Seedling Season

It’s time to buy seedlings. I try to grow most of my seedlings from seed, but as I’ve written it’s been an especially trying year for me. So I’ll be heading out to nab a few baby plants for my garden in the next few weeks. I aim to plant tomatoes/peppers around Mother’s Day. I know some people plant much earlier, but I can’t deal with the late night panic when an unexpected frost descends. I’m fundamentally a lazy gardener and rounding up row covers is just too much work.

As you head out to pick your seedlings, here are a few tips:

1. Look for the healthiest plant possible. Rich, green color and stocky stems are always a good sign. Avoid the plants with yellow leaves, this means they’ve been subjected to a dry spell or sub-par nutrients. You don’t want the tallest plant either, leggy plants might have been looking for more light or been hopped up on too much fertilizer.
2. Avoid plants that have obvious insect or fungal damage – chewed on leaves, funny spots. You don’t want to bring home the blight!
3. Don’t buy from places that have miniature plants – meaning you don’t want a teeny-tiny plant with big flowers or fruit already starting. It’s not natural for them to be flowering so soon and could mean they’ve been artificially induced to do this (to make them more attractive) or they’ve been stressed out by too little water and sent out their fruit early.
4. Buy the largest plant you can – not by plant size, but by root size. The plants in the bigger pots most likely have bigger root development and won’t have as much ground to make up when you plug them in. Those six packs of bitty little peppers for a buck-fifty are cheap for a reason. They’ll be way behind your other plants and may never catch up.

 Plan to make your purchases when there is time to plant. I tend to buy on whim and have several containers of plants waiting to be planted sitting on my porch on any given week. That’s not a good way to operate. The sooner you get them in the ground, the better chance they have.

The best day to plant is a cloudy day, or at least in the evening to avoid shocking your babies with the bright, blistering sun. And be sure to water well for the first few weeks to help them establish themselves and sink their roots down deep so they can survive.

Dig a hole big enough to sink your seedling up to its neck. It should be a few inches deeper in the ground than it was in the pot. Even if you cover a few leaves, you’ll just be giving it stronger roots. If you pull your new plant out of it’s container and the roots are in a tight, tight knot, wiggle them loose, or even break off some if necessary, so that you can spread the roots out in the hole.

I like to work a little compost in to the soil in the bottom of my hole. This gives the new plant a little fertilizer to get it going. And when I inevitably forget to water it, it still has something to keep it going.

Be sure to mark your seedlings well. You may think you’ll remember what type of plant you put where, but you won’t. Trust me on this. It also keeps helpful children from pulling out your new plant in their efforts to help you weed. Have fun with labeling, too. You don’t have to write exactly what’s on the plant label. You can call the plants anything you want!

Buying seedlings always feels like cheating to me. But the new plants I bring home are typically more exotic and exciting than what I’ve got growing under my lights and that makes it fun. Every year I try to pick out something I’ve never grown before – eucalyptus, peanuts, and last year we planted a kiwi fruit (it survived the winter – imagine!). Happy shopping!

When You Pick a Pepper

Growing a garden takes a lot of imagination. That’s the best part, really - imagining what you will grow. This weekend as I studied the hot pepper seedlings for sale and read their descriptions, I imagined the food I would cook and the hot pepper jelly I could put up. I imagined the sleek red shapes of the habanero peppers and the tiny round shape of the cherry pepper. I considered the Thai Hot and decided it could be dangerous. The plants I was looking at were no more than six inches tall and had just a smattering of leaves, but deep inside them are the beginnings of some fierce enchiladas. I picked out two hot and one sweet pepper that were new to me.

For the record it is much more economical to grow your own seedlings from seeds unless you’re letting your imagination lead and you’re taking a chance on something like a hot pepper. Here’s why: First of all, who needs more than one hot pepper plant? If you’ve never grown hot peppers, let me be the first to tell you that they are pretty prolific. And if you’ve ever cooked with hot peppers you know it only takes a tiny amount to add some serious heat. One well grown hot pepper plant will easily supply me and any unsuspecting friends who stop by all summer.

The way I figure it is this – A packet of heirloom or organic seeds (that could grow me 40-50 hot pepper plants) costs $3.00. This healthy, already-grown-with-someone-else’s-time-and-trouble plant is $3.00. And after I buy this one all future peppers of this variety will be free. Truly. That’s because I’m a seed saver as I’ve said before. There was a time that I was more of a purist and would have insisted on growing the new pepper myself. These days I have drawerfulls of seed packets from years and ideas gone by. Now it’s much simpler, and more economical, to buy a seedling. If I love it, I’ll save the seeds. If I don’t, it just cost me $3.00 and I won’t have another seed packet hanging around making me feel guilty.

