This year Katie and I are getting serious about our garden. Last year it was a flop, excepting the herbs, garlic, cucumber (thanks Trimborns) and okra (thanks Kingsleys).
I realized that our current seed-starting method, directly sowing outside in the garden, is not the best way to germinate seeds. It is the easiest, which I like, but many never germinate because conditions are not favorable enough (light, water, heat), and even those that do often succumb to “damp off”, where fungi attack the little plant and kill it.
I did more research and am now going to with the “baggy + coffee filter method” to germinate seeds, then transplant them into small seed trays with a “grow-light” I am making myself from some Home Depot lighting materials, then hardening them off by setting them outside for a while each day before finally transplanting them into the garden.
Additionally, we are going all in with the homesteading idea and I just bought some awesome-sounding heirloom seeds from Baker Creek farms, which I had read about in my Countryside journal (the magazine for modern homesteading).
They have things that most of us have never heard of like yellow and purple tomatoes that have been grown in a family’s garden in Italy for 500 years–these seeds aren’t the commercial varieties that are hybridized for common size and appearance and production and taste but rather have lots of unique characteristics that make them fun for home growers.
Here are the seeds we ordered:
Under Herbs:
Lavender
Blue Hyssop
Parsley-Giant of Italy
Common Thyme
Under Peppers:
Corno di Toro Rosso
Quadrato d’Asti Rosso
Summer Squash:
Striata d’Italia
Tatume
Tomato:
Red:
Pantano romanesco
Principe Borghese
Yellow:
Plum Lemon yellow tomato
Yellow tomato
Melons
European:
Charentais
My Melon
Cucumber:
Thai Green
Winter Squash:
Butternut Rogosa Violina Gioia
Tell me that doesn’t sound cool?
Please keep us posted with growth status and dinner times.