Plants: Day 10

The first one!!!!  This morning, we woke up and discovered that finally, one of our little seeds has grown up into a full-blown seedling.  Isn't that exciting!  We are on our way now.....

Plants: Day 7

Tomatoes!!

Well, not much action for the whole week in terms of growing and such.  We watered twice a day (after Thamara's suggestion that we were not watering enough), and kept them under the top light on the timer all day.

Fiber Pellets!

Let's see how the store bought product does...

So, Day 7 has rolled around and it is time to plant once again.  We are now 8 weeks out from our anticipated outdoor planting date, and it's time for the tomatoes to be planted!!  Now, I'm not much of a whole-tomato fan, but I love the tomato products: sauce, ketchup, you name it!  Which means that even I am excited about the tomato planting.  This week, since we are rookies and trying to experiment a little, we are using a different product than our toilet rolls.  We bought seed-starting pellets.  These are non-peat pellets that you use to get your seeds growing (as an aside: apparently, the method of harvesting peat is terribly destructive on the environment, so you should get away from using that if you have the choice.  Coconut coir is the same type of product, and is considering a renewable resource.).  We put water into the tray, let the pellets expand, and then put seeds into the little holes for the seeds.  Oh, and we labeled the rows so that we know which plants are which, because we have some fun plans for cherry tomatoes!

The little pellet tray also had a cover for it, which we learned helps to hold in the moisture and is good for little seeds to get started, so we then put a plastic cover over our other tray of eggplants and peppers.  Now we wait and see what we get.....

Put the seeds in!

Mini-greenhouse!

Plants: Day 1

The first three plantings.

Alright, so now that the seed growing shelves are all ready to go, it was time to plant seeds!  We are looking to do our outdoor planting on the May 24th weekend; the usual date around here to ensure that we have no more frost nights.  So, on March 20th, we were 9 weeks out from our planting date; at 9 weeks, we were looking to start our peppers and our eggplants.  We have one type of eggplant, and three types of peppers that we are looking to grow.




In the spirit of sustainability, how are we going to start our seeds and grow our plants?  Well, we found a great little tip for seed starting: used toilet paper rolls!  Yup, that's right, plant the seeds in the toilet paper rolls, and then when it's time to transplant them, just pop the whole thing right into their new pot.  The roll degrades into the soil, and the plant doesn't get the usual "transplant shock."  Win-win!

Nikko's a little confused.....

Putting the dirt in the toilet rolls.

The seeds getting their new homes!

Finished product.

Ah...light.....

Yay, planties!!

Green Thumb?

Wow, so it has been a very long time since an update.  What has been going on?  Well, a lot of reading, planning,  prepping, and looking after our little seedlings!

Old shelving + sale lights = cheap seed starter!

After a couple of abandoned ideas, we finally got the design down for our little seed-growing setup.  I found some shop lights on sale at Canadian Tire (1/2 price!!), and then we did our research to make sure that we got the right bulbs for growing plants.  Let me tell you though, when you go looking and talking to people about trying to set up some grow lights, you get a lot of funny looks!  I think some people didn't believe me when I told them it was for a container vegetable garden; "sure, for 'just' vegetables."  Using some old, cheap Ikea shelving (lucky I didn't throw them out!), we assembled a shelving unit to hold the seeds and lights.

Getting the timer and lights all ready to go.

The next step was getting the lights going on a timer and finding out when and how long to have the lights on.  Looking for a timer was surprisingly tough.  Finding a timer that had two grounded outlets proved to be a bit of a challenge!  Crazy!    So, got the timer, plugged the lights in, and bingo, automatic light!  We've got them running about 14 hours a day right now; from 6:00am until 8:00pm.  And with the fact that they are fluorescent lights, you'd be surprised how little energy they use up!  It's amazing that they run all day like that, and at the end of the day, you can touch them, and they're barely hot!  Good stuff!

The finished product.