Gardening 2018

Gardening: a season of updates 
For the past ten or so years my wife and I have kept small gardens in our back yard, but each year the amount of plants, as well as raised bed gardens and fruit trees, has increased. This year I'm hoping to post updates on the garden throughout the season. It's the end of the first week of March, and we're already two and a half months into growing.

We started our summer garden for 2018 in late November 2017 when we flipped through some seed catalogs and made our first orders for seeds. To be honest, we really started earlier than that when we saved and preserved seeds from last year's huge crop of several varieties of tomatoes, peppers (bell, Colorado, jalapeño), and sunflowers. The seeds I placed into envelopes after prepping them, then stored them in a cool, dark, and dry spot.   From the seed catalog we ordered several varieties of lettuce, a huge pack of Genovese basil, plus new varieties of tomatoes, bell peppers, and jalapeños.

Our back yard is quite small. We've built a number of raised bed gardens and we compost, but the house we live in now is the smallest piece of land we've ever owned (and the house is by far the biggest, leaving us with a couple strips of dirt). Despite a dream of buying a hobby farm, what we're working with now is incredibly small. In other words, if we can do this in a tiny backyard hidden from the homeowner's association and the neighbors, you can, too.

We started Genovese Basil seeds in late December

We decided we want to have fairly mature lettuce and spinach plants when we transfer to the garden in mid-March, which will ideally give us lots of salad into June (we hope). To hit that target, we started from seeds a couple days after Christmas. We used the Jiffy dried pellets and the plastic domes. We had the kits from previous years, but had to buy the pellets from Home Depot. A box of 36 was only about $3.75.

We've used Jiffy Pellets the last few years for December and January seed starts

The initial batch of lettuce seeds took quickly, but the spinach didn't germinate very well and we re-started several times in early January. Initially we had the seed starts on a sunny shelf in our kitchen. We started small, but things expanded quickly. Within a couple weeks, we had some good starts going.

January 21.  Lettuce, spinach, and cabbage seed starts, three weeks after planting

We were at dinner one night in mid-January when I mentioned to both kids (20 and 15) that we planned to turn our son's room into a nursery when he went back to college in New York. I, of course, was thinking of all the plants. They assumed I was talking about a new baby. Language is funny like that. I'm not sure whether they'll think it strange to be eating what comes out of that nursery later in the summer. Hopefully that will all be but a distant memory at that point.

Calling it a nursery isn't entirely accurate. His room is on the second floor and has south-facing windows which get sun all day. We laid down a thick tarp to protect the carpet from water spills and dirt, and on top of that placed a simple folding table from Costco. On that table I placed a rim of 1x1 scrap boards and a plastic paint drop cloth, also to catch spilled water and dirt. The boards help to form a lip that will keep any significant spills on the table. 

January 21: Lettuce Seed starts transferred to four inch pots three weeks after starting from seeds

One of the biggest mistakes we made last year was we lost track of what plants were what.  We had plans to build 32 square feet of additional raised bed garden space, so we planted a lot of seeds. But as we rotated the seed starts, then planted in larger pots, we didn't label well. This year, to hopefully solve that, we labelled seed starts much better. Then when we transferred to larger pots, we put 2" thick blue painter's tape on the pots and wrote details in sharpie. So far so good.

Blue painters tape and a sharpie are helping us keep track of what plants are in what pots

Last year we bought 100 four inch plastic pots as a middle-stop between the initial Jiffy pellet seed starts and moving into the garden a couple months later. We started this year with about 75 pots (we gave quite a few plants away last year in May). To the remaining pots we added a 50/50 mix of raised bed soil from Home Depot and top soil. One thing I didn't plan on was that the bags of dirt were frozen solid in late January, and it took several days for them to warm up enough to blend and put into the pots.

February 11: More seed packet starts, the lettuces are looking like lettuce.

February 11: Lettuce and tomato starts

Once the second and third rounds of Jiffy Pellet seed starts were going strong, we added another tarp and folding table set-up in the bedroom. It was crowded, but everything was still getting sunlight. Now we had all of our four inch pots filled, and still needed more room to transfer plants. Home Depot didn't have the pots I wanted, and Amazon (where I'd purchased them initially) was sold out. Instead, I bought compostable pots to transfer some of our seed starts. 
We also started a few more seeds directly into the dirt in these compostable pots. As of early March, some are growing well, others have yet to germinate. 

March 4: Tomato starts reach for the sun. Many are already six to nine inches tall.

March 4: A second table of plants, with some seeds direct-sown into the larger pots.

Seed starts thus far: (type, date started)
Genovese Basil (12/28)
Reisentraube tomatoes (1/2)
Purple tomatillo (1/2)
Brunswick cabbage (1/6)
Paris Island lettuce (1/6)
Buttercream lettuce (1/6)
Spinach (1/6) (limited germination)
Vernisage tomatoes (1/29)
Heirloom cherry tomatoes (1/29)
Heirloom San Marzano tomatoes (1/29)
Craig's Grand (Red) Jalepenos (1/29)(limited and long germination, 1 - 2 inch tall by 3/6)
California Wonder Bell Peppers (1/29)(limited and long germination, 1 - 2 inch tall by 3/6)
Heirloom Roma tomatoes (1/30)
Heirloom bell peppers (1/30)
Heirloom jalapeños (1/30)
Spinach (more) direct sown (2/18), 3" tall by 3/6
Basil (more) direct sown (2/18), 
Dark Galaxy Tomato (2/18), one germinated, four have not yet taken as of 3/6
Sugar Rush peach peppers (2/18), one germinated, eight have not taken as of 3/6
California Wonder (more directly sown)(2/18) no germination as of 3/6
Jalepenos from seed company (2/18) no germination as of 3/6