For me, gardening is a learning process... and I am constantly amazed to see the results of my labors.
With the exception of the amazing sunflowers (that I blogged about
here) I've always started my gardens with starter plants. You know, the ones that you can buy from Home Depot or Lowes that are already technically plants and you just have to transplant them and keep them alive. And that plan worked great for me. I grew quite a few delicious vegetables from starter plants. But this year, I was curious to see if I could grow plants from seeds.
Earlier this year, my mom gave me one of these flower kits from Target's dollar bins:
...except mine was Forget-Me-Nots. I went ahead and planted them, but without much hope. I kept thinking "you get what you pay for" and at a dollar, this was a cheap little kit. But lo and behold, a few days later, I saw some greenery poking through. A few weeks later and I still don't have flowers, but I have healthy leaves and optimism for the flowers.
I decided that if I could make cheap Target seeds grow, maybe I could make vegetable seeds grow. People do it all the time. Why not me? So when I found some seeds on sale at Publix one day, I bought a few kinds. Tomatoes, Jalapenos, Sweet Peppers and Onions. Apparently I wanted to grow my own salsa ingredients that day...
Since my past seed-growing experience hasn't been very successful, I wanted to try different methods to hedge my bets. For the first attempt, I temporarily sacrificed a brownie pan and filled it with dirt and sowed some of the seeds in little rows, watered them, set them in a sunny location indoors and kept an eye on them. To my amazement, within a week I saw signs of life. And then more and more every day after that. It's been less than two weeks and here's how it looked today:
I can't stress my amazement. Granted, I'm fully aware that many, if not most, of these will never grow to produce vegetables, but I'm still shocked that they've gotten this far. I've read that I shouldn't transplant them until the second set of leaves emerge, and they haven't yet, so for now, they'll stay warm indoors.
I started my second attempt several days after the first and for this one, I chose the damp paper towel method. If you didn't have to do this in elementary school science, it's pretty self-explanatory. I got a paper towel slightly damp, set a dozen seeds on it and folded it up. I put the towel in a plastic bag, zipped it up and kept it dark and warm. Within 3 or 4 days the seeds had sprouted. I struggled to find any clear answers on when to transplant seeds started this way, so I just put them back in the bags and waited a few more days. When I got them out today, the roots were looking much healthier and I decided to move them over to the soil.
Some of the tomato seedlings.
The seedlings (these are jalapenos) had actually started to take root in the paper towel, they were pretty firmly attached to it, so I went ahead and planted the pieces of the paper towel as well to keep the roots intact.
This is one of my tomato seedlings and I buried the paper towel and the roots about a 1/4" below the surface, where the seed would have been had I planted it in the soil from the start. The paper towels will decompose, so nothing to worry about there.
This is my new kitten, Emmy, and she was not happy that I was out on the porch planting and she was stuck inside.
When I was done planting them, I labeled some sticks and placed them in the pots as well.
So now all of my seedlings are in soil, with one set inside and one set outside. I'll continue to watch them and keep my fingers crossed they keep growing!
The pots they're in now are much too small for the full sized plants, so I'll eventually need to transplant them again. I've been collecting various large containers to hold the adults, including an old apple basket I scored from a flea market for $3. But when my friend Kendel sent me a link to a $68 Anthropologie coiled rope planter, I couldn't pass up the opportunity to turn this gardening adventure into a cheap crafting one as well. And I already had a popcorn tin from Christmas that was just itching to be repurposed. Cue the hot glue gun:
My crafts are rarely complicated, but this one takes the cake. Popcorn tin + hot glue gun + 75 yds of sisal rope = easy as it gets.
The back seam seemed the logical place to start. From there I just put a dab of glue every quarter of the way around the tin and kept wrapping.
In less than 20 minutes, we had gone from winter popcorn wonderland to summer planter. I'll need to line it with plastic to prevent rusting, but that's easily done. Mine is no where near as cute as Anthro's is, but it's also nowhere near as expensive. 75 yds of sisal will run you about $6. Since I already had the tin and the hot glue gun, that's a tenth of the cost of the Anthro one. For that, I will sacrifice a little style, because I still think this one is pretty great.
I'll be sure to keep you updated on my countdown to homemade salsa. :)
