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The Old Guy's Garden Record
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In an industrious mood yesterday, I updated our how-to, Sterile Potting Mix, while a kettle of potting mix was sterilizing in the oven. I'm getting ready for our January seedings. I plan to start petunias, vinca, onions, and impatiens this month. The flowers are all for hanging baskets that will adorn our back porch in the summer.
While poking around on the web for Reids Yellow Dent, I found an interesting paragraph on Wikipedia's page for Dent Corn. "Dent corn, also known as grain corn, is a type of field corn with a high soft starch content. It received its name because of the small indentation, or "dent", at the crown of each kernel on a ripe ear of corn. Reid's Yellow Dent is a variety developed by central Illinois farmer James L. Reid. Reid and his father, Robert Reid, moved from Brown County, Ohio to Tazewell County, Illinois in 1846 bringing with them a red corn variety known as "Johnny Hopkins", and crossed it with varieties of flint corn and flour corn. Most of today's hybrid corn varieties and cultivars are derived from it. This variety won a prize at the 1893 World's Fair." The sentence "Most of today's hybrid corn varieties and cultivars are derived from it," really impressed me. After growing Reids for seven years on the farm, I never knew what the variety had spawned.
During my teaching years, one of my physically challenged students received free care at the Shriner's St. Louis hospital. Today's banner and a small donation are my thank you to them. |
Sunday, January 2, 2022 - Starting Egg Carton Petunias I got our new year and new gardening season off to an early start yesterday, seeding petunias that will eventually hang from our back porch. My mother used to start seedlings in egg cartons on a kitchen windowsill. About ten years ago, I tried starting petunias in egg cartons for the first time. The experiment turned out well, although petunias quickly outgrow the small confines of an egg carton cell. I've continued to start our petunias for hanging baskets in egg cartons since that first try.
I use styrofoam egg cartons for the seeding. Cardboard would seem more eco-friendly, but cardboard cartons don't hold up too well to the frequent waterings the plants need. I prepare the egg cartons by first cutting off and discarding the narrow flap on the egg carton before splitting the egg cell section from the top. The tops get set aside until the petunias are ready to go onto our windowsill. They will then serve as drip pans. I punch a drainage hole in the bottom of each egg cell with a sharp pencil. That allows for future bottom watering.
The cells of the egg cartons get filled with sterilized starting mix. We make our own by heating damp potting mix in the oven for an hour at 400° F to kill off any damping off fungus that might be present in the potting soil.
Petunia seed needs light to germinate, so I don't cover the seed. To help the pellet dissolve and release the seed on the soil surface, I go back and drip several drops of warm water on each seed with an old syringe. An eyedropper would work just as well. I part with Mom's practice of just setting the egg carton on a windowsill to germinate, as it's a bit cold on our available windowsill these days. Petunias also benefit from a bit of bottom heat during germination, so ours go into a planting tray with a clear cover on our heat mat and under our plant lights. Our soil mat thermostat has a probe that goes right into the soil, so we can be pretty exact with our seed starting temperatures. For petunias, I set our thermostat at 70° F. A warm, sunny windowsill might work as well. Once germinated, I'll keep the petunias on the heat mat for a day or two before removing the clear cover and shutting off the heat. They will acclimate a bit to the cooler conditions under our plant lights in the basement before being moved to our kitchen windowsill. The petunias have to be watered almost daily once they get started due to the small size of the egg cells. The egg carton tops used as drip pans make bottom watering pretty easy. When the weather begins to moderate a bit in late March, the hanging baskets go out to a protected area on our back porch. On sunny days without a lot of wind, the baskets get hung. Since they're pretty portable, the hanging baskets can easily come back inside on nights when frost is predicted. The last few years our hanging basket petunias have taken a beating from strong winds. We live next to an open, ninety acre field that the wind sweeps across. The nearby Merom Bluff also has some effect in making the winds stronger than areas a few miles north or south of us. My goal this year with our hanging baskets is to get them out of the wind on windy days, as wind damage can really spoil ones plants. If you're a longtime reader of this site, this posting may look a bit familiar. It's a light re-write of last year's posting on starting hanging basket petunias.
