It’s spring. The birds are chirping outside. The pollen is flying everywhere making EVERYTHING yellow! The grass is growing back. When you go to some stores, they have brand new plants out there ready for you to take home to toss into your garden. Yep, it’s that time of the year to start planting if you are starting from seed. For me, I felt like everything was passing me by as I had not started anything (even though you can start plants throughout the growing season). I had to do something and I needed to do something now!
We had just finished using an 18-count of eggs and had the leftover plastic container ready for the recycling bin, when I thought, “You know what, I am going to start some seeds!” I went to our little photo album where we keep our seeds (the wife’s idea) and pulled out some Tomato, Cucumber, and Garden Bean seeds. I ran out to the garage and dug into my tied up plastic bag of gardening tricks and found 17 grow peat pellets lying around. Now, if you have never seen the peat pellets before, they look like little discs about 1/2″ tall, and surrounded by some biodegradable material. You let the pellets soak in water for a few minutes and they expand, complete with a hole and ready for you to drop your seed into it. That biodegradable material that surrounds it, well that keeps all the dirt from fall out once it expands. It’s a pretty neat alternative to start your seedlings and keeps them self contained until you are ready to transplant them.
So, I lined all my pellets in the plastic egg carton. Then I poured water over all of them and let it run down into each little egg tray. I let it overfill because as the pellets start to expand further down into the tray, they’d soak up the water at the same time. By the time they had finished expanding, the water was gone. It took about 15 minutes or so for all of them to expand and when they were done, I was ready to drop my seeds in them!
I went down each expanded pellet and placed a seed in each one. I know typically you would want to sow 2-3 seeds together in case you had some duds, but hey I was just spontaneously doing this in the first place. I didn’t feel like following gardening rules (more on that later). When I was done, I had 6-tomato pellets, 6-cucumber pellets, & 5-garden bean pellets. Aaah, success, but then I remembered something. I have a heat mat with temperature control! Again, I ran to the garage and into my little gardening area to pull out my heat mat and the device to control it. I set the temperature to about 79-80, plopped my temperature probe into the carton and whala! My work was done. Now, I just had to wait for everything to do what it was designed to do…grow. The way I figured, if I went ahead and started something, I would be forced to build those raised bed planters I have been intending to build.
I had pretty much created a small greenhouse inside of the egg carton. Now, I do have a larger seed starter where I could have planted up to 20+ seeds that comes with a humidity dome, but the egg carton and pellets seemed more convenient at the time. Not to mention, I only had 17 peat pellets any way. Well, after a few days of growing, I finally got the beans and the cucumbers sprouting. SWEET! I am in business now! A day or so later, the seedlings started to bend over from growing too tall in the egg carton, so I started thinking I need to get these things out of there. About the same time here in Central NC, we finally got a sunny day. I looked at my seedlings and they looked at me. I looked back and my seedlings and they looked at me. I said to myself, I am going to put these seeds outside to get some sun and I did. Left them there and then left home.
Now, I am going to pause right here for a moment to explain something. The back of our current home faces due West. When the sun comes over the home, we get FULL SUN. I mean, sun pretty much for the rest of the day because the back of the home also has a clear view of the South West. Remember these seedlings are not even 2 weeks old and anybody who knows anything about gardening probably already see my rookie move. I left new seedlings out in the sun WAY to long! When you start seedlings indoors, you are supposed to introduce them to the sun and outside climate a little bit at the time, while slowly extending the outdoor sun exposure. This is called “hardening off” when you work to transition the seedlings outdoors. So, you can probably guess what happened.
Yep, they all perished. They were still green and I thought maybe I could save them. You know, close the lid and kick the heat back up again, but it was too late. They were gone and then I just shook my head because I knew what I had done….ROOKIE MOVE!
Oh well, it happens to the best of us. I guess it’s like in Wisconsin when it first snows. Every year at the first snow fall, everybody seems to have forgotten how to drive in the snow. Then magically everyone remembers. Maybe I needed to kill a few seedlings first to remember how to start growing from seed this spring. You have got to love the ups and downs are gardening, but this too shall pass.
So, what are you growing this year?