Seeds and Seed Starters Arrived!

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Yippee! My package of heirloom seeds came from Baker Creek seeds and also my order from Henry Fields came with all my little peat pots and two of the little seed tray starters! I’m so excited! Of course, I’m going to wait a few weeks because I am seeing already with my lettuce and peas that I started two weeks ago, they are already getting a little weird and leggy. They are just not getting enough good sunlight and I’m not ready to invest in grow lights and all that jazz. I just don’t have the space really.

Around here, we’ve had the gloomiest stretch of days I’ve seen in a while. It all started with the big storm and to be honest, only Saturday past was a good sunny day. The rest have been dark and overcast and downright unpleasant. It’s got me feeling less than perky, that’s for sure. Naps seem to be the favorite sport around here. Crawling into bed with a good book to read for hours. It’s wrecking havoc on my to-do cards, but at least I had knocked them down to a tidy number right after the holidays.

Still, a couple good days in a row of nice sunshine would really do wonders for my spirits and my little indoor garden!

My plan still stands, I’m going to resist starting my slightly pricey fancy seeds until March 18th. Tim is building me my coldframes perhaps next week or so, and I plan to start my plants in them if the weather is slightly pleasant. I have too many issues indoors… primarily lack of good space and these little indoor weasels….

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I love these fuzzy woozels but they LOVE to dig in plants!!!! We have to watch my indoor garden like prison guards! They have a way of figuring out how to get to them no matter where we park them. Last year I tried to grow pumpkin seeds and some lavender inside and they must have roughed those seedlings up 3 times before I gave up. And then, just a day ago, I found Luna grazing on my little lettuce sprouts! A loosing battle indoors if you ask me.

Well once I get my cold frames installed, that is going to help matters greatly! I spent a great deal of time handcrafting these beautiful plans for Tim…

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HAHA! Okay, well, maybe not hours. Poor Tim! At least he knows that whatever he makes, I’ll love! I’m not picky at all. As long as it will help hold in some warmth and sunshine, and extend my gardens a few months either way, I’m going to love them!

Looking over the seed packs is just so exciting. I ordered a pack of little glassine envelopes so that I can share a few of the fancy heirlooms with a couple gardening friends. I think that will be cool for us all to try these different and unusual varieties of garden favorites. Since I ordered 9 different types of tomato alone, I think I’ll have plenty of seed to share! Each pack has about 25-50 seeds, so that works for me. I’m hoping to have at least 3 or 4 of each variety scattered through the moby farm. That way if something gets to them, I will have backups. And I’d like to keep the varieties together so that I won’t make my own weird varieties. I’d like to try and save some seeds for next year. I’ve been reading about that and it seems interesting.

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I’m trying to figure out how best to do this all. I have been saving my toilet paper tubes and want to try that, and also I ordered 100 nice sized peat pots as well as about 100 little teeny pots. Some seeds I want to just start out in the teeny and transplant the best ones. Others I know would work best in their own decent sized pots from the beginning. I think I might use my toilet tubes for corn. I know corn is not the best thing to start inside, but I think they might do well in their own little tubes. I have 4 different varieties that I want to grow… one is a strawberry popcorn, another is golden bantam, and one is a baby corn and another is a sweet corn. Can’t remember the name. I want to start about 5 or 6 of each variety in my tubes, and then also sow directly and do a little experiment. I am curious as to if the head start will help or hinder my little pals.

I’m excited to be trying this all on my own this year. I’ve always been a garden store starts kind of gal. Even when I had my house, I would usually plant mostly from starters that I bought at the local big box place. So of course, all were hybrids and they were the same thing that everyone else was growing. Nice, safe and normal varieties. Nothing too fancy. Well, I want to step outside that ring of comfort and give this a try. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. I’m excited about the prospects. It’s going to be fun!

I do have these slightly wacky ideas in my head of turning part of my shed into a sort of greenhouse with some grow lights and such maybe next year. But primarily that means I need to really get it cleaned out and sorted because right now it’s packed to the hilt with junk. One of my early spring jobs is going to be to totally empty the thing and super organize it. And pitch a lot of the odds and ends that are just cluttering it up. SInce Maggie is not that keen on her little fort that she built on the side of the shed, I believe we are going to make it a bike shed. That will really help out a lot. We have three full size bikes in the main shed and it is hard to get in and out of there. If we convert the leanto to a nice little bike shed, that will give us a lot more room to work with in the shed. But that’s something we’ll consider in the fall…. making a green house out of part of it.

As much as I am super excited to get back into gardening and all, I believe that the time off for winter is not a bad thing. I know myself… about the last couple weeks of the gardening season, I was getting done with it. And I was looking forward to the break. I let some of the weeding go, and a few veggies lingered in the frost and died with half finished fruits. I want to remember that and see how I do with my late season cold frames. It’s easy to be all excited right now, after a couple months off, I’m raring to go! I think that God gives us these breaks in life to be able to contemplate and grow excited again for the journey to begin again. A little break from labor and a chance to recharge and dream about new possibilities is good. So that shed might just stay a shed for a good long time.

Of course, it would make a GREAT chicken coop…. If I could ONLY convince the park to let me have a few girls… oh, how happy I would be!

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About Mobymom

the banjo player for Deepwater Bluegrass, and the editor of BuckeyeBluegrass.com as well as the main graphic designer of the Westvon Publishing empire. She is a renaissance woman of many talents and has two lovely daughters and a rehab mobile home homestead to raise.

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