Thursday, April 5, 2012

Blog Break.

I took a bit of a break from the blog the last couple months. I was starting to feel like I wasn't doing anything new and a lot of the things I have written about were becoming the norm. That's a good thing! What's the point in writing about making yogurt....again? That's become a monthly weekend ritual that I don't even really think about anymore. My standard Almost-No-Knead Bread is a last minute thought at 1:30am (really, I did that last weekend) to throw together before I go to bed. But, in reality, there are a lot of new things I'm doing. Here's the first:

New seed starting set-up! The last two years I have started my seeds in the living room in the front window. We had built-in shelving in the window, which was also southern facing. Win-win! Except it was single paned glass and covered floor to ceiling pretty much the entire living room wall. So, in the effort of energy efficiency and home value appreciation we upgraded our windows and lost our shelving. I didn't really know what to do with my seeds this time around. I considered setting them up in the back bedroom somehow, but we really didn't have space and I was worried the cats would eat them. We have a hallway closet that once housed the worm-bin, but doesn't have any electrical access and would necessitate lots of rearranging of storage items. We finally decided on setting up the seeds in the garage.





(Please excuse our mess.) The work table on the right was another "free-box" find from neighbors the next block down. It's sturdy and has a wooden top and metal legs and a shelf underneath. We bought a seedling heating mat for the lower shelf and hung two light fixtures with daylight wattage bulbs from the underside of the wooden top.

Even with the heat and light the seedlings have been off to a slow start. The mat is supposed to bring the temperature about 20 degrees above ambient temperature for the seeds. So, for the most part that means soil temperature has been around 60-70 degrees so far. We are still struggling to get into the 50's during the day around here. It's another slow gardening year for the Pacific Northwest.





I'm liking this set-up because I am properly labeling all my varieties so far. I have been bad about that in years past and ended up with a lot of mystery varieties. As you can see above we have broccoli, lettuces, cauliflower and onions and leeks in the back. There is another tray almost entirely filled with tomato starts and peppers go in this weekend. No matter how many times I waste my space trying to grow peppers here, I just keep trying.





These pictures were taken on Monday when I did a good thinning. I checked on them last night I swear they have almost doubled in size!

As far as the outdoor garden goes, it goes slowly. There are radish, spinach and kale going....but there's no point in taking a picture of those just yet. All of you in the rest of the country who are already headed into summer, send some of that warm, dry weather this way, will you?

1 comment: