Hellchick

I've decided to use my blog as a way to keep a gardening journal since this will be my first big garden, and especially since I'm growing all heirlooms. This way I can keep track of what worked well and make notes that might help me out next year. And my first note will be this: next year, start the winter squash in bigger peat pots right away rather than the tiny seed starter pots I use for most other things.

I started all the peppers (two bell pepper varieties and a hot pepper variety called Thai peppers), the tomatoes (three varieties: hillbilly potato leaf, Wisconsin 55, and Beam's yellow pear tomato), the onions (Australian Gold), lettuce (Yugoslavian red butterhead), broccoli, and delicata winter squash. I was worried that they weren't going to sprout because I was faced with a problem in putting all the seedling trays somewhere where (a) it was warm enough and (b) they were safe from the cats. Any place that solved one issue invariably didn't solve the other.

But then Len was there to be My Hero. If you need a solution to some kind of mechanical problem, Len is your man. The ideal place to store all of these, we'd agreed, was the basement, where I had plenty of room. The problem was temperature -- it's a maximum of 65 down there, even in the hottest weather. While this is perfect for the cool-weather vegetables like lettuce, Brussels sprouts, broccoli, and spinach, the rest of the veggies would never sprout in such cool conditions. But how would we make it warm enough down there? We don't have much money so I couldn't afford to go get special heaters for seedlings.

Len had an idea: he put a large sheet of plywood down there on two sawhorses and then drilled a bunch of holes in it. He then attached a plastic skirt around it, then hung the growlight over it and cover the whole thing with plastic. We have a hot air heater that we've had since we lived in Wyoming -- my sister bought it for us to dry our snowy boots and gloves on it. He put it underneath, set the thermostat, and voila -- instant greenhouse. We set the seedlings in (with room to spare for more) and then checked on them the next day. The temperature inside was a humid 80 degrees or so. Perfect! Within just a couple of days sprouts were coming up in the trays.

Everything has sprouted, most noticeably the squash. They grew so big so fast in the greenhouse that today I transplanted them into larger peat pots since it's going to be at least a couple of weeks or more until I can work the ground. I'm taking a bit of a chance transplanting squash since they apparently don't take transplanting well (although last year I transplanted fairly mature plants really well into the garden). I'm hoping they'll survive, and I should get at least enough for the garden considering quite a few seeds sprouted. In fact, if they all stay alive I plan to ask my coworkers if any of them want the left over transplants -- I hate to see good seed go to waste.

The lettuce has also been growing fast, so I decided to transplant that into larger peat pots as well before it goes into the garden. This is the veggie I'm looking forward to trying the most. And I've been doing some reading on growing lettuce in containers -- turns out that it's very good for that, so I plan to grow lettuce in the sun room over the winter, where there are perfect conditions for it. The sunroom stays at a cool 60 degrees or less but gets decent light, and we always keep the door closed in the winter (since it's so cool out there and thus makes the living room more expensive to heat) so the cats won't get to it. If I do the planting right, we can have a constant supply of the stuff all through winter and it'll give me a chance to do some gardening in the cold months.

I'm trying to decide which veggies I want to save seed from. Part of the whole idea of growing heirlooms is to save their seed -- it helps preserve genetic diversity in our food supply, and it keeps some rare vegetables from dying out. I thought the term heirloom was strange until I read that some heirloom vegetables really are handed down in the family. I like this idea, so I plan to save seed. But I probably won't try and save seed from every plant I grow this year -- this is my first year gardening on such a large scale, and I want to concentrate more on getting them to grow well. For some items saving seed will be easy -- pick the best couple of peppers from your crop, cut them up, dry the seeds, then eat the peppers. But some vegetables, like lettuce, broccoli, onions, and many more, require that you sacrifice a few plants in order to save their seed (once you let lettuce bolt -- throw up seed shoots -- it's too bitter to eat). Since I'm growing lots of things in small areas, I don't know that I want to sacrifice some things yet for seed. I'd rather eat them.

Today I started the Brussels sprouts, the cucumbers, the watermelons, and the spinach. We'll see how well they do in the greenhouse this week.