Gardening Is Like A Slow Dance

When you decide to become a gardener, you have questions, and lots of them. What do I plant? What do I plant them in? How do I plant them? Do I start my own seeds or do I just purchase my plants? These are all good questions, which might leave you wondering where to begin.

We were once there years ago too. We got encouraged to start our own garden from gazing at our neighbors garden. He has a green thumb. We asked him tons of questions. (thanks farmer Steve!) I remember that first year we wanted to plant something, just to try it out and we purchased a couple cherry tomato plants from a local nursery. We planted them in large flower pots and when we saw how well they grew in just a pot, we were hooked and wanted our own garden! That’s when we decided to build our own raised garden beds in the backyard! We have never looked back and every year we get so darn excited about gardening every year.

Now, a few years of gardening under our belt, we feel that we can start and maintain a garden with confidence.

Gardening to me, is like a slow dance. You gather your seeds, soil, and plant trays, then stare at the soil for days until you see a little something “green” poking its way out of the soil! Success! You have officially germinated a seed and you are on your way!

GARDENING: STEP ONE
CREATE CUTE PLANT LABELS

When you become a gardener, you definitely learn from your mistakes. For example, last year I made some cardstock plant labels and taped them to a toothpick. I placed these labels in each seed section to identify what was planted in there. What I learned from this, is that the condensation that happens under the lid, those cardstock labels got destroyed and fell apart. That’s where the “learn” from gardening mistakes come in.

This year, I made some cute plant labels on cardstock, but I laminated them first! Now I’m on the right track! I got those cute labels all cut out and taped them to the toothpicks again and now know that through watering and the condensation, those labels will hold up until we take the plants out to the garden.I am happy.

GARDENING: STEP TWO
CHOOSING THE RIGHT STARTING SOIL

Choosing the right seed starting soil is important. I remember a few years ago we got some cheap crap soil at Marcs (will never do that again) and the soil was like a bag of fluff. Yes, I said fluff, because the soil was horrible and we lost all the seeds that we had planted. Nothing grew in this cheap soil.

We changed our starting soil to either a Burpee seed starting soil, or a nice organic soil and have had much success with both of these. It’s better to spend a few dollars more on your soil than waste seeds.

Once you have the correct seed starting soil, you are ready to start your seeds. This part is fun, but a little tricky because most of the seeds that you will probably be starting are very tiny in size. I had to use a pair of tweezers just to grab the seeds out of the bag. For example, the Flat Dutch Cabbage seeds are the size of a period at the end of a sentence.

GARDENING: STEP THREE
PLANTING YOUR SEEDS

For a first time gardener, I would suggest you read the planting instructions on all of your seed packs before you attempt to plant your seeds. The depth of your seeds is important.

We start our seeds in the 72 cell seed starting trays. Each kit comes with a bottom (to catch & hold water), the 72 cell tray (8 sections for 9 plants each), and a clear lid (for the grow light to shine through). I normally use the sections to plant the same seeds, and always plant a few seeds extra, just in case one seed does not germinate!

You take your good seed starting soil, NOT potting soil, as there is a difference. Potting soil is for house plants, not for starting seeds. Fill up each seed cell with your soil, and very lightly pack it in, but not too much, then take a toothpick and poke a small hole in the center of each seed cell, this is where you are going to plant that seed! (now remember, I told you first time gardeners to read the seed packet first, because some seeds just lay on top of the soil, where others have to be planted at a certain depth)

Once you drop your seeds into the soil, lightly cover them up with a dusting of soil. Lightly water the entire seed cell tray, and put the clear lid on.

GARDENING: STEP FOUR
GROW LIGHTS & KEEPING YOUR PLANTS WARM

Other than choosing the right seed starting soil, keeping your seeds under a grow light is important. We hung our grow lights off the beams in the ceiling in our basement. The lights hang from a chain and we use little metal “S” hooks on the chain, as this is used when we change the height of the grow lights.

