Gardening and Food

After getting fed up trying to find an appropriate garden journal in the App store, I just decided to revive this old blog. It's currently intended for me, so I can keep track of when I planted what and how that worked out, and if others can benefit from it, then all the better.

I started with a boatload of seeds, mostly from Baker Creek, which specalizes in heirlooms, but also picking up a couple of packets from Kitazawa Seed Co., who specalze in Asian seeds and are located in Oakland. I'll upload or attach a spreadsheet of the plants at some point.

The first thing I did was plant seeds in a dedicated seed-starting system adapted from my Aerogarden Spacesaver. You can get a special seed container with room for 36 seeds, and there's a water reservoir, some liquid fertilizer (not organic--their excuse is it's not in soil--not sure I buy that), and grow lights you can adjust in height.

I planted these seeds on February 17, and the picture shows their progress on 3/6. It took me almost a month to plant the second batch, which I did the same day I actually felt compelled to transplant some of the bigger plants from the Aerogarden. The second seed starter is a big tray with a heat mat undernedath and a simple hardware store shoplight above. It's supposed to be on a timer, but the stupid timer has one of those old two-pronged outlets, so I'm doing it manually until can pick up an adapter. Sheesh.

Not all the seeds in the Aerogarden have germinated, and some--namely cabbage, some of the squashes, and the lettuce, got so huge I think they are shadowing the other strugglers.

I guess I did the transplanting and finished filling the bigger seed tray on Wednesday or so, so March 19. This tray includes my serious quantities of tomatoes, eggplant, and peppers, and according to the UC Davis calendar, I should have started them earlier. I'm wary, though, since, although it's been a warm spring so far, the nights still get pretty cold, and those nightshade type plants really don't like having their little roots cold.

At this point, I guess I'll give the Aerogarden plants up to another week or two, then transplant the ones that made it and start fresh with some succession plants.

As for direct planting, I should have already planted peas (I have two kinds of snap peas but no regular ones and no snow peas, which I really dislike). I'm behind on my garden organization, though, so I really don't have a place to put them. We'll see how that goes.