Potting Mix – Day 22

Three weeks have passed since I made potting mix, laid it into seed trays and planted seeds.

The large seeds – zucchini, watermelon and cucumber – are the most advanced, with the first real leaves appearing in this past week. Only now could I possibly contemplate planting these seedlings out, though I will wait at least another week.

Now the more familiar form of these leaves can be seen.

Smaller seeds – such as basil, beetroot and tomatoes – have only their first leaf pairs and are still tiny seedlings.

What is already clear is that thinning these seedlings is inevitable; there simply isn’t space (or energy) for planting out every seedling that survives germination and development.

Armenian cucumber

The first batch of cucumbers (Armenian) are planted. I put them in my trough, so that they are slightly protected from the icy winds that still crop up (like today).

The snails and slugs haven't attacked them yet - so let's hope it stays that way. Can't wait for our first summer vegetables! :) How are yours going?

First planting session...

...finally!

I planted the first tomatoes today. I managed to squeeze in 10 plants per bed. They may be a bit close together, but let's hope for the best. (I always plant them a bit close together, it seems to have become a spring ritual, I'm afraid.)

There are stardroppers at either end of the beds, plus one in the middle. Later in the season, when the plants grow bigger, I'll use some twine to weave it around them - called 'Florida Weave' - and that tucks them in nicely.

I also started on the other summer vegetables. Zucchini (Golden Summer Crookneck), cucumbers (Armenian), okra (Burgundy) and tomatillos.

There are still quite a few plants left to be planted, but one day at a time! How are you going with your spring planting? :)

‘Red-a marl’ tomatoes

Potting Mix – Day 15

Two weeks after planting out seed stocks for the summer crop into home-made potting mix, germination of most seeds is well along.

The few seeds that haven’t yet appeared can probably be assigned to the ‘infertile’ category and these trays re-seeded with something else. This is no bad thing; all seeds have a limited life, and some of my stock has been gathered from the tool sheds of the old men of the district who are now down the cemetery. While the beans from my old Italian neighbour have failed to appear, his capsicums have burst forth energetically, despite that fact that these seeds must be over five years old.

I’d also been saving on some ‘moon-and-stars’ watermelon seeds for many years, but not planting them out during the decade-long drought that we endured down under here in southern Australia up until two years ago. I’m guessing that it takes about 100 kg of water to grow a kilogram of watermelon flesh, so I’ve been anxiously awaiting a year when I could afford the water to regenerate my ageing seed stock of this old heritage variety.This year’s the year, and I’ve planted out the last of my seed. Germination rate has been only about 25%, so I’m just in time. That matters not – I just need to bring a few melons through to completely reinvigorate my collection of these colourful melons. Even the seedlings display the yellow patches that will later dapple the melon’s skin into the large dot for the moon and smaller yellow dots for the stars.

But back to those capsicums – they look suspiciously like tomato seedlings! Could it be? My old Italian neighbour grew his own particular variety of tomato that he’d brought out from Italy. Every year around Christmas, I’d drink a beer with him, and ask him – yet again - what the name of his tomato variety was. “Red-a marl, Andrew, red-a marl”, he would reply. This didn’t help – no such tomato is listed anywhere in the seed catalogues. The colour ‘red’ didn’t ease my pain much either – most tomatoes being red. Once I asked him to write it down for me, but this proved to be embarrassing – he either didn’t know or was illiterate in the English language. So ‘marl’ is just the spelling of the sound as I heard it.

So now I wait. If he mixed up his labels and these aren’t capsicums at all, but ‘red-a marl’ tomatoes, I might be the luckiest bloke around here. I’ll be able to grow them on!

Potting Mix – Day 8

Eight days ago, I planted out twelve trays of seed in home-made potting mix. These have been watered each morning with rain water via a watering-can; I prefer to have the seeds start with a cool bath and warm up during the sunny Spring weather, rather than start their evening with a cool bath and have them just get colder overnight.

Eight days later, the cucumbers have had almost perfect germination and have developed their ‘cotyledons’ – the ‘seed leaf’ that was such a large part of the structure stored within the seed. That makes cucumbers members of the family of flowering plants called ‘dicotyledons’; if they’d had only a single embryonic leaf, they would be classified differently, as ‘monocotyledons’.

Not far behind the cucumbers are the beetroots, while basil, silverbeet and lettuce have only just begun to emerge. Various other seeds – beans, melons, rocket – are still dormant or infertile. We’ll follow their journey from potting mix to soil to table over the coming weeks…

Over in another part of the garden, the other end of this story has begun to play out; silverbeet entering its second Spring is going to seed, and will dry out over summer to provide me with thousands of seeds for the next few years, at no cost beyond space and water.