Since our seeds were just started, we keep the grow lights a few inches above the closed lid on our seed cells, as this keeps the seeds warm and with the moisture in the soil from watering, it produces condensation. Always keep those lids closed on your seed cells until you need to water your plants.

As the seeds germinate & grow, they are still kept under the grow lights, but the lights on the chains gets moved up a few notches. You don’t want to burn your plant leaves with too much heat.

Well, that is it for now! You have successfully planted all of your seeds! Now you wait, and wait, until you see that little piece of green popping through your soil and then you rejoice! Normal germination for seeds can be just a few days, but others may take a little while longer, so be patient, you did nothing wrong!

Gardening is definitely like a slow dance, taking it nice and slow. Stay tuned for more gardening tips as we progress along our way!

Reaching For The Sky: Progression Of Our Garden

Watching your plants grow is exhilarating and an experience.  Our plants have been in the garden for almost a month now, some are struggling, while others are thriving.  Our weather has been up and down, had some rain, and daily up keep in the garden from weeds & bugs keeps us really busy. 

We thought that we would share with you some “Progression Photographs” of our plants to see them when they first peeked out of the seed cell tray, to how they are currently doing in the garden.  It is amazing, thrilling, and quite frankly a little nerve-racking trying to do all you can for these little plants to keep them going, while you hear of other people’s  gardens are thriving and you wonder “that are they doing differently than us”, but you trudge on and do your best. 

We started our thought of a garden earlier in the year and said “let’s do it, let’s plant a garden“!  We got tired of paying $2.99/lb for red peppers and thought that it is time to start growing our own!   So, we did the research on how to build a raised garden bed, figured out exactly how much rich garden soil we needed, and started our seeds indoors under a grow light.  Then the waiting began.  Every day we stared at the soil in the seed cells, hoping to see a glimpse of green ….nothing, then about three days later, we saw our first sprout, a cucumber!  Holy cow, we thought, man those things germinated fast! 

Now that the plants are in the garden and have got themselves acclimated to being outdoors and the weather, we feel that we should start seeing some leaps and bounds and some major growth.   We take photographs of the plants every day so we can see how they are coming along (kinda like what we did last year to our pumpkin plants) not to mention their progression in growth.  It is amazing to look back on the photographs to see how small they actually were back then, and can hardly imagine picking fresh vegetables from them one day.  The whole process is amazing to us, but we are so glad that we have started this journey in home gardening, and we’re ready to do it again next year. 

For next year, there will be a few things that we won’t do & some things that we’ll change, for instance:

• First, we found out after the fact, but we will not leave our grow light on 24/7.  We found out that plants need to learn to sleep and need the night/day difference when growing up.
• We will not start our cucumbers indoors.  We started them indoors waaaay to early and by the time we got them in the garden, they were getting stringy and out of control.  So, if we do plant them indoors next year, we will start them closer to the actual date of taking them outdoors.  They grew well indoors, but we just started them too early.
• For our tomato plants, we will start them indoors next year (just like we did this year, but we lost all of our little sprouts & they died).  What we did wrong this year is, we planted a few seeds in each little seed cell and never clipped them down to only one plant per seed cell.  We think this killed the plants.  We could not bring ourselves to clip any of them, and thought we could separate them when we transplanted them into peat pots – – wrong!  Their roots were inter-twined and could not be separated.  So for next year, we will plant only one tomato seed per pot and we should not have the growth problem, not to mention that we will have to probably start these indoors around February/March.
• While shopping for bags of potting soil, we happened to pick up a bag here and there and found that only the Burpee Potting Soil worked best for planting seeds indoors.  We had picked up a bag of soil from Marcs that we used for my flower seeds, and almost all of the seeds that we planted – died.  This soil was so horrible and if you breathed on it too hard, you could blow it away.  So, buying the better and more expensive potting soil is your best bet, don’t buy the cheap stuff!

Home gardening is truly an experience, one that we have enjoyed and the knowledge that we have learned along the way is priceless. 

PROGRESSION PHOTO’S OF OUR COPENHAGEN CABBAGE:

 

 

PROGRESSION PHOTO’S OF OUR LETTUCE: