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.