Monday, January 3, 2022 - When to Start Seeds
The folks at Johnny's have added a lot of flower varieties this year to their seed-starter date calculator. It still lacks info for vincas, but Johnny's doesn't sell vinca seed. I also noticed that my readout of the calculator suggests starting petunias from February 3-17. That's about right for petunias for the garden or flowerbed. I started our hanging basket petunias on New Year's Day, as the hanging baskets can be brought inside on cold spring days and also benefit from being on our porch where heat leaks from our old house. Here's part of what the seed starting calculator recommends for us with our last frost date of April 14. Note that clicking on the image below will open the full list, a very long graphic in a new tab or window.
Another Good Book Having mentioned one book, let me get totally off subject for a paragraph here. I'm spending a lot of time reading Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker's I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final Year. Since I'm a rather slow reader, I'm not quite half way through the intriguing 592 page Christmas present from my wife, Annie. Between writing this blog and reading the book, I'm having trouble getting other stuff done. I even skipped watching major parts of yesterday's NFL games on TV to spend time reading! And if your politics tend to lean to the right, just ignore this paragraph. Brr
We started out today at 24° F. It's supposed to get a lot colder later on this week. After writing the line above, I heard our dogs downstairs stirring a bit. I went down to let them out and they immediately went to their outside water bowl. Their inside water bowl was empty and the outside one was frozen. So I filled the inside bowl with cold water and dumped the ice out of the outside one, filling it with lukewarm water.
Wednesday, January 5, 2022 - Cuttings, a Sweet Corn Seed Germination Test, and More Seed Catalogs Wandering Jew Cuttings
I sort of cringe every time I write about our Wandering Jew plants, wondering if the use of that common name for tradescantia zebrina is offensive to some and/or politically incorrect. There are lots of pages online that suggest I should use the proper Latin name for the plant. Let me know what you think. Sage Cuttings
I trimmed the lower leaves off the sage stems, leaving just three leaves at the top of each stem. Then I dipped the stems in Clonex Rooting Gel . Because sage is so hardy, the cuttings went into unsterilized potting mix in four and a half inch pots. Sweet Corn Seed Germination Test As I'm planning our garden for the coming season, I'm considering planting a lot more sweet corn than usual. I have several new varieties of seed from both last year and this year that I'd like to try. (Our 2021 sweet corn planting failed.) And after a really bad experience several years ago, I decided to germination test all of the sweet corn seed we have on hand.
I'll be waiting a while longer for another variety that's on backorder until sometime in March. I'll need to test it when the seed arrives. One more thing I'm going to try is planting our Enchanted sweet corn with our sh2 varieties. According to the Twilley Seed catalog, Enchanted is an "Augmented SuperSweet" that "Combines sh2, se & su genes for exceptional combo of sweet flavor, tender kernels, strong seed vigor and emergence." Since most seed vendors are listing Enchanted as out of stock or a crop failure, I'm guessing that I got some old seed that Twilley still had a good supply of. That's not a bad thing, as long as Twilley plays fair with germination tests. And hopefully, the Enchanted will pollinate well with our other sh2 varieties. More Seed Catalogs We're continuing to receive more seed catalogs. Even though I'm pretty well done with seed orders, I still enjoy looking through the catalogs.
Note that the Stokes catalog is for commercial sales in the United States. Stokes dropped its U.S. retail sales a year or so ago, leaving a gaping hole in our seed order opportunities. Lucky Canadians can still order retail from them. An online gardening friend there ordered some Empress gloxinia seed from Stokes (and smuggled a bit of it to me Weather We started out today (well, just after midnight) at about 40° F. From then, our temperatures have slowly dropped. The drop is supposed to continue tonight and tomorrow, bottoming out at around 4° F Friday morning. About the only positive I saw in our Weather Underground forecast was the daylight line in the astronomy section,"Tomorrow will be 0 minutes 55 seconds longer."
