Starting Our Seedlings

Two weeks ago, we built the frame for our garden bed this year. Well, we built the main part anyway. We ran out of chicken wire before we started on the last 4 x 4 bed because we'd ordered a 4 x 12 bed, and we didn't realize it would come with enough materials to build a whole other bed. Anyway, we decided to start a few plants from seed last week.

We decided to start our beans indoors since they're a bit more "picky" than the radishes, which will be fine being planted directly into the beds this week. And the pumpkin won't be ready to plant for another month or so. We will be purchasing tomato, pepper, and cucumber plants from the same nursery we did last year in another few weeks, and we  plan to purchase several lettuce varieties while we were at Lowe's getting dirt in a couple of days..

As advised on the packet, we soaked our beans overnight. Then we used a few cheap, plastic cups we got on sale at Dollar General to plant the beans. They're the kind that are sturdy enough to be washed and reused, so we'll clean them up and keep them to use again next year. 

As you can probably tell, the pictures were taken from this week's vlog.

We tried the peat pots last year. They made a mess when we watered the seedlings, and then, when we dumped the pots into the new beds, we found out they didn't even really break down. So, they ended up keeping our plants root bound even after replanting, which could explain why they failed so badly last year.

Here are the girls planting the beans while I fill the cups with dirt.

To be quite frank, we'd planned to already have the beds finished and partially planted by now. However, I woke up Sunday morning with con crud following Huntsville Comic and Pop Culture Expo. That hung around for a couple of days, and then the migraine whose aura had me mangling everything I tried to say throughout the end of last week hit and hung around until late last night.

Pretty much the only thing that's gotten done all week, other than numerous naps and just a bit of work on a crochet project I'm trying to finish, was a trip to the local botanical gardens.

We do know several of the beans have germinated even though they still just look like cups full of damp dirt sitting on our kitchen table. A few were exposed during watering, and they'd sprouted their first roots. We know from last year's experiment that it will take another five or six days for the plant to push its way up through the soil.