Seed Starting 2014!

 I'm baaaack! It's been a while, but it's springtime, and that means I'm starting my seeds!

About two weeks ago I planted ground cherries, tomatoes, lettuce, kale, eggplant and sweet peppers.

Last year I grew Aunt Molly's Ground Cherries for the first time. They ended up being my favorite plant in the garden and were insanely productive (we still have ground cherry jelly in the pantry!) so I thought I'd try two varieties of GCs this year.

 

 On the tomato front, I decided to go with a couple hybrid varieties to see if they produce better than the heirlooms I grew last year.

I also thought I'd try starting lettuce and kale inside for the first time (Territorial Seed Company's packets are so pretty!).

Incidentally Territorial Seed and Park Seed are my two favorite veggie seed companies. Their catalogs are insanely easy to read with amazing photos, descriptions and planting instructions, and I've always had great luck with their plants and seeds, even though neither is New England based.

The pepper and eggplant seeds were free from an awesome event I attended at the beginning of March: the Growing Places Gardener's Gathering.  If you live in north-central MA, and you garden - this event is a must do in the spring! They had a seed exchange table with lots of free seeds for the taking. Unfortunately I forgot to label all the seeds I picked up and had to guess when I got home...

Two weeks later, this is how everything is looking:

In the above pic, left to right we have one row of kale, two rows of romaine lettuce, a row of eggplant, a row of what was peppers (whic never germinated - so yesterday I planted more ground cherries), a row and a half of big beef tomatoes, a row and a half of cherry tomatoes, and two rows of ground cherries (which aren't doing so well yet... see below).

Kale and lettuce are growing like gangbusters!

Happy Little Tomatoes!

Not so happy ground cherries... If you look hard you can see a few little sprouts - there's also this weird mossy mold stuff that seems to be doing better than the ground cherries...

My one and only fully sprouted ground cherry.

So yeah, I think my mistake with the ground cherries this year was planting just two seeds per square. The seeds are incredibly tiny. Last year I planted a clump of about 10 seeds per square. That gave me much better odds. In a lot of my squares the seed seems to be stuck on the end of the little plant stalk, and is too hard for the leaves to break through. This kind of thing happens with tomatoes pretty often (ground cherries are in the same family). I always end up with a few duds whose leaves never do emerge from the seed shell. They just get stuck in there and the plant eventually dies.  Ground cherries do have a longer germination period than tomatoes... so I'm hoping a few manage to break through.  Just to be on the safe side I planted big clumps of GC seeds in the row where the free pepper seeds never grew. Last year I had four big ground cherry plants and that was more than enough for our family to eat fresh and can, so I really just need four of them to survive. Go Ground Cherries! Go!

The awesome thing about Ground Cherries is once they make it through this semi-difficult baby stage, they grow like gangbusters. They're much easier to grow than tomatoes. They're basically very weed like and can take over sections of your garden (which I see as a good thing because I love them so much!). I wish I could find seedlings locally...

I also started some cabbage seeds I snagged at the Gardener's Gathering. The cabbages are living in the family room window right now, with some flower seedlings  my eight year old planted in Cub Scouts, lots of matchbox cars, and the cats.

Cabbages!

 

A well used window