Gardening: Seedlings from Basement to Garage

 

During the winter my garage  houses my car and many of the things that are  used in gardening.

During February and March, the grow lights in the basement have been busy turning seeds into seedlings.

Now that April has come and snow is unlikely, the car is now out in the driveway, and the seedings have come up from the basement to set behind the south facing garage door to begin the "hardening off process" of gradual exposure to direct sunlight, and temperature variations.

They are actually upon four different pairs of shelving with wheels. I have combined several photographs so that it looks like they are sitting on one very tall set of shelves.

On the top shelf are the snow peas which are ready to set out in the garden. Actually another shelf is already in the garden. They have been grown this  year in peat pots, usually three or four to a pot. The pots have holes in them and will decompose into the ground. (We are told you have to completely bury the peat pot so it does not wick water out of the soil. The snow peas already have their tendrils which will attach to the fencing in the garden. You can get a better picture of each shelf by clicking on the photos. 

The next row below is broccoli and cabbage which have been grown in yogurt cups. They will be potted up in the next week or so into larger containers for the container garden. Beneath them are some lettuce, which we have already begun to harvest, and another container of late starting snow peas.

Then below comes a tray of peppers. Half are green bell peppers, and half are sweet banana peppers. About half of each will go into the container garden; the other half will go into peat pots to be placed in regular garden soil.  

Next to the peppers on the right below are three types of herbs (sage, basil, and oregano). They will need to be repotted into containers on the back porch.

Below them on the next shelf are some marigolds and petunias in one tray, and then a tray of rutabaga. This is our first year trying to raise rutabaga.

Then below in the bottom shelf are two containers of various types of tomatoes. Actually we have a total of six containers of tomatoes since we can a lot of tomatoes, and tomato juice.. 

We  have started to replace our regular florescent grow lights with LED grow lights. We tried two different grow lights, and one appears to work much better than the other.

We  have educated ourselves on YouTube and found out that there are two important things about them. First to get  your lights about two inches above the emerging seeds so that the plants do not get leggy, i.e. continue to stretch for the light. The second is to reduce the adaptation of plants to direct sunlight by giving them a hour in the sunlight every few days while they are very young. This also helps to stop them from getting leggy. 

We might still have a frost yet in April. We do both container and in ground gardens. So the job now during April is to get all those areas ready so that when all these seedlings are hardened and there is no more danger of frost (for the warm weather crops) we can then put them out hopefully around the first week of May. Historically the average date of last frost here was May 10th and the legend was to wait to Memorial day for your warm weather crops. But climate change has changed all that, and we now rely much more on the thirty, sixty and ninety day forecasts to make decisions about planting.