Grow, little seedlings! Grow!

[indeliblesasha]

It's that time of year again (for those of us patiently waiting for the snow to thaw, anyway) to attempt to grow baby plants from tiny seeds and hope and pray they turn into full grown fruiting plants!

This is the part of gardening I fail at the hardest. Also, knowing what to plant, and how to water it, and where to put them all, and when to plant them...

I'm really bad at gardening. You'd think not, since my earliest memories is of pulling carrots up in our backyard with my daddy when I was very small. My mother puts a stick in the ground and 6 months later has long stem red roses. I should have the gene. But I put flowering rose bushes in the ground and 6 minutes later I have a stick. So. I need all the help I can get.

A very dear friend of mine posted a link on Facebook this week, it has changed my life and I wanted to share it with you all.

Smart Gardener dot com

This wonderful, amazing, super helpful garden planning tool (that suggests plants based on your location and specific growing season!!) came along at the same moment as the other bit of information I was desperately in need of: Jumpstart Your Food Garden: Affordable Resources and Tips to Ensure Summer's Bounty by a blogger local to ME. It was great during Market season because I could go get those exact ingredients! From the same farmer!

And now all my years of pulling my hair out and feeling stupid and knowing I was missing swaths of information that no one seemed able to tell me...everything just went plink plink plink into place this week. All the missing bits have been found.

Oh THAT'S why my seedlings NEVER GROW. Ooooh, I should plant those LATER.

I'm very excited.

I have spent the entire day on garden planning and research, and I am not entirely sold on the Locavore recommended lights because of the wildly varied reviews on Amazon, so I think I might venture into one of our MANY MANY hydroponics stores and see what I can find without breaking the pocketbook before I order. But the under-tray heating mat is a total winner in the reviews department, so I will absolutely be getting one of those.

So! Yay! Anyone else planning? Getting ready to start the seedlings? What are YOU planting to eat this year?

♥ ♥

Comments

[teapot_rabbit]

I am cleaning out my garden, which I should have done months ago. Bad gardener.

Any day now I should also be starting tomatoes, cucumbers, and green beans, which are my garden staples. The green onions can probably go straight into the ground. Probably a bunch of sweet peppers too, if I can find enough sun. I may try eggplants when it gets a bit warmer, and if I have space left.

[hazel]

It's late summer here, and I just moved a month ago, but we're starting up our herb garden and a bunch of leafy greens (spinach, silverbeet, kale, pak choi). It's also about time to start plotting where the next lot of stuff will go (the section is a bit of a blank slate).

[feroxargentea]

How lovely to see someone so enthusiastic :-) Planning is the best bit, when you can see all the results in your head and you're sure everything's going to work out perfectly. And generally it does work out, if rather differently than planned.

I have a new propagator I love - because it has a thermostat. No more turning the power on and off and on and off to try to keep the temperature constant. Chillies and tagetes are up and pricked out, cosmos and lupins and aubergines are currently "cooking", broad beans, garlic and shallots are sprouting in unheated trays, and soon it will be time to decide which dozen or so tomato cultivars there's room for. Decisions, decisions.

[sporky_rat]

I'm hoping for tomatoes (little cherry sized ones that are omnomnom right off the vine), little green beans and maybe some butter lettuce.

On the not for eating side of the big metal bucket that is my garden, I'm going for Flax!

[willidan]

I try every year to grow tomatoes. I'm in an apartment with only a tiny balcony, but tomatoes are a must. But every year I kill the seedlings and end up buying seedlings as soon as they appear in the stores. But I'm taking a look at your links and maybe *crosses fingers* I will have some luck this year.

[indeliblesasha]

I found the heating mats in my local hardware store (it's a pretty epic store though, I don't know about smaller ones) and the trays and pots and everything. It seems very promising, and was really not very expensive at all.

Something I learned from one of my tomato seed packs today that I was not doing: when the seedling has it's couple of leaves on top of the spindly stem, transplant it to a larger peat pot, and bury it deep enough that only the leave are visible. It was a very much a "Well...DUH. Why didn't I!? GAH." So I'm feeling really positive about this year.

[indeliblesasha]

Cool thing I learned about green onions yesterday:

http://homemadeserenity.blogspot.com/2011/03/putting-food-by-beef-onions-and-vanilla.html

Basically, put the roots in a glass of water and let them keep coming back so you can chop them off again.

[indeliblesasha]

That sounds awesome. What herbs are you growing?

[indeliblesasha]

I have come to realize today that we might be digging up a whole new bed just for the peppers and tomatoes. I have culled them down to about 20 total, and can't bear to part with any of them.