When I got to my office today to begin writing, it was almost too warm. I think the difference was that the howling winds we've had for a week or so have subsided.
I woke up with a nasty head cold yesterday. My nose ran. I sneezed a lot. And my eyes watered. It made me wonder if I should get a Covid test. I snuggled all day in my easy chair under a new blanket our youngest daughter, Julia, had given us for Christmas. And after lots of kale soup, orange juice, vitamins, and some Nyquil Severe Cold and Flu, I awakened this morning feeling pretty normal. I noticed some tiny, tiny green specks in our egg cartons seeded to petunias this morning. The specks were too small to even attempt photographing, but it appears that the petunia seed I started on New Year's Day is germinating. I also checked my germination test of our sweet corn seed. The results are pretty good already. I usually let germination tests run 7-10 days. This test is just at day three.
It appears that all of the seed will eventually test good (80% or above germination), I was surprised at the excellent germination of our older seed, especially the 2012 ACcentuate MRBC that has been in the freezer for ten years! An email yesterday from Fedco Seeds let me know my seed order was on its way. I sort of goofed starting our sweet corn seed germination test, as the Fedco order has some Yellowstone Supersweet seed in it that will need to be tested. I'd forgotten I'd ordered it. And we also have some of the open pollinated Who Gets Kissed? variety that's on backorder from High Mowing Organic Seeds. I'll just have to test those varieties as they come in.
I'd been busy watching our Indianapolis Colts play an uninspired game, blowing their playoff hopes by losing to Jacksonville, 26-11. Carson Went should probably update his résumé. I also cooked a Butterball Turkey Breast for lunch. It wasn't a special occasion. It was just that the turkey breast had been in our freezer so long that it was almost eligible to vote. The menu was turkey, dressing, leftover mashed potatoes, gravy, and green bean casserole. I had a bit of room in our covered tray over a soil heating mat, so I started a communal pot of Cora Cascade Vinca yesterday. It's a lovely trailing variety that I'll use in a hanging basket. I also moved our moved tradescantia Sabrina cuttings to sixpacks. Today, I cut off our sweet corn seed germination test early. I had the results I needed, and a few of the seeds were beginning to rot.
All of the varieties tested germinated at 80% or above. I was really impressed with some of our oldest seed germinating at 100%. I'll probably use up all of our Summer Sweet 7930R and Accentuate MRBC seed this year, as I'm really pushing things with eight and ten year old seed. And I'm guessing at this point that I'll skip planting the Enchanted and El le varieties that only tested at 80%. The Daimon that tested at 80% gets a pass, as it's open pollinated and will go in with our other open pollinated varieties, Silver Queen and Who Gets Kissed? I got a little crazy ordering sweet corn seed this year. That may be because our sweet corn plantings failed in 2021 due to me getting hurt and not taking care of them. It also may be because our 2020 sweet corn was a bit crunchy, although still very sweet. We still have two pints of that corn in our freezer. But with all the new varieties I want to try, along with some old favorites such as Silver Queen, I hope to grow a lot of sweet corn this year. The plantings won't rival my 2-4 acre plantings of sweet corn during my farming years, but it will be the most we've done in our 80' x80' East Garden plot.
We're definitely into winter weather here, although not all that bad. I'm looking at our extended forecast looking for for days when I can get a few outside jobs done. Sadly, there aren't any of those occasional pleasant winter days right now. But spring is coming soon.  Tuesday, January 11, 2022 - Hot Water Treating Tomato Seed
I began with five bundles of tomato seed bound in cheesecloth in some warm water, adding hot water from a teapot on the stove to bring it up to and maintain the desired temperature. Then it was just a matter of periodically splashing a little very hot water from the teapot into the Pyrex cup to keep it at temperature. At the 25 minute mark, I began adding cold tapwater to gradually reduce the water temperature to 80° F. Other than a hot water bath in the kitchen sink to help keep the seed warm, I didn't use hot tapwater. While our hot water in the kitchen runs around 130° F, it is soft water and probably contains a bit of salt that wouldn't do the seed any good.
