So far the seed-starting efforts around here are going pretty well.
In previous years this stage of the garden has been fraught with insecurity, but like most things garden-related, this year I’m feeling a little more confident; a little more relaxed. While I would like to do things on a slightly larger and more organized scale, I am nonetheless content to do this suburban style – using an unnecessary and expensive appliance to accomplish a fairly low-tech job.
My husband gave me an Aerogarden about four or so years ago for Christmas, and though we used its pods and nutrient tablets that first winter to grow herbs, I stopped using it when the nutrient tablets were gone. For me, anything that requires that I keep purchasing something eventually becomes an annoyance, and the Aerogarden was relegated to the attic. It wasn’t until a few years ago when I first considered starting seeds, rather late in the game – April or May I think – that I thought of the Aerogarden again. Or, it would be more accurate to say, that I thought of the lights.
It turns out that the Aerogarden lights make a perfectly adequate seed-starting station, and I’ve used it for that the past few years. The light is on an adjustable arm so that you can move it higher as the plants grow. There is a timer that can be set to provide 16 hours of light and 8 hours of darkness. All I have to do is drop by every few days to water and ogle the progress.
My current fascination is with these leek seedlings, unfolding themselves up out of the ground – partly because they’re so different from all the other babies and partly because it was so surprisingly quick and easy for them to come up.
The curcurbits (here cucumbers and canteloupe; the watermelon has only just curling its milky white neck up out of the soil) are an old stand-by for me now. I think they are particularly reassuring to me because they are not only not complicated but they are big compared to the tomato, pepper and leek seeds, and so everything seems so much more sturdy.
Here is my latest batch of baby tomatoes just up: Nova (4) and Taxi (2).
And a representative jalepeno pepper.
And here is one of a few nicely developing eggplant seedlings.
My first batch of seedlings – beefsteak tomato and jalepeno – have already started thier brief but increasingly long forays into the great outdoors to start “hardening off”, not because they’re going into the ground any time soon, but because as you can see, space under the grow light is limited, and I still have another batch of seeds to start – Carmen peppers and Bulgarian Carrot peppers.
Not pictured is a nice windowsill of sweet potato slips greening up in mason jars full of water. The parent potatoes are still pumping out slips in the darkness under my cabinet, so I guess I’ll keep plucking them off and greening and rooting until I no longer have anywhere in the garden to put them. But that’s a post for another time, because they won’t start going into the ground for a few weeks yet. For the time being, my garden buddy and I are still just growing gardens in our minds – and ocassionally on the living room rug.