Well, the old seed starter bug jumped up and bit me again. I don’t know why I can’t resist it, but I can’t. Anyway, I started another batch of Marigolds on the boiler on Feb 6 (today), and will move them when they get up. I am down to my last 3 or 4 packets so I will have to slow down a little on my experiment. I consider the possibility that I will have a cellar full of flowers and the ground will still be covered with snow.
In my last post, I mentioned moving my plants under a light, and a nice note from “Wiseacre” reminded me that shedding a little light on the light situation (heh, heh) might be in order. I use (as does Wiseacre) ordinary fluorescent shop lites over my plants once the seeds germinate. I tied strings on the chains provided with the lights and suspend them from nails driven into the floor joists in my cellar. The strings allow for infinite height adjustment, and this is critical to the process. I try to keep the lights about 4 or 5 inches above the plants and this seems to produce the short, stocky plants I want. If you get the lights too high, your plants will get “leggy”, all stem, no leaves, and be very weak when you want to transplant them. You do not need to buy any fancy “grow lights” or anything else the garden suppliers try to sell you. For about $15 you can get a 4 foot shop light, complete with bulbs, and from there you only need a place to plug it in. I keep my started plants down cellar where it is cool, and later on in the spring when I start running out of room in the cellar, I will move the bedding plants into a table in the garage where I can close the door if it looks like a frost is coming. They will do nicely there until planting time.
My main tomato is “Big Beef”, which is getting a little hard to find, but is available. This is a nice large tomato, doesn’t crack at the top and I have had no disease problems with it. It is also the best tasting main season tomato I have grown. When I was going through my seed packets I discovered that I had 8 packets of tomato seeds of various varieties. The answer to this mystery is my wife, who cannot walk past the seed rack in Wal-Mart without picking something up. If I planted all the tomato seeds she brings home, I would not have to worry about anything else in my garden.
I will try to show a picture of our “Awning” provided by mother nature when the ice formed, and then melted (then froze again) on the edge of our roof. Nothing to do with gardening, but kind of neat (it doesn’t take much to amuse me).
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