Gertrude's Flower Garden Weekly Diary
1/7/00 - Eight flats of impatiens, begonias, and Star zinnias are now growing under shop-lights on three tables. I have also planted browallia seeds, but they are not up yet. I plant browallia seeds directly in the plastic boxes where they will stay until they are ready to be put outside. This is because browallia seedlings are the only ones of all those that I plant that I have had great difficulty transplanting. Not only are they difficult to handle, but also they don't thrive when transplanted. Begonias, on the other hand, are very difficult to transplant, but will always grow well under almost any conditions. When I finally put browallia in pots (which is where most of them will go), I plant them in clumps without trying to separate the individual plants; again because they seem to resent having their roots pulled apart. Sometime in the next few days I will plant blue salvia seeds.
I ran out of my regular seed-starting mixture only to find that my garden supply store didn't have any in stock this early. I was able to find peat moss and vermiculite packaged separately, and made a 50-50 mixture that is satisfactory, but if you can locate the ready mixed product in your garden supply center, it is much better. A fellow gardener who reads these pages adds bonemeal, super phosphate and lime to this mix--I have never tried this but may in the future. Friends question why I start my planting this early. I guess there are two reasons: first, the amount of treansplanting that I do takes time, and, secondly, I want plants as large as possible by the time I risk planting outside--if they are beginning to flower, so much the better.
The picture for this week is of a plastic container of Wings begonia seeds that have germinated sufficiently to have been removed from the warming pad, but have not grown enough to transplant. You can see from this photograph how difficult it is to spread the seeds thinly and how hard it is to separate and transplant these tiny fellows. I am going to try next year to devise a method of planting begonia seeds more thinly, but the seeds are like dust so that it seems almost impossible to plant them further apart. These are the smallest seeds that I plant; the largest probably are sunflower seeds. These larger seeds are easily planted individually using tweezers, so that you can space your plants as you want them. Also, as you will see when we get to later plantings, I usually put larger seeds directly into the containers in which they will grow until set out in the garden. Intermediate sized seeds such as marigolds and regular zinnias are easy to plant and to transplant. As a general rule, the samllest seeds should be planted earliest with the larger seeds being planted last, if you want to have your seedlings the proper size at outside planting time.
1/14/00 - Gertrude's Flower Garden Weekly Diary
12/31/99 - Gertrude's Flower Garden Weekly Diary
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