Welcome to Growbox Hill

Welcome to Growbox Hill
Welcome to Growbox HIll!

Thursday, April 5, 2012

A few pics of seedlings

Just a few pics of all the seedlings we got going on right now...

 Here we have flat leaf parsley in the big blue pot a mix of lettuces in the two handle pot. The two handled pot was sadly retired after I screwed up and baked the bottom off of the pan when I turned on the wrong burner and walked away thinking I was starting up the big kettle of water. Ugh, hadn't used electric cooktop in decades and had to re-learn. Nonstick is worthless when improperly baked out, but still can stand in very well for a large planting like this.
The matching pair of pots now have a sproutling each of pumpkin pepper plant. I got this seed from Pinetree seeds and I'm trying it for the first time this year. It is neither a pumpkin or a pepper, but rather grows like a leggy pepper plant and produces small pepper sized fruits that are perfectly orange and pumpkin shaped! And they are supposed to be dryable for long term crafting action. Hopefully will get seed off these this year too :)

 So end of the bench by the corner. A bunch of toms and peppers in the six-packs. They are all coming along quite nicely I think. The pink cartons are Roman Chamomile which seems to have utterly failed to sprout :( And the yellow cartons are random discount marigold seed I picked up last year. I saved a bunch of seed too and did wildcasting with it.

 A nice pile of baby marigolds waiting to be plunked into the keyhole line leading down to the firepit. Picked up a handful of mixed varieties on clearance last year from a dollar store for 5 for a buck and a few nicer kinds for about 3 bucks total mixed them all up. I also saved up a big pile of seeds from some clearance marigold plants I plunked into planters outside the back door and rounded out the remainder of this planting seed for the wildcasting. With some time and care, we should have an amazing flame colors border there that also has the benefit of being repellant to bugs!
Those leggy things in the fourpacks at the back are some of my cabbage, cauliflower, and brussels sprouts. I planted all of them waaaay too early in my anticipation of spring.

 The soup cans are herbs, the super bushy one closest is cilantro. And yack those leggy plants at the bottom again. The ninepack tray is leeks. My leeks and leggies, I'm not too positive I can hold them all indoors for the couple more weeks till safely after the frost date. I may have to set up sort of a quickie hardening off stage on the front porch or something. The leeks I think I can extend out since I now have enough cardboard tube to add a couple inches to those pots and start blanching in a tad.

 The leeks and onward. Most of the rest is a bunch of the second serious batch of planting. The big pan is envy soy, ans most of the row on the left are beets and other roots. The Lutz beet is popping up, which is nice since I can put it out earlier. If I figured it out right, I should be able to start pulling and taste testing this batch of spring planting along with setting in seed for fall setting in planting for storing, and perhaps two set-offs for seed saving. The pile of five blue trays on the right are wildflower plugs. Beyond those are big dill, more parsley, mustard (in the 3 matching coffee cans), and moonflowers. The mustards are one of those wild and questionable weeds I wanted to try out this year. According to a lot of information, it's a very useful plant that can extremely naughty in the containment department. Helpful is that I plan on harvesting as much of the seed as possible for culinary and seed saving.

 This is a closeup of the envy soy... I just love the instant gratification that legumes give. I'm hoping for a super-early harvest on these, and they take a tad longer than other soy does.  So in a few weeks when I'm ready to put them out, or even earlier if I put caps on them, they are a full tray that can go out.

 A closeup of one of the wildflower mix trays. I put together a whopping bunch of discount flower mixes and a big handful of desirable wildflowers into a big dried herb shaker. About 8oz or so gathered up. A couple weeks ago I dug up about 10 spots in the sanctuary and sprinkled seed in. Once these five trays are ready to go out I will divide them up into another 10 plantings in. Once the overnight freezes knock it off and I can proceed with using the windowsills again and start moving stuff outside I'm going to pop off with another pile of wildflower plugs of the smaller square kind. Gonna use a chunk of what is left over to do another wildcasting too. I plan on using up all the wildflower mix this year and start looking for my bergamot/oswego seeds for starts next year. Especially the native scarlet kind.

This is one cup of a muffin tin. Unfortunately it too is a recycle after setting it damp on my bamboo cutting board left the board with black rings on it. I figured if it did that, what in the heck would it do to food, even when it's in liners? Those tiny and adorable seedlings are some of my strawberry seed. Fraise de Bois I do believe, anywho, a little alpine wild kind. Makes super potent, super tiny berries. I want to build up a whole section of these eventually.. Thinking perhaps as a vertical wall on the west side of the garage.

There's still way more plantings and seedlings to come. I've put a total halt on any seed planting while overnight lows are in the below 40's, and we are hitting a streak of lower 30's. So far the seedlings have been weathering well in the solarium, and the temps have been holding steady in there.

 Here's a long shot of pretty much the whole of what's seeded so far. It's pulled out quite a bit from the windows right now with the cold overnight temps.

Here is one upset little Moon kitty after being scooped up in the solarium. She decided to sneak out while we were going to take pics.. Silly kitty, there's a modeling fee for entering the solarium :)

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