I'm already putting the crowder peas along one fence, the strawberries off the porch, most of the cucumbers and cherry's in pots...but. My two actual beds are going to leafy things and carrots.

So rough!

I have decided not to do garlic this year, I've never done it before and I have enough others that I think I'm happy getting garlic from the farmer's market. Is it a tough one to grow? Any special needs?

[indeliblesasha]

I'm doing butter lettuce, too! It comes with some curly red leaf mixed in so you can make a pretty container of them. I've very excited.

Flax...isn't that edible? Or am I think of something different?

[hazel]

Currently: sage, rosemary, thyme, parsley, mint, tarragon, and oregano. Next up will be coriander and curly-leaf parsley and possibly basil; and maybe some weirder things like borage and comfrey. The rosemary has already made itself useful. :)

[carrie_ironhorse]

Oh, this has got me excited and it's only February! We usually don't start seedlings indoors though, everything we can't direct seed outdoors usually comes in as seedlings from the store. Might change that this year if I can convince my mother (whose garden it technically is) to get excited about some heirloom tomato breeds, though. I may have gotten her convinced to put in another vegetable bed, anyway. There goes the planning bug, bit me hard again even though we've just barely seen anything resembling winter...

[feroxargentea]

Tomatoes are addictive - too many varieties to choose from! You're lucky if you can grow them outdoors. They have to be coddled in a greenhouse here.

Garlic is very easy as long as you have decent soil and a sunny spot, but you need to start it early - late autumn or late winter - because it needs a spell of cold. Just break up a bulb into its cloves and bury them a couple of centimetres down, 15cm or so apart (or start them in module-trays), and that's it. Dig it up when the topgrowth withers in late summer/early autumn, let it dry out, and it will keep for months.

[sporky_rat]

Flax seed is edible, but we're after the fiber.

[eien_herrison]

Oh, I'm in the middle of planning and needing to start planting things out. I had a raised bed installed last autumn, and unfortunately my cat's been using it as a giant litter tray, so it needs to be cleaned out and roped off.

I've already got two raspberry plants and a dozen strawberry plants which I'm hoping we'll get some fruit off (in containers because there wasn't enough room). I had started off plans to only do a few select items, but now I've got plans to use the whole of my raised bed to grow things: tomatoes, basil, parsley, beetroot, garlic, onions, lettuce, carrots, four varities of potato, lambs lettuce, rocket, spinach, radishes, dwarf beans, and attempting some bell peppers. The potatoes, onions and garlic need to be planted very soon, and I alternate between thinking "this is going to be awesome" and worried that everything is going to fail -- I can grow things, but some plants need more care than I can remember, especially watering (which isn't looking too good with my region looking like it's going to be declared a drought zone soon -- we do have a water butt though, thankfully).

Unfortunately, I've barely planted anything and have already started planning for next year. Most of my seeds were free and/or cheap and are the standard varities, but I really want to extend in to things I can't buy at the supermarket (like chioggia beetroot, multicoloured carrots and radishes; the bell peppers I've got for this year are multicoloured).

Smart gardener looks useful, but does it cover places outside of the US?

[indeliblesasha]

I have been trying to stick with things I am not likely to get from our CSA and things I want extra of for canning and preserving. My list is still kind of insane and I am looking at probably two more beds. *facepalm*

I'm doing a ton of tomatoes and peppers because we eat them all the time. My kids will eat bell peppers by the bushel. Lots of herbs, trying some lettuces and some interesting squash and melons. Strawberries, crowder peas, cucumbers.

And I can't figure out if Smartgardener will work outside of the US or not. I poked around a bit but I can't see anything specific. If you try it will you come back and let me know so I can update the post yea or nay? :)

[eien_herrison]

Completely understandable -- like I said, I'm using free/cheap stuff I've got now, and expanding in to the more unusual stuff in the future. Preserving for us may be a little difficult, although I have gotten a friend to teach me how to make jams, preserved and chutneys (and she says it'll help her to remember to do such things this year).

Unfortunately for me, I'm limited to just the one plot as we recently had the whole garden redone and I can't really go "okay...now can we get rid of all the pretty, non-functional stuff and make the whole thing available for growing stuff?" Bell peppers I'm not sure will grow (might be too cold to be out in the open), but I'm willing to give them a try: I'm growing peppers similar to these ones and also some chocolate pepper ones (ripen to a deep brown and are said to be very sweet tasting).

From the looks of it (and a poke around the FAQs) it does seem to be US-only, at least for the time being: lots of refernces to zip codes, states, and also a shopping list which I suspect would be linked to a US supplier.

Good luck and bountiful harvests for your garden this year :)