Monday Seedling Update

Last night we got our predicted freeze. The ground was quite frozen under my feet. Since we had gotten a rain right before the cold weather the ground was saturated and made beautiful crystals. The photo may be deceptive as the crystals are just under 3" tall. My plants seemed to have survived the experience. There is a reason I have a garden covered in plastic and remay in the spring. If you want to push your seasons, you have to protect the poor plants.

Certain plants like my onions and leeks are fine with this kind of weather. I'm thinking the spinach is too. I have two sections of spinach. One is unprotected (just to see how it will do) and the main part is covered in remay. The unprotected spinach has frozen ground under its feet, but seems to be happy enough with it. It is growing slower than my protected patch. That patch has spinach that is already starting to put out its first true leaves. I have images of spinach salad dancing in my head, but I've got to be careful about expectations since spinach hasn't like me in the past.

The section I was most worried about, my brassicas, have weathered the freeze just fine. They had the soda bottles laid out next to the plants. The water in the bottles are not even frozen and the ground is still much warmer than any of the other beds. Success. Though it is possible to get another freeze, it is unusual for us in the latter half of April. Light frosts are more prevalent.

Today it is sunny and more moderate. The wind is really kicking up. I've brought out the above plants to start hardening off. I'm not sure exactly when I need to plant these out, but real sun can't hurt. I'll plant the chard soon since it has been hardening off for a few days. The rest need to be planted after our last frost or under protection.

I still have lots of seedlings under the lights. My favorite right now are my pepper plants. They looks so pretty. I really have to pot them up sometimes this week. After that the lights will start getting crowded.

The tomatoes have had almost a 100% germination except for Gregory's Altai, a large beefsteak of Siberian origin producing at 67 days. It didn't germinate at all. So I reseeded. It still hasn't come up. Sigh. I knew a large early beefsteak was too good to be true. If I don't see germination by tomorrow I might just try to paper towel sprout all the seed. These are seeds from wintersown.org. They were free. All of their others came up fine. But they only send 10 seeds. If they don't sprout at all maybe I'll replace it with one of the extra seedlings. Maybe Miracle of the Market.

Besides tomatoes in the above container (I have a whole other container filled with just tomatoes, but I needed more room), I have basil popping up. Four plants of Italian basil and one of lemon basil. The empty blocks are my tomatillos. I was getting concerned that they hadn't germinated, but sometimes they can take a couple of weeks. This morning I see a tiny little stem of one plant just poking though the soil. So maybe in the next couple of days the rest will come out. I hope, or I'll have to reseed that too.

I haven't shown my lettuces or my parsley, but they are up. My lettuce had germination issues with the first round. Neither the Australian Yellow Leaf or the Dear Tongue came up, so I reseeded rather heavily. All of the second batch of seed germinated. Of course. Put four seeds in one block and everything comes up. It makes it hard to thin, but I'll take it.