Henbogle

It is April school vacation week here at Henbogle.  As is our wont, we are spending much of the week on outdoor projects. One eagerly anticipated project is some improvements to our water system.  Several years ago, we buried a plastic water line running to the back garden using pipe we purchased at a yard sale. We had enough pipe to run the line to the end of the freestanding deck.  We continued the line using ordinary garden hose, and it has worked great.

We ran garden hose all the way to the garden sink, adding a post with a spigot for a hose to the garden, and later added a dedicated buried line to the hoop house.  This worked fantastically well, no more dragging the hose out of the way for the mower, but watering in the garden still meant dragging a hose over the fence or through a gate and snaking around the raised beds, a pain for the gardener and dangerous for the plants.

Last year, we saw more of the plastic pipe at the town dump (aka transfer station).  Following our tradition of dump picking, we snagged it, awaiting the need to replace the garden hose line.  Sure enough, when we turned the water on a few days ago, the old garden hose was leaking, so it meant it was time to replace it with the plastic pipe.  We decided while we are at it,we might as well move the spigot to give room to expand the compost bins, and we are also going to add a spigot in the garden at the end of the hoophouse, splicing the buried line that runs to the hoop house.  This will be much easier to use for watering in the vegetable garden.

Unfortunately we need to run the pipe through the middle of a nasty, thuggish, multiflora rose bush today, that will be fun.  We’ve been hacking away at the rose over time, but this one is the biggest of them, and starts on our neighbors’ property, so we’ve been a bit slower at getting rid of it.  It does make for good cover for the birds, who fly straight to it whenever a neighborhood cat comes calling, so I do feel a tiny bit of reluctance to get rid of it altogether.  Nonetheless, we’ll hack away more today, and I hope have a new spigot in the garden before lunch.  At times like this I love being handy.

I’ve always been a slurp-the-water-out-of-your-hand-to-rinse-your-teeth kind of gal.  Dan came home with some little paper cups for the bathroom a while ago, and recently, upon observing one sitting by the sink in a little puddle of water getting soggy, I realized they are made with un-coated paper.

I wondered, will these work for seed starting?  I’d love to find a replacement for making paper pots, which is my favorite seed starting method, but are just a bit time-consuming for the amount of seed starting I normally do at Henbogle.  I am giving them a try in hopes I can plant the whole thing right in the soil, no need to remove the seedling from the paper cup.  I hope it works, as it would be an easy and low-cost solution.

Here’s my trial of lettuce and pac choi, along with my tomato starts and my peppers, out catching some rays.

I finally started some tomatoes Saturday (4/14).  This year I’ve started:

Rose (78 days)
Cherokee Purple (72 days)
Pineapple (85 days)
Martha Washington (78 days)
Speckled Roman (85 days), and
Sun Gold cherry (57 days)

I’d like one more red slicing variety.  Any recommendations?

I needed some germination mix, so I popped into Johnny’s Selected Seeds this morning.  Since I was there, I picked up a few more seeds, too.  I picked up some fresh tomato seeds, Shiro, an early maturing Pac Choi, fresh carrot seed, some Chinese broccoli, and Benary’s Giant Zinnias, my **favorite** annual flower.  Time to sow those tomato seeds!

My peppers germinated pretty well this year.   I just had two pots with seeds that did not germinate, but as I had used a couple of seeds per pot, I had spare seedlings to transplant into those pots.  Today was the day.

My first step was to give all the plants their first taste of Neptune’s Harvest fish emulsion.  Yum!  I watered the seedlings with a dilute mixture.  After they’d had a chance to uptake some of the liquid, I used a discarded kitchen knife to carefully lift out the seedling to be transplanted, trying to minimize root disturbance.

I then popped the replacement seedling into the cup, and gave it a bit more fertilizer to settle it into the potting mix.

Once that was done, it was time to thin the remaining seedlings to a single seedling per cup.  I used some fine snips to do this, selecting the most robust seedling to keep.  In some cases it was pretty obvious which seedling to select, in other cases, it was not.

I did keep an extra each of the Carmen and Baby Bell peppers in case the first transplant procedure goes awry.

I am liking the party cup method of seed starting, especially when I’m starting multiple varieties of the same plant.  It makes the labeling much easier, something I always find challenging.  It uses more potting mix, which adds cost, but the trade-off is less potting up of seedlings, which is time intensive for the gardener and harder on the seedlings.  I throw all my used potting mix into my compost or use it for larger container planting so it doesn’t go to waste.  It’s all about the trade-offs, and in this case, I can’t buy time, but I can buy potting mix.