The seed varieties treated today were Earlirouge, Moira, Quinte, and Crimson Sprinter. I only treated a few seeds of each variety. There's always the possibility of getting the seed too hot and killing it, so I have a good reserve of each seed variety in frozen storage. As to hot water treating seed, the University of Massachusetts Amherst has a great web page with a chart that lists many seed varieties that can be hot water treated for disease control, water temperatures required, and especially diseases controlled. For tomatoes, they list:
Hot Water Treatment of Tomato (and other) Seed
Other Our Fedco Seeds order arrived yesterday in a timely fashion. Last year, our Fedco order toured New England post offices for about ten to fifteen days before heading towards Indiana! This order wasn't a big one, just packets of Yellowstone sweet corn and Rocket Mix snapdragon seed.
While out in the back yard with my camera, I snapped a shot of part of our row of elephant garlic. The hard freezes we've had so far don't seem to have damaged the hardy plants. A few of our regular garlics have put up shoots as well. With the warm fall we had, it's not surprising that some of the garlic is up. It should be okay, but I'll need to check fairly regularly to make sure shoots aren't getting trapped under the mulch.
Monday, January 17, 2022 - Martin Luther King Jr. Day (U.S.)
Our hosta, vinca, and egg carton petunias have all germinated over the last few days. It was time yesterday to get them off the heat mat they were started on and give them some more intense light. After turning off the soil heating mat and removing the clear plastic tray cover, I dropped a fluorescent to four or five inches above the tops of the young plants.
The petunia plants in egg cartons are tiny. I'll give them about a week under our plant lights before moving the egg cartons to a kitchen windowsill. The vinca, like the petunias, are for a hanging basket. I'll be starting more petunias and vinca later this month with varieties more suited for going into our garden plots. The hosta are for flowerbeds around the house.
I recently looked through January blogs from 2021 and 2020. That triggered me making a long list of items I'd like to get started this month. Starting geraniums and onions top the list. But it goes on to include stratifying and planting milkweed, and seeding daisies, trailing impatiens, dianthus, snapdragons, catnip, and celery. When I made Portuguese Kale Soup in December, I'd brought in the biggest bag of kidney beans that I had in the freezer. But when I started to soak the beans, I was aghast that the seed was from 2017. So instead, I brought in seed from 2020, the last year we had a good crop of kidney beans and used them in the delicious and nutritious soup. The 2017 bean seed remained in our kitchen freezer until yesterday. Seeing the seed and knowing that I still had three varieties of sweet corn to test, I began yet one more germination test. If the bean seed wasn't something I'd trust to cook with, it might still germinate well.
I've gotten a little silly this year ordering sweet corn seed. I'm searching for new varieties we might like, as seed for most of our old favorites is no longer available. After I thought I was all done ordering, I ran across a couple of sweet corn varieties I was tempted to try from a new-to-us vendor, David's Garden Seeds (DGW rating). I ordered some Accentuate yellow supersweet corn mainly on the strength of the similarly named bi-color ACcentuate MRBC that we really like. (Our old, 2012, MRBC seed germinated at 100% in a test earlier this month!) I also ordered a packet of Xtra-Tender 3473, a somewhat rare sh2 white corn variety.
Some of the gloxinias I grew from June leaf cuttings are still in bloom. The double blooms are lovely, although they keep tipping over prematurely. Considering that they are first year plants, they're doing pretty well. When they stop blooming, they'll go under our plant lights to build corm strength for future blooming cycles (probably after a required period of dormancy).
Tuesday, January 18, 2022 - Starting Onions Yesterday, I looked over my record of planting dates trying to decide whether to start onions or geraniums. The data suggested it's six of one and a half dozen of another. I decided to go with onions. Part way through the onion germination, I may start the geranium seed on paper towels or coffee filters, moving germinated seed into pots of sterile potting mix when the onions come off the heat mat.
