Thursday, March 20, 2014

Gardening - March

Now is the time to plant those vegetable and flower seeds. I started mine last Saturday. Some of them have started coming up already.
I make my own seed pots out of news paper. Its simple to do. If you are interested you can Google  making paper pots, and I'm sure that you can find some instructions.
I started tomato (5 different varieties), cabbage, broccoli, peppers (5 different varieties) zinnia, geranium, petunia, celosia, and cosmos.
I started many more plants than I need, but will give the extras away to church members, who are also gardeners.  I think that its as easy to start a dozen plants as it is to start 3 or 4.
I start my seeds in the basement under lights. They seem to grow pretty fast. By the end of April, they will be ready to put outside to begin the hardening off process.
I may place some of the tomatoes out earlier using something called Wall-O-Water. These things keep the temperature around the plants up by absorbing heat during the day and giving it off at night. They are good to around 15 degrees.

Some of the seeds that have already popped up from the ground.



 
My set up in the basement.

With this, I can start 8 trays of seeds containing 32 pots each. 
The trays that don't have seeds popping up, yet, still have plastic wrap over them to help hold in the moisture. I water the pots every day to keep the moisture levels high. After the seeds are up for a couple of days, I will start fertilizing.

Outside, I have begun to to clean up the yard. We had a lot of tree limbs knocked down in the storm last January. It will take several days or longer. :)