Don't Blink

During the past week of business travel my indoor plant starts have grown with the vigor of youth into a verdant and slightly unruly bunch of tweens.The tomatoes from my saved seed are particularly in need of thinning.  I seeded them a little more thickly since I did not know what my germination rate would be.  While they initially lagged about week behind fermented seeds I purchased this year, the germination rate for my saved seed looks to be close to 100%.Pro Tip - always use scissors to snip off the plants you are thinning to avoid disturbing the roots of chosen specimen.

Tender Beginnings

While winter is having it's (hopefully) last hurrah outside, I am prepping my indoor garden to be without me for a week while I travel for work.After trying first newspaper pots then peat pots for last year's starts and having them disintegrate before I was ready to transplant to the garden, this year I am using Siloé Oliveira's technique of drilling holes in smooth plastic cups that can be reused year after year.All of my starts are doing well but the ones I am happiest about are my saved seed from the Paste and Amana tomatoes I grew last year.  They sprouted a few days behind the new varieties I purchased seed for this year, but since I did not ferment the saved seed I knew they would lag a bit.And gratuitous pics of some of the collards and other tomato varieties starts just because they are so pretty...

New Year's Resolutions (Then and Now)

For 2015 I set two gardening goals for myself - begin keeping a garden log and saving seed and I did pretty well on both of them.  My 2015 garden log ended the year with 8 typed pages and containing details from pounds of tomatoes and serranos harvested to the date of the first and last blueberries.  I used Word for Mac so I can keyword search in 2016 (and beyond) if I want to find when I planted the 3rd crop of edamame or when my squash and cucumbers were invaded by cucumber worms.  I found I was more diligent about doing entries if I kept the document open on my second monitor at all times so when I began the 2016 garden log earlier this month detailing all the indoor starts for January, I continued with this practice.Prior to 2015, I had only saved my own cilantro/coriander seed and purchased everything else.  At the end of 2015 I had saved 10 different varieties of everything from squash and chili peppers to flowers and tomatoes.  My seed box, which has always been full of Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds packages is now peppered with the plain brown paper envelopes that I use for my own seed.For 2016 my two goals are saving even more of my own seed and mulching.  Going from 1 to 10+ varieties that I saved seed from in 2015 is good, but I am growing over 53 annual varieties in 2016 so there is plenty of room to continue to improve in this goal.The Square Foot Gardening method I use places a heavy emphasis on compost but almost none on mulching.  The SFG method recommends starting with a 33% compost mixture in the raised beds and continually adding compost as plants are removed and new plants added to each individual square foot, but no mention of covering the soil between and around plants.  Soil science as well as observation have led me to understand that just as nature abhors a vacuum and will swiftly fill it, soil abhors being exposed and will cover itself with weeds if it must to protect it from the wind and the sun, allowing it to retain water better and reduce erosion.So for 2016 I will be experimenting with different types of mulches in my beds to see what works best, doesn't invite too many visiting pests and makes the plants and soil happy and healthy.Here's to getting better every year!  #Kaizen