The official beginning of the farm

Today is the day that we finally got our hands dirty, so to speak. After much research on all of my vegetable varieties, I came up with a (rough) plan on what to plant, when. My tomatoes, eggplant, and peppers are all warm weather plants, which is a challenge for Maine gardening. To give them the best shot possible at actually producing fruit, these guys are getting a head start indoors. A few weeks ago, Mike built me a grow light setup, and we bought a cheap folding table to complete the indoor farm. At Skillins, my new favorite store, I bought two burpee seed starting sets, with 72 cells each, peat pods, self watering tray, and clear plastic covers - the idea being that each set will give me all that I need to start out my seeds. Initially I was thinking of starting some squash inside, too, and so we also bought several Cow Pots, which are pots made of composted cow manure, that contain your seedlings and then dissolve into fertilizer once you transplant outside. I also had some zinnia and marigold seeds whose packets instructed me to start them inside, so they also went into round one.

As soon as we started setting up, I realized that there's no way I'll have room to start the squash seeds inside. I was on the fence about that plan anyway, as I've read in several books that squash plants don't like to be transplanted, so the space issue made the final decision easy. To the eggplant went the Cow Pots, to prevent transplant stress. Zinnia, marigolds, tomatoes and peppers went into the Burpee containers.

I decided that I should probably plant as many seeds as possible, as I'm trying to be realistic about the number of plants I grow that will actually survive. So we filled all of the cells, going especially heavy on the tomatoes and peppers. This way, if some don't make it, I should still have viable seedlings. And if they grow particularly well, then I can thin to the best, and give some of the seedlings to my parents. My father approves of this plan.

Actually planting the seeds was a little tricky. The container instructions were to place only 1-2 seeds per cell, but that was much easier said than done. For the most part, I think I managed to keep it down to 2-3 seeds per cell, but as we were finishing up I noticed quite a few rogue seeds that fell into random cells. Getting to the flowers was a relief, as the zinnia and marigold seeds were much bigger!

Now they are all planted and covered. We have heat mats under the eggplant tray and under the container that has the majority of the tomatoes and peppers, to keep the soil warm. We'll turn on the grow lights once we see green - hopefully within the next week or so.