week and a half ago. Nothing. We got nothing. The soil might have been too loose when we first planted and the seeds fell through or dried out. It might have been that we got some frost a couple mornings. Or that I watered late in the day and it cooled the seeds down too much when the sun went down. Maybe we watered too much, or not enough. I went out and dug up a couple corners to try and find what went wrong. There was a kale seed I found that had sprouted, but never made it to the surface. Maybe they were planted too deep. Anyway, massive failure on the first sowing. I just did the second sowing and the soil has packed down a bit now after being rained on for a week, and I think it will be more conducive to creating a nice bed for those seeds to germinate. Though, like I said, the rain is coming back tomorrow, forever and ever. Keep your fingers crossed for me.

I also got the first sowing of peas set up in the back along our fence. I fertilized some, but I didn't use an innoculent. I did some research and people were split down the middle of the necessity of it. My Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades told me that most soil in this part of the world has enough of the right bacteria in it to start that an innoculent isn't necessary, and just a little bit of fertilizer should get your legumes off to a good start. So, I sowed, I fertilized, and now I wait, again.

Our one success so far is the sprouting of broccoli starters! Five seeds have sprouted so far. This is very exciting. There is hope for feeding ourselves yet.