If you haven’t had the time or the inclination this year to start your tomatoes or peppers from seeds, you’re out of time. But choose your seedlings carefully because they could become the grandparents of tomatoes to come. Be sure to buy heirloom plants if possible and avoid hybrids (you can’t save their seeds because they have two different parents so you’ll get one or the other, but not the tomato you’ve come to know and love). The seeds and seedlings you buy at Walmart that cost just $1.25 are not a good deal because more than likely they are sterile seeds. Many of the big seed companies sterilize their seeds. That way you have to buy them again and again. So like so many other things that seem so inexpensive at first blush they will cost you more in the end.

I won’t tell you how to save seeds now, you’ll just forget, but watch for a post later in the summer when seed saving time is in full bloom. Just know that it’s easy and takes nearly no work. And while you should be picky about what you bring home for your garden (just like relatives, they could be with you for a long while), now is the time to let your imagination run wild. Take a chance on something new. It won’t cost you much.

The Babies Are Moving Out

It’s time to move the babies outdoors. It’s kind of like sending the preschooler off to kindergarten. You can no longer control their surroundings and protect them from the elements. You have to hope you’ve done a good job raising strong healthy seedlings and then pray for good weather. There are a few things you can do to make the transition easier.

I firmly believe in “hardening off” my baby plants. This means moving them outdoors in a gradual way to get them used to the wind, temperature, and the strong sun which is so different from the fluorescent lights they have been raised under. Even store bought seedlings can use a little hardening off. If I had a sunny window I would start by letting them spend some time there. Alas, the only really sunny window is in my six year old’s room and that might not be the safest of surroundings. So I move them outside in to the shade on my porch on a warm day for an afternoon. From there I increase their time outside and their exposure to real sunlight a little each day. Eventually graduating them to sitting in their bin together over the very spot I plan to plant them. If the temperature threatens to dip low, I bring them in for the night. This takes about a week.

At this point I watch the weather. The last frost is supposed to be somewhere around tax day (April 15) for us, but we always seem to still get a few frosts after that down in the hollow where we live. I shoot for Mother’s Day for tomatoes and peppers and other warm weather plants. I want to be certain the temperature won’t go below 45 at night. I’ve got too much invested in my tomatoes (all 24 of them) to risk a cold night ruining my hard work. Ideal conditions would be daytime temps around 70 and not too sunny with some light rain. But life is not ideal now is it?

Planting seedlings is careful work. Water your seedlings thoroughly so that when you lift them out of their pots they soil will stick to the roots and not crumple away. Lay out where you are planning on putting them and prepare clear markers so that other folks who traverse your garden won’t trample on them. Like so many other things that look great at home, once you get them out of their element they seem incredibly small and fragile. Surround them with a string fence or deliberately mark them with large stakes.

Dig the hole larger than the seedling pot and be sure the soil you are planting in to is moist. If it isn’t, water the hole before planting the seedling. If you have compost to add, work the compost in to the hole also.

Getting the seedling out of its pot and in to the soil seems simple, but that isn’t always the case. If you use plastic containers (like the used yogurt cups I use), it is helpful to tap the bottom to loosen the plant. I actually invert the plant (holding my hand over the top so the plant won’t fall out) and tap it really hard. If there are roots growing out of the bottom of the cup I tear them off. Then I carefully shake the entire plant out for the container and set the plant in the hole, firming soil around it and up its neck. I bury it deeper in the ground than it was in the pot, especially with tomato plants.

Many of the books I’ve consulted have said to lift the plant out by the leaves, but that has never worked for me. Inevitably I end up lifting off the leaves without the plant. So gently shaking the plant out of the pot works is my method. And if that doesn’t work, I run my finger around the edge of the pot and scoop the plant out that way. If you have used the “plantable” peat pots, you are supposed to be able to plant the seedling pot and all. The one year I tried that it didn’t work for me. The plants were root bound and didn’t do well. At the end of the summer when we turned over the dirt, the peat pots were still completely intact. So if you use them, be sure to tear off the bottom and maybe tear the the sides back a bit too before you plant them. Lovely idea though, those peat pots.

My favorite plant store (Landreth Seeds) is having their annual sale this weekend. I will get up early to be one of their first customers on Saturday. As much as I enjoy saving lots of money raising my own seedlings, it’s still at thrill to buy a few “foreigners” to plant. This week I’m also going to harvest some of my “volunteer” lettuce that grew from the lettuce I planted last year and let go to seed. That’s the beauty of heirloom seeds, you get lots of volunteers. I’ll let you know how that works out. I’ve never thought of lettuce as a perennial, but this year it is for us. Gardening is such an adventure. You learn something new all the time.