Seed Starting

I mentioned that I'm using Jiffy-7 peat pellet greenhouses. I went this route for a few reasons. One was my uncle used the Burpee trays last year and complained about them. He said the chambers were too small and it was nearly impossible to get the plants out without either destroying the tray or destroying the root ball. So in looking for alternatives, I found the Jiffys and I liked that the tray and dome seemed to be decent quality -- good enough to last a few years. Also, the pellets have a netting around them to hold them together. This way, you can lift individual cells out as they germinate without disturbing any others. Also, they're very inexpensive. And next year, all I have to do is buy a couple packs of refill pellets to reduce costs even more.

Most seeds call for an ideal germination temperature of 70-75 degrees. I don't have anyplace in my house that gets this warm. I tried the top of the fridge, on top of the furnace, everywhere. Best I can do is a max of 65-68. So I resorted to sticking the tray on an ordinary heating pad for a few hours a day just to give it a boost. I know some say this isn't a good idea since regular heating pads aren't designed for this, but I keep a close eye on them and just use it for a few hours at a time.

What I've been doing is, once the seeds sprout, put them under the lights. Then, once they start to get their first true leaves, I'll thin them to one per pellet, then transplant them to a plastic cup. I remove the netting at this time since I've read reports of the netting impeding the roots.

Introduction

My name is Luke. I'm 31 and live in Central New Jersey with my wife and two kids (ages 6 and 5). I've worked in IT for 7 years (most recently as a SysAdmin) until being laid off in Oct., 2008. After being laid off, my wife and I decided to fulfill a dream of ours of starting a vegetable garden in the backyard. Inspired by my uncle, who started started a small square foot garden in Maine last summer, I bought a used copy of Mel Bartholomew's Square Foot Gardening and started planning our garden.

Being technical by nature, I really like the orderliness and efficiency of SFG. We decided to put 4 4x4 boxes on a gravel area just off the patio behind our house. This space is largely wasted and previously had a small, neglected flower bed along the edge.


After a bit of clearing, leveling and digging, the space looked like this -->


I then bought the 8 8ft 2x10's from Home Depot, some landscape fabric from Walmart, and got to building using some deck screws left over from another project. And a couple weeks later, I had this...


Those 2x2's sticking up from each box are cleats to which I'll bolt the trellises when the time comes. Next came filling the boxes with some variation of Mel's mix.

As stated in the SFG book, "Mel's Mix" is 1/3 peat, 1/3 vermiculite, 1/3 compost. After an inital search for vermiculite, it seemed like it was generally unavailable in central Jersey, or was obscenely expensive. Best price I found locally was at Agway, and that was $25 for a 4 cu ft bag. I just about decided I wasn't going to use it when I stumbled on a wholesaler 20 minutes away who also sold to the public. Price was $13.15 a bag, so I shot over there and bought 4 bags.

I then bought a couple bales of peat at Lowes and some various composts and manure at the local Agway (which is only 5 blocks away). After a laborious afternoon of mixing and shoveling, I got the beds pretty much filled. The next weekend, I bought another 10 bags of manure to top off the beds. I was skeptical at first, but this soil is absolutely beautiful -- light, friable, and holds moisture well.


I planned to grow everything from seed and bought 2 Jiffy-7 greenhouses, 72 pellets each, as well as a 25-pellet version with slightly larger pellets. Most of my seeds came from Pinetree Seeds. The nice thing about them is the price and the fact that the envelopes contain a reasonable amount of seeds. One of the advantages of SFG is supposed to be that you don't plant a huge row of plants, only to thin out 80% later on, so a small number of seeds is needed.

I threw together a simple 2-shelf rack made of 2x2's and one 4 ft florescent T12 light fixture from Walmart for $10. The other 3 fixtures came from Freecycle so didn't cost anything. This gives me 4 40W light tubes per shelf. Should be plenty of space for now. It's tucked in the corner of our partially finished basement. Stays rather cool (58-60 degrees), but the seedlings don't seem to mind it.



At the moment, I have parsley, broccoli, cauliflower, cayenne peppers, California Wonder bell peppers, four types of tomatoes, three types of lettuce, mint and basil started indoors. I also have yellow onions (from sets) and two types of peas planted out in the garden. I have a master spreadsheet with my garden grids, planting schedule, cost breakdown, harvest schedule, succession planting schedule, etc. EVERYTHING I do is based off this spreadsheet, and yes I do have it backed up since I'd be totally lost without it!

Today, I built the chicken wire fence around the first box. We have a lot of rabbits around here so keeping them out is a priority. It took me a while to come up with something suitable. For a variety of reasons we can't fence in the whole area at the moment, so I needed to come up with something to surround the individual boxes. So it needed to be either low enough to reach over to tend the plants or be easily removable. I ended up building 2ftx4ft frames from 1x2's and tacking chicken wire to it. These panels are placed against the box and tied at the corners. Seems like it will work. I need to build the rest next week.


Well, this was a long introductory post, but there was a lot to get up-to-date. Overall, I'm enjoying our first garden and it has really given me something to keep me going during my layoff. Now that the planning and most of the construction is done, when I do eventually manage to find work, I should be able to tend to the maintenance.