Getting started on 2008!

One of my 2008 New Year Resolutions is to keep my garden journal more regularly this year.

Starting off with -- seed starts! I bought a four-foot shop light and two full-spectrum fluorescents at Home Depot, total $30. This is much cheaper than the indoor stations in seed-starting catalogs -- but it does not come with shelving for the plants or a stand for the light. Or extra space in the apartment.

Our apartments in the Union are studios, the kind called SROs, which officially stands for "Single Resident Occupancy." I say it stands for "Standing Room Only." In order to squeeze in a seed-starting station, I stood the light up against a bookshelf and piled milk crates and planting containers between the bookshelf and the microwave. And on the microwave. And in front of the bookshelf. With a holding area in the bathroom for pots that are not sprouting yet.

This first photo shows the shop-light:


In the second photo, you see the motley collection of pots and shelving I have cobbled together:


The wicker baskets are permanent planters; two will stay in the kitchen, along with one of the other trays and a couple of yogurt containers. They contain chives, cilantro, cress, scallions, spinach, leeks, garlic, and two kinds of parsley.


The last of the wicker baskets has been sown with catmint. When it grows up to a nice thick mound, I'll take it into the office for the Cat Executive Officer.


The yellow pot contains one of the three perennial geraniums I planted in the perennial bed in November. I dug one up to bring indoors for a closer look at how & whether it comes to life. It has a small green sprout now; too small to see in the photo yet, but exciting to me. :)


The little plastic box isn't really pearl onions, as labeled; it's bell peppers. The container makes a nice little greenhouse, with plenty of air circulation and no mold problems so far.

There are also a couple of 72-cell Jiffy seed-starting trays. I took the tops off because I was getting mold on some of the cells. Mold's been growing on practically everything. I think I used too much water in the starting soil. Picking off as much mold as I can and then sprinkling with bioactives, Soil Alive! and Dr. Earth's Compost Starter, have helped control it -- maybe just by drying the surface. I've even sprinkled pots that haven't shown mold yet, to be proactive. For the last few batches of seeds, I've mixed the bio-powders in with the soil right at the start, and I haven't seen mold on them yet.

In the bathroom are handmade newspaper pots of far more tomatoes than I will ever plant. :) (You can probably tell which ones were my first efforts!) If they all grow up healthy, I'll give the excess away.


By the time these pots show green, I hope to have bought, begged or borrowed a small bookcase, and be able to arrange the plants better. I also might get a second $30 light setup and put it in the bathroom.

Everything is sprouting up pretty fast except the spinach. (I added some leek seeds and three garlic cloves in the wild hope the would help combat the mold.) It finally dawned on me that it's too warm in here for spinach to germinate; it would actually do better outside. I'm going to take the basket out back tomorrow; after everything gets going, I might bring it back in.