What can I say? We just got a puppy, I’m working on a major deadline for work, and I’ve been outside helping the landscapers place rocks and shrubs, all of which needs to happen before any of my seedlings have a hope of seeing real sunlight. So I forgot to water, and fried some penstemons, my Roma tomatoes, some Missouri Evening Primrose, and a couple of Prairie Zinnias, which really bums me out because those have such a low germination rate to begin with that I now have only four. Oh well, live and learn and come up with a more fool-proof (or should I say busy-proof) watering system for next year.

The good news is that everything that survived the mini-drought is now doing really, really well. I moved some tomatoes, peppers, Rudbeckia hirta, hollyhocks, and English lavender up to 3 1/4 inch pots yesterday. And did something I have never before brought myself to do: thinned seedlings. Perhaps it’s because I don’t have room for 24 Zapotec tomatoes, or because my stomach can’t managed a dozen habanero plants, or maybe it’s just because I’m becoming ruthless and selecting the plants with the strongest stems in hopes that they’ll be able to resist the Lyons winds. Either way, I had a fairly good pile of thinned seedlings to go on the compost pile after my work downstairs and that freed up room in the tetra-packs to start the other seeds that have been cold stratifying in the fridge since January.

One small lesson learned (besides setting some sort of reminder to water) is that you can’t give plants like tomatoes the number of hours of light they need (I’ve got them on 16 hours a day right now) and, under those same conditions, grow greens. Yes, it’s true. Despite the fact that my arugula is only an inch tall, it’s sending up the characteristic 4-petaled mustard flower. It would be sort of adorable–garden in extreme miniature–if I wasn’t really hoping to eat those greens. I might have to buy a second timer for the greens next winter, but I’m still trying to calculate return-on-investment before I, um, make more investments

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 23rd, 2008 at 5:15 pm and is filed under Native Plants, Seed Starting, The Growing Challenge. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.