End of January

I really hate the month of January, it lasts too long and many of my tax and insurance bill come due this month. The end is at last in sight. A quick check of the calendar reveals that this is a leap year, so they will sneak an extra day of February in on us. Oh well, 29 days is better than 31.

The marigold seeds I started on the boiler on January 25 were up on January 28 so I took them off the boiler, uncovered the pot, and put them under a shop lite to keep growing. I will try to take a picture of them when they are ready to transplant into six-packs if I can figure out how to get it into this blog. One of the things I find is absolutely essential in this business is record keeping. I use little 3X5 notebooks, and start a new one every year. When I start seeds, I make a note of variety, date started, date germinated, and in the case of flowers, plant height when they mature. This record will be continued when I transplant, because when you start several varieties of plants it is easy to lose track. I will mark each six pack with a marker I make out of tongue depressors. A whole box of them is pretty cheap, and I cut them in two to keep them short. I mark the variety or batch number on the stake to keep track. The rest of the details are in my little notebook to be referenced as necessary. When I moved the little plants under the light, I gave them a little shot of a dilute sulfur-water mixture to prevent "damping off", a fungus type disease which makes small plants develop weakened stems and break off. As with all fungi-type diseases, prevention is the only treatment - if you wait until you see it happening it is too late, it can't be treated.

I am getting ready to order some new gladiolas to start this year. After shopping thru several seed catalogs, the best deal seems to be from Farmer Seed and Nursery (Farmerseed.com) - 40 corms for $2.99. My old glads were getting infested with thrips, a tiny bug which seems to live over on the corms I dig up, and start again when I plant them in the Spring. They can be controlled with sevin, but vigilance is the answer.