It's cold, wet, and windy outside, which means one thing: it must be time to start our 2015 garden!
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| Peas seven days post-planting |
The beginning of this planting season is all about acting on lessons learned from last year. For example, some of our plants didn't hit their stride until too late in the growing season, resulting in low yields. So this year we started kale and eggplant in the first round and plan to harvest them in late April and July, respectively.
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| Organizing the seeds so we can remember what we planted |
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| All the tools - bucket of home grown dirt on the right |
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| Seeds in - ready to put under the light |
Another difficulty we have growing inside is a lack of natural light and cool temperatures - it is usually around 62 F in the back room where the plants are, but seeds like to germinate at temperatures between 70 and 80 F. Without turning up the heat and doubling the gas bill, we decided to get a heating pad for the plants and an industrial size LED light on a timer. Roger's dad was in the process of retrofitting his farm with LED lighting - something that will result in huge energy savings for his business - and was nice enough to send us one of the 4-foot LED lights for our little experiment.
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| Putting old textbooks to good use |
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| Heating mat |
The heating mat gets the soil temperature up in the 70-80 F range, ideal for most seeds (if we wanted to be precise, we would move peppers to separate pots and heat them up to 85 F, but we'll see how this works for now). The light is timed to turn on at 5:30 AM and off at 8:30 PM, simulating a longer growing day.
Anecdotally, these measures seem to be making a difference already, although I don't have measurements to back that up. These are pictures taken 7 days after planting:
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| From front to back: 2 rows kale, 2 rows tomatoes, 2 rows cucumbers, eggplant/peppers, broccoli, 8 rows peas |
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| Left to right: peas, broccoli, cucumbers |
