Twelve days ago, I took a leap of faith and planted seeds in 64 pods. Four days ago, when around 15% of those seeds had not germinated, I filled in the blanks with more seeds. Most of those seeds are up already. I hope to plant another 64 pods sometime in the next month. In those pods I'll plant tomatoes, peppers and other seeds that need a long time, but are warm-weather plants. And, sometime in early>mid April, I'll plant some quick growing plants like cucumbers. Ted has suggested that the dining table might just become their interim home. This is new territory for us.
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We have a little experiment going in the dining room window this year. I want to be able to deliver fresh salad greens in the late spring/early summer to the food bank.
Below are the winners in the category: Quickest to Germinate and Fastest to Grow, Napa Cabbages. We try to garden as organically as we can. We've tried these in both the VegePod and direct-seeded into the garden in previous years. In both places, they attracted pests who liked to eat them. No pests here. So far.
Planted on the very same day as the Napa are these Kale plants, Westlandse variety. Love this type of kale! We enjoyed fresh kale well into January this year. But, no prizes in the fast growing category. Can you see that the new leaves are starting to display their curliness?
The majority of the pods are growing a Mesclun Mix. I am so tempted to squeeze one of these little leaves to smell what they are. That would probably kill them at this stage. Patience! I am hoping to have an early crop of salad greens and then plant more in late July for a fall crop. Last year that worked fairly well.
I like the gardening concept of cut-and-come-again. You just harvest the outer leaves, leaving the plant to grow more leaves. Cut and come again. It worked very well last fall.
Mr. Researcher (Ted) found me these cool little mini-greenhouses. We are hoping that the above plants can be moved individually into these pots and grow out on the dining room table. He's (of course he has) changed out the dining room lightbulbs for grow lights.
I hope the seedlings don't get discouraged when they look out the window. I am a little bit concerned that they will get too big for their pods and the VegePod won't be warm enough for them.
I won't tell them about my worries.
Last year we were able to deliver around 500-600 lbs. of fresh food to Fare Share. I wrote about that experiment here. We'll see where it goes this year.
“There are people in the world so hungry,
that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.”
Mahatma Gandhi
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