A Slow Start

Our Fruit trees arrived in the last week of April. We had bought 2 kinds of apple trees, a peach, a nectarine and a cherry. We had also bout a Poplar hybrid for a shade tree. We planted those behind our vegetable patch. They took a couple of weeks to stabilize their roots and start to sprout leaves.

We had gone to Menards and bought a large variety of vegetable seeds, that included carrots, radishes, bush beans, peas, cucumbers, zucchini, eggplant, tomato, green & red Bell peppers, Jalapenos, Habanero, Mixed peppers, eggplants, tomatoes, watermelons, thyme, cilantro and parsley. We also bought a few perennial flower bulbs for our flower patches in the front of the house.

Reading the instruction on the seed packets, we realised that all the Peppers, the eggplant and the tomatoes needed an early indoor start. But since we were only going to be experimenting we decided to start them indoors anyways. So we got ourselves a seedling tray and started the seedling indoor. The tray had a dome to keep the pellets moist and the seedlings shot up from the seeds.

It sat on our kitchen counter for a little more than 2 weeks, as per the instruction on the seed packets. We discovered that this was a little too long. Within a week the tomato seedlings had reach the max they could support on the pellets. By the end of two week most of the tomato seedlings were pretty weak. The Thyme which was the first to sprout, got a fungus within a week. The peppers and the eggplants were slower so the 2-week time frame suited them well.

By the last week of April we had seeded our garden, however we made one mistake. In our eagerness to keep the seeds from the birds, we had seeded them too deep. After a 3-week wait we saw only a few sprouts here and there and since we weren't sure what kind of leaves were were should be expecting, we had to let all sprouts grow before we could ascertain whether they were weed to the plats that we planted. So we had a slow start. We had also planted onions and potatoes, but there was no sign of sprouts on the ground, even after week 3.

So off we went to find a few plants that from the garden center that were in the sapling stage. We bought six-packers of tomatoes, green & red bell peppers and corn. We had them planted in the patch that we had still empty.

We used the six packs to transfer whatever seedlings were left in our seed tray. We set them up indoors for another week by our kitchen window.

We were off to a slow start. By the 4 week we had just a few sprouts and we decided to reseed everything. We dug up the potatoes and found that they had all sprouted and were slowly making their way to the surface. So we left most of them alone and covered them back with soil. We had to wait a little more.

The flower bulbs planted in the front of the house, for whatever reason, started slow too. The Phlox we bough from Stark Bros, went in the front too. But they never took off and dried away.