March 25, 2008

Wow, more sprouts!  I have at least a few of each variety of pea sprouting now, and nearly all my lettuce has poked up also. 

So, let's see, what hasn't sprouted... Onions, carrots, broccoli and cauliflower seeds.  The seedlings of those veggies are doing well though.  I have removed the plank from the carrots to try it a bit without the cover.  We'll see what happens. 

Today I got a comment from GardenGirl.  Among other things, she mentioned that I need to put more pictures in my blog.  Hehe, I haven't put them in because for the last few weeks, all I could report was "nothing's happened." Since I already had pics of nothing happening, I didn't want to clutter the blog server with more of the same.  So today when I got home I grabbed my wife's phone and snapped some pictures.  I'll do my best to show you what I'm so happy about, though the sprouts are tiny right now. Enjoy!

 

First let's start with the radishes.  You can see they're almost all germinating.  Not bad for my first try at direct sowing...

 

Next is a great pic of a healthy broccoli seedling holding it's own.  Remember this was the only viable seedling out of 16 indoor starts...



As you can easily see above, I just stuck the peat pots in the ground that had my spinach seeldings in them.  But what is more difficult to see in the foreground are the multiple spinach sprouts that I direct sowed for my first succession planting.

 

This was fun to see.  I've got two SF of lettuce sprouting.  One of the three varieties hasn't sprouted yet, but these took a while so I'll be patient. 

We've had two straight days of 50 degree days and frosty nights.  Thankfully all the plants I planted were cool-weather crops and haven't appeared to be hurt by the mild frosts.  I expect a few more with even a slight chance of snow in the forecast, but these little guys are tough.  And since my favorite coldframe is out of commission, they're going uncovered.

Oh, and in case you're interested, I edited yesterday's post to add a pic I took of the coon print and the broken coldframe.  I didn't have time yesterday to take pics as I was only out there for a few minutes total and most of it was after "sunset." 

Also, I added a sprouts section to my Seed to Table page, continuing that all-in-one-place saga for a quick resource guide.  For some research tonight, I tried to find out how to build a SWC or Earthbox from scratch.  I may be tired, but the instructions I found online led to more questions than answers.  After hearing about Judy's, I got excited that I could use the wall area at the north end of the two pathways to grow tomatoes, either more varieties or maybe even use them to give me more space in my beds by moving them entirely to SWCs.  If only Judy could help me build them. They look so confusing. hehe