Finally...

My peppers have sprouted. I was starting to get concerned that my little “guest room garden” wasn’t conducive to peppers quite as much as for the onions…I’ve had everything set up under a lamp in the only free room in the house. The seed packages did say that it would take 10-21 days for the seedlings to take off, but after 18-19 days I was starting to get worried! Finally on day 20, we have sproutage. J

Next to see how the poor little things survive my week-long vacation out of state.

In other gardening news, I spent time yesterday between rain showers applying Milky Spore Disease to our yard and garden. This is an organic grub solution – the grubs ingest the spores, get Milky Spore Disease, and die. The spores live on to infect future generations of the Japanese beetle grub. It was probably quite the sight to see – me measuring out teaspoons full of white powder onto my lawn every four feet – at least one neighbor stopped to ask…

Emergence

I’ve got seedlings! I need to get some photos of this…my onion and pepper seeds have begun to sprout. Very soon they’ll need to be moved into a well-lit area, which will leave me room to get some tomatoes started on top of the fridge… Yea! I was kind of worried that my bad house-plant luck would spread to the garden as well… J

Seeds of possibility

Tuesday night I sat down at the kitchen table (well, more like crouched over it) with a bag of seed starting mix, some small containers and a couple packets of seeds and planted my first veggie seeds ever…or at least since 6^th grade, when we grew beans on the windowsill at school. My first 50 containers, now safe and warm on the top of the fridge, hold Vidalia onions and sweet bell peppers. I’ll post pictures when I finally get my camera back from my sister…

The directions on the seed packets weren’t the clearest, so I wasn’t certain as to how many seeds to put in each container. For this first round of seeds, I went with one pepper seed per container, for a total of 20 seeds, and 2 onion seeds per container, for a total of 60. I’m planning on buying more containers tonight, so I can start my tomato seeds as well. If I have enough space, I might toss a few more onions seeds in a couple of pots to see if they grow well in multiples… I’m not exactly sure where all these seedlings will go, as our refrigerator top is full and we don’t have that many more warm spaces available in our little house…

So to recap, first seeds:

Vidalia Onions – planted April 3, 2007

60 seeds

Seedlings will be moved outdoors when they have reached pencil-thickness

“Carnival Mix” Sweet Bell Peppers – planted April 3, 2007

20 seeds

Seedlings should appear in 10-21 days and will be moved outdoors when they have 2 pairs of leaves each.

The Happy Little Garden

I'd been considering a gardening project for some time now. Since I moved to the "big city" (which Omaha is IF you grew up in a town so small it was officially a "village") I've frequented the Saturday morning farmers' market and tried my hand at growing various flowers and the occasional houseplant. But I've never grown my own food, an idea that appeals to me more and more as I read about the sustainable farming movement and local food initiatives. I'm working on convincing the DH that we should also join the local farmers' food coop that sprung up last summer...but for now I'm going to focus on the immediately local area - aka my back yard. And so begins the happy little goddess' Happy Little Garden.