The Seedling Experiment - 2011

This year my seedling experiment revolved around light usage. When I first started my seeds there was plenty of room under the lights for all of them. Until I potted up. After that, only half of my seeds would fit under the lights. I thought about adding lights, but I really had nowhere to put them. Instead of trying to overhaul the makeshift system I had set up, I decided to split the babies and put half in a south-facing window with plans to compare the growth of the two sets when time came to harden them off. Well it's officially hardening off time! They're all on the porch with the windows open and will stay there a few days before I start bringing them to the real outdoors. The plan is to start transplanting them into the rural garden over the next 1-2 weeks since it's a zone warmer than the urban garden.

Here's the whole gang!

The leggy ladies from the windowsill

These were under the lights, more leaves and shorter stronger stems than the windowsill seedlings

The remainder of the windowsill seedlings have been moved under the lights to join the peppers and eggplant

Now that I've done the whole starting seeds thing once I feel like I can make the investment in a new lighting rig. I didn't want to invest money in something I wouldn't end up using again, but I'm officially hooked on starting seeds. I love seeing something big growing from something so small. Plus there are so many more varieties when you start from seed and it's way less expensive than buying plants!

Porch Seedlings

What's left of my cool season vegetables (plus the Oregon Spring seedlings) are currently living on my enclosed porch. It's south-facing and gets sun all day. I've been cracking the windows during the day to start exposing them to a little wind and started leaving them open during the night a couple of days ago. So far, all seems to be going well!

I sowed this window box very thickly with spring greens as the seeds were 10 years old, but they seem to still be quite viable!

This is the box post-thinning with lots more space for the largest seedlings to grow.

Potting Up

Most of the seedlings have their first true leaves so I decided that new homes were in order. I wanted to hopefully separate them out early enough that their root systems weren't completely entangled and wrapping around the bottom of the plant cells.

Prior to transplanting:

I think I timed it pretty well. Most of the seedlings had good root systems that were just starting to show at the bottom of the soil mix when I took them out of the cells. Most got put into deep plastic cups with holes drilled in the bottom, but some simply got moved into single cells in the interest of space. Between everything, I've got two flats filled with seedlings that are being rotated between the lights and a south-facing window.

A few days after potting up everything seems to be doing quite well:

These are the early Oregon Spring tomatoes. I hardened them off a bit and then put them on the windowsill in my enclosed porch to test their hardiness. So far they're doing completely fine.

In other news, I went out to check on the rural garden on Friday and did some transplanting, although I unfortunately forgot my camera. I thinned out the cells of broccoli, lettuce, chard and cauliflower, taking the most established plant from the cell and moving it to the garden. I moved 3 cauliflower, 12 lettuce, 4 chard, 4 broccoli deccicio and 4 broccoli waltham into the garden and covered all of the cauliflower and half of the broccoli with plastic bottles. I decided to only cover half the broccoli as an experiment to see which do better. If I lose some of the plants it's no big deal because I still have 6 of each variety growing on my porch.

I planted some spinach seeds last Tuesday and a few were beginning to sprout. Yay! I also planted 4 sq ft of carrots this morning (1 ft each of the Lunar White, Cosmic Purple, Amarillo and Nantes). I sowed them very shallowly, watered and then covered with a layer of hay to hopefully keep the moisture in and encourage germination. I covered the left side of the garden with a tarp and the back half of the right side with a thick layer of hay to help keep the weeds at bay until I plant next month.

Seedling Update

I'm sure everyone's getting sick of seedling pictures, but I'm proud of my babies and I need to show them off! This is really the first time I'm doing any major seed starting. Last year I started a hybrid tomato and broccoli, but that's it. I direct seeded beans and squash successfully, but all of my other plants were freebies that were donated by the local YouthGrow program to all of the community gardens. It's a great organization that gets teens involved with growing their own food. They start plants for the community gardens and plants to go into the large YouthGrow gardens that they help to maintain all summer. While I love free plants, this year my goal was to start all of my plants from seed.

Kellogg's Breakfast shared by EG and Oregon Spring

Black Cherry also from EG

Brandywine and Cherokee Purple from EG

Oxheart Pink and Polish Linguisa

Hungarian Hot Wax Pepper that was a freebie with the Tam Jalapenos I got from eBay

Tam Jalapenos and Organic Black Beauty Eggplant (With some cauliflower mixed in... I accidentally seeded the cauliflower in the wrong 6-pack)

Early Snowball Cauliflower from EG

Broccoli Waltham 29 and Organic Broccoli Deccicio

As you can easily see, EG (from Our Engineered Garden) was extremely generous and gave me lots of seeds to help me out this year. I'm a broke college student and I just can't afford tons and tons of seed unfortunately. However, I'll be saving as much seed as I can this year to start building up my own little seed library. Hopefully I'll have a bunch of fun stuff to trade this winter!

