Seedlings and Planting

Note: This is a long over-due post that spans April 11 - April 25. I'm back-dating it to make the blog easier to click through.

We decided not to plant on the lot outside our fenced in area.

The city came by and mowed over the entire area, and had I planted anything there, it would have been mowed down to nothing. I did however, plant outside on my balcony, and within our fence. Here's how I did it.

Once I decided to use the two big planters on my balcony, I had to plan accordingly to tone down the scope of the garden. I saw these little "urban planters" at Home Depot, and while I think they take the fun out of everything, were pretty clever ideas. However, they already had everything planted, and even some tomatoes already on the vine. I decided to emulate the idea.

I first needed to obtain some seeds and soil for my planters. Since this is a geeky, technology influenced garden, I made sure to get some pretty geeky seeds. This means that I bought all Hybrids and high yielding seeds. I almost decided to go organic, but I feel like once you decide to do "organic" you've got to keep going, if you ever use anything non-organic (like non-organic water (hah!)), you're no-longer organic.

Here's what I bought:
* Tomato Giant Hybrid
* Pepper
* Sweet Basil
* Oregeno
* ...

I then bought a seedling starter kit. It's nothing more than some mushroom compost pellets that are compacted down and dehydrated.



Once you fill them up with water they expand -- kind of like a straw wrapper compacted, using that trick you learned as a kid to make it grow like a worm.



I planted rows of each, and I am quite sure that I planted too many seeds in each one. The directions stated for each to plant one or two seeds, but I simply dumped a good quantity of each in each seedling starter. I planted each one successively deeper than the next, and had I recorded the "inches" that I planted, I probably could figured out the optimum planting depth for each one. Note to self: you should probably get a little notebook and record these kinds of details for the next time (and for the blog)!

The seedlings were planted on April 11, 2009.

A few days later, the seedlings were sprouting. The Peppers took the longest to sprout. The Basil shot up, even growing out of the side and on the bottom of the seedling starter!




After about two weeks, I decided to transplant my seedlings to the pots. This was on April 25, 2009.



As far as soil goes, the geekiest option available to me was to use a specialized Miracle-Gro Potting mix, made specifically for flowers, and vegetables. It's a mix of mushroom compost, composted soil, bark, and lots of Miracle-Gro Fertilizer.



The 2 planters are quite deep, so the first task was to fill up most of them with rocks. Luckily at my building, we have a rock garden, and plenty of left-over rocks that are perfect for this. It took several trips with a bucket down to fill them up. I then filled it up with soil.



I then removed the "netting" from each and planted them throughout.



There wasn't any rhyme or reason to my planting. I did plant the tomatoes on the right, center, and left of the pots, and then put everything else spaced around. If I had to do it again, I might re-arrange, based on the way each grows.