Saturday, March 8, 2008

the juicy stuff...

Erik and I had a date night last night (no, this isn't the juicy part. My mother does read this...)

The subject line is referring to the fact that I've been let back into the greenhouse!!! The other official experiments that booted me out in the first place won't be happening for a while. So, I'm going to get my seeds to germinate out at the greenhouse and then bring them back to my mudroom to get bigger.



Before we went into the greenhouse though. We checked on our plots at the community gardens. Erik signed up for one last year, and then he got an extra that was abandoned and had become overgrown. As I was in and out of town last summer, I didn't sign up for one, but you can bet I'm signing up for one this year. It's going to be great for pumpkins and squash and potatoes and maybe a few tomatoes. Those things either take over the garden at home, or the fruit/vegetables don't need to be harvested until late in the season. So, they can stay out there, safe and sound, with room to roam.

Here's some pics of Emma and Myosotis hanging out in the overgrown plot (when Erik got ahold of it there was a beautiful coneflower and some sunflowers in it. He threw his corn starts in that one, and left the flowers. We should have some good volunteers this year).





After checking out the plots, it was back to the greenhouse. I don't know if anyone has tried starting petunias from seed, but I don't have much faith in mine. If they don't work, I'm definitely high-talin' it to the farmers' market to get some starts. I took tweezers and placed tiny petunia seeds on top of the soil and lightly pressed them in with my finger. I covered the trays with cling wrap to keep the soil moist. I've also got some time release fertilizer for later - all the comments I've read say that the petunias, specifically the wave and cascade varieties, need extra help.

I also seeded some geraniums, some dahlias, and the picture below shows me looking quizzically at the lobelia package. Those suckers are small!! I really had no idea what to do with them; the seeds were smaller than either variety of petunia seeds, and there was no way I was going to tweeze them into their trays. The clumsy cook strikes again! I just shook the package over some trays of dirt... I'll keep you posted on whether or not that amounts to anything.

The settings on the greenhouse right now keep the high around 75-80 degrees, the low at 55 degrees, and there is extra light between 630am-10am as well as 430pm-930pm.




So, that's it. I've finally gotten something in dirt... and finally shared my juicy news.


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I LOVE the first sentence of this post...too funny. Here's a shout out to Mama Patterson!

Daisy said...

I'm not sure if she knows how to find the comments, but I might have to direct her to this one... she'll love it.