Monday, April 14, 2008

It's like Magic!

There's a feeling you get after days of looking for the first seed sprouts, and finding only dirt, and then you see a little flash of green - like magic. And then there's the feeling that comes when you realize that it's only green discoloration on your perlite. *sniff* Is it mold? Or fungus? A sign I'm overwatering? But if I don't water, the seeds will dry out.
No seeds up yet. I think the soil isn't quite warm enough; what does the ambient temp need to be to raise soil temp to 70F?
I did swing by the gardens today; it's really too wet to be out there, but there were people working the soil anyway. I hope that works out for them. I'm going to wait another week or so, and hope it dries out some. In the meantime, the gardens are just off the lake, in a really beautiful part of the city. All the ice is off the lake (even up to last week, we had dangerous blue ice - you wouldn't want to be anywhere on it, but the lake was technically iced over).
I scored a few packets of seeds from the boxes (literally) donated by various companies. I love you, various companies! Especially those of you (Heirloom Seeds!) that donated this year's seeds and not just old ones.
It's interesting to see what's there. Of course, I don't know what people donated, but what remains now is:
-No peas to speak of. Either they weren't donated, or they were snapped up. (Ha, ha - get it? Snap peas? Snapped up?)
- Approximately 1 giant box of summer squash seeds, almost all one variety.
- A few beans, mostly yellow wax. (Nothing like equating a bean with ear wax to make me want to plant it.)
- Even less corn, but interesting varieties, including an heirloom blue sweet corn.
- A huge box of flower seeds, mostly marigold, funny sunflowers (ie dwarf or fuzzy or deformed in some way)
- Lots of heirloom tomatos
- Some root crops, including a 5 pound bag of beet seed. I would expect beet seeds to look like turnip seeds, because in my mind they're almost the same crop, but they look really different. Or else the package was mislabeled.
- Plenty of lettuce and endive seeds. No spinach. Maybe 2 arugula. No mustard. Very strange.
I was very restrained - I got a few packs of flowers, and a pack of beans because I loved the packaging. OK, OK, I might have also got some salsify. And sage. And rutabaga. And, all right, I may have a slight issue with the overstocking of seeds, but I can't help it. It could be worse - do you have any idea how expensive art supplies are these days? I am sharing seeds with a co-worker and my neighbor, so it's not completely out of hand. And I gave some pea seeds to someone who was very distraught there weren't any left.

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