Today, I watered the potting mix a little more before putting plant labels at either end of rows in the trays. I used an old plastic ruler to make shallow furrows down the length of the trays and dropped in onion seed, trying, mostly unsuccessfully, to space the seeds a half inch apart.
The image at right shows the thermostats, but only just after I plugged them in. Generally, the heat mats and thermostats keep soil temperatures plus or minus 2° F of what the setting is, even in our rather cool basement in the winter time. Onion seed usually germinates in 4-8 days depending on soil temperature. Our yellow storage onion varieties for this year are Clear Dawn, Milestone, and Yellow of Parma. We'll be growing the venerable Walla Walla sweet onion (only stores for a couple of months at best). Our reds will be Red Bull, Rossa di Milano, Red Creole, and Red Carpet. Note that the Red Creole variety is a short day onion and produces small, early onions for us. And lastly, we'll grow some Southport White Globes for a few white onions. Our how-to, How We Grow Our Onions, gives more information about our onion growing practices.
Saturday, January 22, 2022 - I'm Lost!
The doctor's office is located in Bloomington, Indiana. So after getting a good report from the doctor about my neck injury, I headed over to Morgenstern Books. It's a bookstore that was run out of business in 1996 by big book chains before they folded their operations in Bloomington. One of our daughters and her husband are now co-owners of the reopened book vendor. Just like going to the grocery, I can't get out of a bookstore empty handed. I'm now immersed in reading Bob Woodard and Robert Acosta's Peril. And while just browsing, I ran across Catlady: A Love Letter to Women and Their Cats by Leah Goren that I think my wife will like.
I'm just beginning to see sprouts emerging from the onions I seeded on Tuesday. That's pretty much on schedule. The sprouts are really too tiny and sparse for a photo. We'll see what germination I get, as I cheated a bit and used some seed from 2020 and 2021. Even with frozen storage, onion seed only stays good for a year or so. The sweet corn and kidney bean germination test I started on January 16 is about done. I'm guessing I won't see any more seeds germinate, but I'll check the test for another day or two.
The results of the Accentuate sweet corn seed are a disappointing 70%. Corn seed is supposed to germinate at least at 80% under federal regulations to be sold. The Xtra-Tender white sh2 seed tested well. And the Yellowstone seed from Fedco aced the test.
Our SSE listings must be accessed online by searching for the seed variety name. Our Grassroots Seed Network listings of shared seed are grouped by the lister, me. Germination of the onion seed I started last Tuesday isn't impressing me much. Two of our four yellow onion varieties have pretty much failed to germinate after six days. The failure of some Milestone seed is about what I deserve for planting two year old seed. But a fresh packet of Clear Dawn onion seed from the Turtle Tree Seed Initiative failing is a real black eye for the non-profit. I bumped up the soil heating pad setting under the yellow onion tray from 75 to 77° F, but I'm guessing that won't help much. I also downgraded our listing on our Recommended Seed Suppliers page for Turtle Tree from "Trusted Suppliers" to "Others to Consider." On the upside, I still have lots of Yellow of Parma onion seed from the Southern Exposure Seed Exchange I can plant over the failed other yellow onion rows. Our tray of red onions is doing a bit better germinating, although some year old Red Creole seed and some two year old Southport White Globe seed are a bit slow coming up and showing spotty germination.
I moved our egg carton petunias seeded on January 1 to a kitchen windowsill where they'll remain until they outgrow their egg cells. The plants are tiny, but they've had about a week to acclimate under our plant lights in a cool basement after coming off a soil heating mat. Not every Supercascade and Double Cascade seed germinated. Fortunately, enough extra seed I'd planted germinated so all twelve cells in each egg carton has a petunia in it.
