Seed Starting

It's time to plant some seeds! Part of the garden planning that we have been working on (and finished this weekend, by the way — more on that later) involves noting when to start seeds and/or set out plants of each type of vegetable we are growing. A great resource for this is Mel Bartholomew's Square Foot Gardening, which has a handy chart of when to start everything in relation to your last frost date. After we had everything plotted out on the graph paper plans, we added planting to dates to our family iCal (I am a huge fan of this, since one of us can update something and the other can see it on his or her iPhone almost instantly). This will allow us to check planting dates easily from year to year since we'll have a record of it, and I also set up the alerts to remind us the Friday before of what we need so that we can run and get any seeds or supplies before Saturday morning rolls around. Hooray for technology!

Anyway, this weekend is 12 weeks before our frost-free date, which we have called May 12 for convenience (it's technically the 15th, but the 12th is a Saturday). That means it is time to start broccoli and cabbage seeds indoors. While we were poking around Lowe's looking for more fertilizer for the fruit trees (note to self: be sure to sock it away in the fall next year, because there is none to be had for love or money in February), we came across these Burpee Self-Watering Seed Starters:

We picked up two, because we didn't have any seed trays, and we thought the "self-watering" mat would be a good idea since we're busy and just might forget about them this weekend. Each tray has 72 spots for plants, and we used up almost one for 32 broccoli starts and 32 cabbage starts. Here's what it looks like when it's assembled:

The seed trays sit on a stand inside the water tray, and draped over the stand is a fabric mat that wicks water from the tray up and under the seeds. It gets pretty constant moisture from the bottom up, which is a good way not to drown your seeds but to keep them uniformly moist. The "dirt" in the kit is actually these little coir disks that are meant to expand to fill the cup when they are wet. Here's a better look:

As you can see, the quality control on these isn't exactly top notch. They aren't of a uniform size, so they don't fill the cups evenly; in fact, some are only half-full. They also don't exactly expand to fill the cup "instantly" as described — many of them took a little coaxing with extra water and my finger to push them into shape. I wouldn't go out of my way to buy refills of these, but the tray system itself seems to be working well so far, and in the future we can just use regular seed starting soil mix in those trays.

Here's the tray all planted out. You can see that condensation is already forming in the plastic lid, which is a good sign. We have these on the window seat (minus the cushions) of our four-season porch, which gets sun from the east, south, and west — definitely a good, bright spot. In the tray we have 16 Green-Sprouting Calabrese broccoli, 16 Burpee Majestic Crown broccoli, 16 Ferry's Round Dutch cabbage, and 16 Copenhagen Market cabbage. The cabbage varieties we have used and liked in the past, but the broccoli is all new. Here's hoping for sprouts soon!