Throughout this year, I am going to publish a weekly blog post with updates from our garden. It will include progress pictures and anything we learned over the past week and will serve as a general update since a lot can change in a week’s time when gardening. I wanted to wait until we started our first seeds, and guess what? We did!

Peppers Have Been Started

I don’t believe that each year’s garden has started until your hands first touch soil in the spring. Buying seeds and purchasing supplies is wonderful, but it’s all still part of the planning process. Getting your hands dirty for the first time moves everything from a concept to a reality. And that’s the step we took Saturday evening.

Earlier in the day on Saturday, we made a trip to the nearest Lowes to pick up a downspout extension and grabbed a couple of bags of seed starting mix, another seed starting tray and flat of cells, and gardening gloves. Brief side story: Neither of us could remember if we needed extra seed starting cells. I would have bet a dollar that we had enough to get us started for the year and only bought the new cells as extra. Boy, am I glad we got them. When we came home, I checked our gardening tote, and the starting tray that I thought had cells in it was empty. It’s funny how taking a two-year absence from gardening and moving can make you forget stuff.

That evening, we unpacked our heat mats and glow light, set up the table we’re using, and ran an extension cord from the nearest outlet. First up on our seed-starting schedule is peppers. (Technically, our mustard greens should already be in the ground, but because they will be directly sown, we have to wait until the ground is tilled). We found our 3 varieties of peppers (California Wonder bells, Scotch Bonnets, and Hungarian Waxes, which I discussed in this post), grabbed our seed-starting mix, and filled a spray bottle with water.

We decided to grow 3 cells each of Scott Bonnets and Hungarian Wax peppers and 6 cells of the California Wonders. With 2 seeds in each cell, we’re confident we’ll get strong seedlings to transplant later in the spring. Determining how many cells of each variety to start is always a fun process. You want enough to guarantee good germination but not so many that you feel overwhelmed if all of them succeed. Hot peppers are particularly difficult for us because we don’t eat a lot of them and will mostly use the Scotch Bonnets for jerk marinade. We went with 3 cells with the goal of transplanting 2 of them, and if all 3 succeed, we’ll give the third plant away. For the California Wonder bell peppers, we’ll probably transplant as many as we can.

What’s Next?

Next week, we will be starting our eggplant seeds. I’ve been using the seed starting spreadsheet that I created to organize everything and started another page to track the dates and expected germination times for each seed. That will allow us to know if a seed is taking longer than expected to germinate.

We’re also going to be buying our rototiller sometime over the next week. We’re big fans of no-till gardening, but our yard is currently all grass, so we have to break ground. We were originally going to buy an electric tiller since they are cheaper than gas models and we won’t need to use it much after the first year. However, after realizing how expensive 100-foot heavy-gauge extension cords are, we have pivoted to a gas model. We’re still narrowing down the exact one, but I’ll write a blog post about it and how we reached that decision when we get it. I’ll also write a follow-up post reviewing the tiller once we use it. Spring weather is finally starting to arrive after a harsh winter, and we couldn’t be more excited.

Happy gardening!