I wound up my indoor gardening today by transplanting some vinca and hostas started in communal pots to individual cells in fourpacks. The vincas, the Cora Cascade variety, are for hanging baskets. The hosta from saved seed will hopefully, eventually, end up in one of our flowerbeds. After my mini-rant yesterday about the bad Clear Dawn onion seed the Turtle Tree Seed Initiative sold me, I fired off a flame throwing email to them late last night. It was the kind of email that demanded immediate attention, at least in my view. After a full business day of no response, I'll soon need to remove any mention or endorsement of the Turtle Tree Seed Initiative from this web site. Selling bad seed along with ignoring customer complaints are a double whammy for seed sellers. Shame on them.
In the gloxinias' place in our dining room are two hanging basket pots of tradescantia zebrina. They should do well there in the strong morning light followed by less light through the afternoons. Bringing the pots up also serves the purpose of holding down a pretty, but rather slick table cloth our cats and dogs manage to pull off the table unless something heavy is holding it down.
I overseeded the failed row of Clear Dawn onions this morning with Yellow of Parma seed. I also removed the humidomes from the onion trays as a bit of mold was getting started on the soil surface. The mold got sprayed with Captan. I left the soil heating mats under the onions turned on, although I dialed down the temperature setting to 75° F. One bright spot with the onion starts is that the Red Creole and Southport White Globe half rows have begun to fill in better. The row of Red Carpet onions is a bit spotty on germination, but not a failure. I'd have re-seeded it, but I'm out of that variety of seed. This year's experience with starting onions is a reminder to me that it's always best to start with fresh onion seed. That is, of course, if vendors are selling actual fresh onion seed. I'll be replacing all of our onion seed for 2023.
In a day or two, the onion trays will come off the soil heating mats and go to the top shelf of our plant rack. That will make room on one of the mats for geraniums. I also hope to get some daisies, trailing impatiens, dianthus, and snapdragons seeded this month or in early February.
Thursday, January 27, 2022 - Federal Germination Standards
If you've ever wondered about federal minimum germination standards for vegetable seeds in interstate commerce, I've posted an edited table of those standards at right. I got them from §201.31 Minimum germination standards for vegetable seeds in interstate commerce. My interest in this was reheightened by some bad onion seed a usually reliable vendor sold us. Two emails to the vendor produced no response, so I sent one of the managers of the seller a snail mail. I'm not holding my breath for a response. Spinach
Spinach is one of those vegetables that you can enjoy fresh and still let go to seed to produce viable seed for future plantings. It's a savoyed, open pollinated variety developed by the Organic Seed Alliance (OSA) in partnership with organic farmers. I hadn't as yet printed and filled any seed packets for this year's spinach, so that got done last night. I put three extra packets of spinach seed in the freezer, only to need to pull one out today to fill a Grassroots Seed Network order for spinach and Crimson Sprinter tomato seed.
The bagged seed went into a covered Perma-nest tray over a heat mat set to 75° F. As the seeds sprout, I'll move them to three inch pots filled with sterile potting mix. Note that one can also start seeds on paper towels. I usually avoid that, as young roots can penetrate the towel and break off when lifting the seed off the towel. Also, some geranium varieties seem to germinate better when they receive a little light! Planting the seed lightly covered with vermiculite can work well.
Something I didn't do this year was to scarify the geranium seed. In past years, I've gently drawn the seed across an emery board to better allow oxygen and moisture to reach the inner seed. But I often would lose a seed or two by pressing too hard on it. Our feature story, Growing Geraniums from Seed, gives lots more information about growing seed geraniums. When digging the geranium seed out of our big freezer in the garage today, I brought in bags of commercial and saved daisy, trailing impatiens, dianthus, and snapdragon seed. I also brought in several packets of milkweed seed. I put a bit of three varieties of seed in a Ziploc, added some vermiculite, watered it lightly, and popped it into the fridge to stratify to improve germination.
Friday, January 28, 2022 - Seed Catalog Covers It's cold and spitting snow outside this morning. So I've chosen to stay inside and play around with some incredible artwork and photography that is featured on the seed catalog covers I've had access to. Below are the covers from seed houses we've ordered from over the years. Clicking on a cover image will open a larger version of it in a new tab or window. Clicking on the name of the seed house should take you to their home page.
