I hate to say it, but I forgot to start this week’s update until Sunday night. Typically, I will start these on Saturday evening, but as I sit here watching the Boston Red Sox lead the St. Louis Cardinals 18-3 on Sunday Night Baseball, I am much later than usual. So, I apologize if this update ends up being shorter than normal, but I was unwilling to push the update back a day or two or not publish one at all this week. To those who read my gardening content: I can’t thank you enough. Writing here has been a relaxing break from work and helps remind me of why I like writing. I don’t want to postpone it any longer: Here’s this week’s update.
Much Germination
In last week’s update, I discussed the difficulties we were experiencing with getting seeds to successfully germinate. This was largely concentrated to our peppers, where we only had two of our 12 pepper cells germinate. I’m proud to report that after we altered the watering process and re-sowed the seeds, we’ve had much better germination. All six of our bell pepper cells, two of the Scotch Bonnet cells, and one of the Hungarian wax cells have sprouted. The bell pepper seeds have been successful enough that earlier today, we thinned the cells so that only one plant per cell will grow.
We also had successful germination with all three dahlia cells, all six eggplant cells, and all 21 bunching onion cells. We feel so blessed that we’ve been able to turn the poor germination rate around and have successfully started many other seeds.
We also started some new seeds earlier today:
- 3 cantaloupe cells
- 3 ground cherry cells
- 3 tomatillo cells
- 6 broccoli cells
- And all of our tomato seeds (6 principe borghese, 3 Queen Aliquippa, 3 indigo pear, 3 blue beauty, 3 yellow pear, 3 black krim, and 3 mushroom basket)
We’ve been very careful to track what we’re planting in each cell. We use a piece of paper with a hand-drawn chart on it for the one tray, and our other tray came with a cardboard chart. I’m also tracking these on a spreadsheet in case the physical copies get destroy or the ink smudges.
Cleaning Out Our Garden Tote
This weekend, we spent some time in our garage (also my woodworking shop) cleaning it out. I recently finished a guitar stand project, and when I’m wrapping up a project, I tend to make a huge mess and not worry about cleaning up as I go. That leads to a lot of sawdust, tools, and scraps being spewed everywhere. I needed to clean everything up from that project and reorganize everything so that the spring and summer things are at the front, with the winter items moved to the back. In doing so, I uncovered our tote of gardening supplies, which was pretty cool.
I didn’t forget that we have this tote, but I did forget some of the stuff in it. There were a lot of supplies that we used when we had our container garden in 2022, including soil amendments, organic fertilizers, and hand tools. Some things weren’t worth using anymore, such as the open bags of seed-starting mix and peat moss, but the amendments were still good. I actually repurposed the peat moss and starting mix by pouring it on our garden beds. We’re also able to use the larger seed pots by transferring our pepper plants into them when the time is right. It was fun remembering everything we had bought for that garden three years ago. It helped me to realize how far we’ve come in three short years and how thankful I am to be able to garden again, especially with some of the same items.
So Much Rain…
In last week’s update, I said that a goal for the week was to get gypsum into garden beds 3 and 4 and do the final tilling. I was able to do that on Monday before a large weather system entered the area and brought a lot of rain. I estimate that we received somewhere between 2 and 2.5 inches total from Monday afternoon through Saturday. It made our garden beds nice and muddy, so we can see that we’re still having some drainage problems, but it’s a work in progress. Also, it’s been a very wet spring that has arrived on the back of a snowy winter, so the ground was already pretty wet. As the ground dries out this week, the goal is to get back into the garden and till the final two beds and perhaps even get some seeds in the ground. We also need to get the parts we need for the rain barrel, which will help with some of the moisture problems.
Up Next
The weather forecast is much better this week, so hopefully, the garden beds and yard can finally dry out. If that happens, we’ll likely try to start beds 5 and 6. If that happens, it’ll be great, but if not, that’s okay too. We’re in a great place at this time and need to be patient. In the meantime, we’re going to be screening in our back porch in a few weeks and need to get it prepped by taking measurements, cleaning everything, and making sure we have our supplies list figured out so that we can get everything we need. When we pick up the supplies for that project, we’re also going to get some materials to build some planter boxes and a trellis or two.
Happy Gardening!
One Rabbit Riot 
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