Some of these guys are starting to get their first set of true leaves, which means I'll soon be potting up! The cauliflower and broccoli will be first, as well as trying to rescue the cauliflower from the eggplant. We'll see how the extraction goes...

New Seedling Set Up

I finally got my lights all set up for my seedlings and I think they'll enjoy the extra light.

Girlfriend bought me the shelves from Target and the shelf heights are awesomely adjustable. The lights are 24" and one is cool white and the other is warm white as that's what I had in my apartment at the time.

The babies in their new home under the lights! It's pretty much all tomatoes, peppers and eggplant under here.

My Orange Sun bell pepper plant is once again producing peppers. After these two grow a bit I'll pick them and pinch back any other blossoms so I can *hopefully* transplant it outside. I hadn't even noticed these two until yesterday when I saw fruit.

The leeks are doing solidly and seem to be slowly getting thicker at the base.

The green onions got a little haircut and ended up as an excellent garnish for my salad the other day.

My chives are doing well once again! I've had this plant for about 2 years now and the fact that I didn't kill it was one of the things that made me want to start gardening in the first place.

Seeding and Seedlings

Welcome, and thanks for following my blog DeanO and Cassandra!

Well, I finally got around to seeding my spring veggies. (Most of them anyways...) I planted 12 cells of Little Gem Lettuce, 12 cells of Fordhook Swiss Chard, 6 cells of Organic Broccoli Decccio and 6 cells of Broccoli Waltham 29. I still need to start my cauliflower and spinach and get going on the summer veggies. I have to pick up a few more seed starting trays from my mothers house this weekend and then everything will be set!

My Walla Walla onions seedlings are doing well! I separated them out of the little bunches that popped up here and there. The only frustrating thing is waiting for my Red Burgandy onions to start coming up... Especially since they got sent late as a replacement for my backordered Southport Red Globe onions. We'll see how they do with the shortened season.

Before separation, this is the seedlings.

Now they have room to grow and even got a haircut!

My Orange Sun bell pepper plant from last year is showing new life.

And I know spring is on its way when my chives start coming back... Can't wait for warmer weather!

First Seedlings of the Year

These are the Walla Walla Onions started from seed in their first 3 weeks of growth.

These are the Hybrid Green Onions over the past few weeks.

Lastly, here are the Large American Flag Leeks that were planted the same time as the Walla Walla Onions and Hybrid Green Onions.

In other news, my backordered seeds came, but unfortunately the Southport Red Globe Onions are unavailable this year so they sent Red Burgandy Onion seed instead. I was a bit bummed since I was wicked excited for the Southport Red Globes, but the Red Burgandy will have to do. I planted them last night and will update with pics when they start to pop up.

I'm also going to begin the germination process for my hot peppers tonight. This year I'm growing Hungarian Hot Wax, Tam Jalapeno and Chinese Paper Lantern. My plan is to have 3 of each plant with the intention of planting only 2 of each variety due to my small space. I have my five overwintered bell pepper plants that are currently showing new growth, so no need to start more bells!

Winter Planting Complete!

Despite my great dislike for Miracle Grow products, this was the only organic potting mix I could find that was outrageously expensive. So alas.... I broke down and bought it. I figure organic Miracle Grow is better than nothing.

The empty, but very soon to be filled, seed pods.


I finally got some nice wide popscicle sticks to mark my plants with. I had previously been taping the name of the plant to the side of the pods, but this has proven to be rather ineffective... The biggest problem being the humidity in the greenhouse. Most of time the ink would either run until its no longer legible or the adhesive would cease to work and I was faced with a bunch of tags on the floor and no clue which plants were which.


Success! I planted Organic Broccoli Deccicio (Park), Squash Medley (mix of four squash types, Park), Celery Tango (Park), Organic Black Beauty Eggplant (Park), Sweet Basil (Burpee) and a Hybrid Container Tomato (Park).


I grew broccoli all winter on my porch last year and did tomatoes on south facing window sills, so I'm pretty confident about success with those plants. However, I will be booting the tomatoes onto the porch to make way for pepper plants inside. The tomatoes will be going into my mini greenhouse though, so hopefully that will keep them warm enough. The basil will stay in my kitchen under a small plant lamp. The real experiment this year is the squash and eggplant. I've been going back and forth trying to decide if it's a good idea to throw these in containers in the porch greenhouse. I'm not sure that it's even worth bothering with, but I figured I could at least try and worst comes to worst, I can just chop em down and compost them.