Seedling season has started! Or at least if you live in the Northeast. Many seeds we purchased say to start indoors 6-8 weeks before the last frost date. Several places I’ve looked online have said that the last frost date for our area will be April 26th. I have no idea how they come up with that but it’s certainly helpful to have a date. We started the seedlings about a week ago so its about 5 weeks ahead of time.
Broccoli
We bought Burpee Organic Seed Starting mix for our seedlings and Jiffy “greenhouses” with 72 cells. The greenhouses are a great package deal, it has a detachable plastic tray, with 6 detachable cell groups and a clear plastic top. We also bought a 1.5 gallon pump sprayer for watering that I LOVE. It has an adjustable nozzle for a fine mist of water so its not too heavy on the new seedlings. It also makes watering 110% easier. Over the beginning of the week James transformed a quarter of the basement into seedling central. We have three grow lights set up. For a makeshift heating mat I’m using an electric blanket folded in quarters. The downside is that it has an automatic safety feature that turns it off after ten hours so we have to make sure to turn it on again when we go down to water.
Tomatoes
We’ve had some marginal success! It’s exciting to see the progress. The broccoli is doing great and the tomatoes are slowly but surely sticking their heads up. We’ve had to adjust the height of the lights a couple times, some of the newbies are a bit stringy which means they are looking for the light so we moved it closer. I’m excited to track their progress. Some of the things I was not expecting to grow did and I was pleasantly surprised. At the seed exchange in North Hampton I procured some golden tomatoes that were from 2010 and I planted them just to see what would happen, and they sprouted!
Notes from the Farmer
Setting up the seed starting area was easy, but there are a couple of important things to consider. I don’t think we have it quite right yet, but we’ll see. One important factor is light. The amount of light is very important. Even with 2 four foot bulbs, there actually is a lot less light output than the sun. So getting the light as close to the plants as possible is needed. The problem is this doesn’t allow very much space under the light. We already have some seedlings getting a bit too stringy trying to reach toward the light. We may have to get more lights to get a stronger output onto the plants.
The second factor is water. Even 1 day of dried out soil can damage the long term potential of the plant. We are using a fertilizer applicator to spray mists of water on to the soil. It is working great so far, stores a good amount of water, and creates a mist spray rather than large streams of water that can damage the plants and roots.
Stay tuned to see the progress!
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