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Growing from seed

By: Decomposed in GARD | Recommend this post (0)
Sat, 10 Apr 21 10:28 AM | 461 view(s)
Boardmark this board | Gardening 		Msg. 00002 of 00028
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New Hampshire weather isn't conducive to gardening before May - well, maybe onions and potatoes but not much else, so my garden to date consists of what I can grow indoors: potted plants from seed under a grow light. This year's batch includes marigolds, chives, tomatoes and peppers, with multiple varieties of all but the marigolds. Larger plants will have to wait until the ground is ready. I'm not going to grow squash or green beans out of sixpack pots. They'd outgrow the pots in about a week!

Most of my plants are heirlooms, and several are heirlooms I harvested myself last year - second generation to me. Having a renewable garden without any store-bought seed is one of my goals. I'm not there yet. I'm finding that much of my stored seed is no good... peppers and eggplant, for instance... so I'm buying from the store even if that means I'm growing things that, in theory, won't let me harvest for future crops. So far, by the way, I haven't found a plant that won't produce viable seeds. Everything seems to work, but I expect I'll eventually find some things that don't.

I started putting down seed in early March and have been planting on and off ever since. Plants are therefore in various states: some ready for the field, others not yet germinated, and every stage in between. The total number of pots is in the ballpark of 200, with more than half being tomatoes. As you can see in photo #2, I've already transplanted two tomatoes into larger pots. I wanted to see if they'd then outperform their more confined peers. Surprisingly, they haven't. Not yet, anyway.

Photos follow. #4 is a closeup on the white chives. I planted both purple chives (store bought) and white chives (from seeds I harvested last year). The purple chives germinated quickly making me think something was wrong with the white chives, so I dumped a TON of white chive seeds in each pot. Then they started growing ... coming in thick, like grass. Too bad the pots will only support one or two each. I'll have a lot of thinning to do in the next few days. It'll feel like I'm killing my children but I need to man up and do it.




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Gold is $1,581/oz today. When it hits $2,000, it will be up 26.5%. Let's see how long that takes. - De 3/11/2013 - ANSWER: 7 Years, 5 Months

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