Potting up

After 17 days, almost every seed that was poked into a fibre pellet has exploded into a shoot.  Only the peppers and watermelons are yet to rise.  The cucurbits are the most bold.  Zucchini leaves, cotyledons, I guess, have been pushing against the top of the tray cover since late last week.  Winter squash are catching up and cucumbers are looking robust as well.  Cauliflower, lettuce, and borage might also be hitting the roof, but their more delicate stems are unable to support themselves and most have flopped over onto a neighbouring pellet or two.  Time to move them to more suitable accommodations.

I'm not well prepared for potting up at this point.  Perhaps I didn't think two weeks ago that this would happen so fast.  One should take better progress notes in one year and then actually read them the next year.  Even so, a week ago it was clear that a situation was developing and I thought maybe I could get away with using what could be found in the greenhouse.  After all, there is so much to be found.
There are ample 4-inch (and many other sizes) plastic pots, left over from purchases at commercial greenhouses and maybe purloined from my father-in-law's shed (he was done with them).  They just need to be washed clean of last (or some other) year's dirt and diseases.  I did ten on the weekend; could have used a few more.  We also had about two dozen small peat pots, barely larger than the wet pellets the plants are outgrowing. However, these will buy me a few more days until I get another batch of larger pots ready.  Suppose I will need more potting soil, too.

It wasn't just the height of the stalks that drove me to pot up.  The roots of some of these creatures obviously had greater expectations than life in a fibre pellet.  The zucchini roots were headed for the far end of the tray.  This is a problem because the roots start checking out other pellets and then the herbs, lettuce, and cauliflowers have to share their water with these goliaths.  Actually, it probably does them no harm.  It's easy to keep the contents of the tray sufficiently moist.  However, the zucchinis might suffer when it's time to separate them from their neighbours.  Roots growing through other pellets can't be removed intact.  I had to break quite a few today.

They always seem to look a little worse for wear after being handled, pressed, showered with soil, and waved about more vigorously than they are accustomed to.  The tomato plants all have siblings that were left in pellets.  I'm looking forward to seeing what the difference is between the two environments after a week.  

The exodus has made space in the trays for more pellets.  Some insurance specimens, some seeds I have saved from last year, some different varieties shared by another urban farmer.  Then more potting up.  Good thing this gives me joy, joy, joy, joy down in my heart.

The seedling collection takes up more space after being potted up.  We assembled the mini greenhouse (a set of shelves with an optional plastic enclosure), after shaking snow melt out of the tubes and wiping crusty spider webbing from corners.  A cardboard box, waterproofed with a garbage bag, holds all the upgraded plants, and the two trays sit on another shelf in front of the west-facing living room window.  The south window in the attic might be better, but that would require rearranging furniture.  One thing at a time.

Starting with seeds

Sending away for seeds makes me feel more like a real gardener.  For years I have listened to or casually read of the of the more experienced (and successful) vegetable growers who carefully choose their seeds from catalogues, while I continue to pick up mine at Canadian Tire.  Finally, I'm trying it their way, even if only to save the effort of going to Canadian Tire.

My aunt in Cape Breton told me that a fellow in her Gaelic class had mentioned a seed company he favours.   How can you not trust the judgment of someone with the gumption to learn Gaelic?  So I asked her to find out the name of the company and shortly thereafter put in an order to Hope Seeds in Granville Ferry, NS,  for 25 packages of seeds plus a pound of Jerusalem artichoke tubers.  The website - www.hopeseed.com - is easy to navigate and allows online orders.  Descriptions such as "slow to bolt" and "this one survived a hard frost that turned the other varieties black" are very helpful.  The price is more than I used to pay, two to three times as much in most cases, plus shipping and handling.  But let's face it, seeds are cheap, so paying three times as much still isn't that much, especially if they work better.

Some seeds were started last weekend, in the aforementioned fiber pellets:
Early Snowball cauliflower
Marketmore cucumber
Black Seeded Simpson lettuce
Jericho lettuce
King of the North sweet pepper
Costata Romanesca zucchini
Red Kuri winter squash
Tigerella tomato
Longkeeper tomato
San Marzano tomato
Borage
Black Cumin (Nigella)
Santo coriander
Sage
English thyme
Minnesota Midget musk melon
Blacktail Mountain watermelon
Ring o' Fire pepper
Tribe's Tobique tomato

Lettuce, thyme, cauliflower, zucchini, cucumber and borage are all awake and now I have to think about how to keep them happy until it's safe to put them in the ground.  Lettuce, thyme and cauliflower can suffer the slings and arrows of a southern Alberta April.  Zucchini and cucumber will have to be coddled indoors for a while and then in the greenhouse until the end of May.

It's too soon to give a full endorsement of Hope Seeds; that has to wait until we've tasted the fruits of this year's experiment (it's always a bit of an experiment).  So far, so good.

The peat controversy

I don't know what these are, only what they are not.  They are not peat pellets.  They look like peat pellets, but they swell much faster, smell quite different, and are a bit more difficult to loosen up for seed insertion.  Fiber Grow® pellets are made in Vietnam.  My guess is coconut fiber, but it's only a guess.

The use of peat for horticulture is apparently becoming a crime against nature.  This was news to me when I read  it on the packaging of the Planters' Pride greenhouse kit I bought on the weekend.  The recommended site to verify this information has a big Fiber Grow® logo in the top corner.  However, several other websites support the claim that peat bogs are an endangered habitat due to extensive "mining" of peat.  The Canadian Sphagnum Peat Moss Association is of a different opinion.  It's members work diligently on site restoration after peat has been "harvested".  One side claims that this renewable resource is being used 220 times faster than it can be renewed.  This describes the typical annual take from a given site.  The other side argues that peat accumulates 60 times faster than it is removed from bogs in Canada, which is quite possibly true since only a small fraction of our total peat bog area is subjected to extractors in a year.  They can't even keep up with it!  But what about the disrupted local ecosystems?  Can they really be restored after being drained, dried, and skinned?  Is it better to ship coconut fiber from Vietnam than to use a resource available closer to home?

I'll have to read more about this issue.  For now, I happen to have non-peat pellets to start seeds and half of a bale of peat purchased two or three years ago.  They buy a little time for me to make up my mind.

Spring never arrives early

A few patches of mud.  This is more of the garden than has been visible since mid-November.  One of the joys of enduring an Alberta winter is seeing the less attractive features of the back yard - yellow cauliflower stalks, broken solar lamps, abandoned weed buckets, the scrap wood pile - disappear under a blanket of brilliant white snow.  Even when powerful winds from the southwest suck the front garden bare and dry several times per winter, snow cover persists on the leeward side of the house and it's welcome.  There comes a day, though, when there are potential alternatives beyond snow and drab.  A necessary intermediate step is a view of brown grass, soggy bare soil, and all the rubbish I couldn't decide how to dispose of before winter hit.  Grim.  It's no wonder so many people here place artificial flowers in their outdoor planters.  It's odd, but not a wonder.