A note on Annie's Heirloom Seeds catalog order page notes that they are out of print catalogs for 2022. Missing from our covers this year is Victory Seeds who decided not to publish one for various reasons. I've always liked their catalog and offerings. Still shown is the Stokes Seeds Commercial Growers Catalog. Unless you're ordering thousands of seeds, it's not an option for gardeners here in the United States. Strangely, Stokes still sells retail to gardeners in Canada. A bit more information about some of this vendors on our page of Recommended Seed Suppliers.
Today, each of our dogs got a small dish of slops topped with 0.5 ml of Ivermectin 1% injectable. With a vet's approval, we administer the cattle and sheep wormer orally to prevent heartworm in our dogs and actually treat one of our dogs that tested positive years ago for heartworm. Do note that sheepdogs don't do well with this treatment.
The sprouted seeds got moved to three inch pots filled with sterile potting mix. I made a slight depression in the soil of each pot, dropped in a sprouted seed, and lightly covered the seeds with vermiculite. Each seed got a very gentle tap down to ensure soil to seed contact. The tray of pots went over a soil heating mat set to 75° F. When grabbing our splashshot for today, I also took a picture of the plants currently growing in our sunroom. The room has no register, so what heat it gets comes from my office and from sunlight through the windows. Even in winter, the room gets really hot on sunny days...and quite cold, but not quite freezing at night.
Currently, four sage plants and two dianthus are actively growing in the sunroom. There are two pots of what I hope are dormant and not dead hostas. There are also a couple of sage that don't look like they're going to make it. During late winter, I often move geraniums to the sunroom to promote slower growth. Likewise, sometimes our brassicas will spend time in the sunroom before going out under a cold frame.
Sunday, January 30, 2022 - Weather
Wildfires, hurricanes, tornados, and blizzards our country has experienced the last couple of years bring climate change into perspective. In the nearly thirty years we've lived here, we've noticed wind speeds steadily increasing. Geraniums Three more geranium seeds had sprouted by noon today. I potted them up as I did with the nine that had sprouted yesterday. Most of yesterday's sprouts have pushed up through the vermiculite I covered them with.
Monday, January 31, 2022 - January Wrap-up
I began our January gardening by starting our egg carton petunias that will eventually wind up in hanging baskets beautifying our back porch. Then it was on to taking tradescantia zebrina and sage cuttings. I also did some seed germination tests (1, 2) to know what seed to trust planting in our garden plots this year. Sweet corn, kidney beans, and surprise, some old Eclipse supersweet pea seed got tested. Some of the tomato seed we'll use is a carryover from last year. It had all been hot water treated for disease control. But our Earlirouge, Moira, Quinte, and Crimson Sprinter saved seed we saved in 2021 had to be hot water treated. I won't be starting tomato transplants until April, but it's another job out of the way. Print seed catalogs continued to arrive all month. While our seed for the coming season had already arrived, I did end up placing one more seed order this month. Looking through seed catalogs is lots of fun, but it can prove to be expensive.
My copies of the books came from our daughter's bookstore in Bloomington, Indiana. I enjoyed seeing Samantha again and touring Morgenstern Books. Both titles, of course, are available from other book sellers such as Amazon and Alibris I got our onions and geraniums started. The onions are looking pretty good already. The geraniums have just emerged. I also started some hosta from seed and some trailing vinca for hanging baskets. Update I got a very nice call today from Anne of the Turtle Tree Seed Initiative. It appears that my emails to the non-profit ended up somewhere in the email nether. Anne didn't have an explanation about the poor germination of their Clear Dawn seed, but offered to replace it. I demurred. But with that call, I was able to return Turtle Tree to our list of Trusted Seed Suppliers.
Contact Steve Wood, the at Senior Gardening |
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. It usually tells me when to seed and how (light, total darkness, optimal temperature for good germination).
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for years in treating our seed. I switched this year to a four cup 
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