Down and dirty
Oh. Ow. Gardening is hard work.
I’m partway through assembling my balcony garden. On the weekend my gf and I went to one last gardening workshop (bio-intensive gardening) and then made a run to Canadian Tire for supplies. I snagged all their remaining bags of aged compost (for a total of seven, since I already had one), two giganto-bricks of coco coir, and five bags of vermiculite. So far I believe I’ve used one and a half bags of compost, one brick of coco, and three and bit bags of the vermiculite. These have filled seven large pots, three long narrow planters, and one huuuuuuge apple basket (already planted with potatoes). I’d still be out there, but I ran out of coco. Good enough reason for taking a break — the other brick is rehydrating as I type this. The add-water-and-stir nature of Coco coir makes me laugh — instant garden!
It’s too bad I don’t dare plant any of my seedlings tonight, but we have a frost warning! What the hell? We’re only three days from June! Getting frost warnings now is just crazy.
I have this terrible suspicion that I don’t have enough pots for all my seedlings. *le sigh* So far I have two large cherry tomato seedlings (yellow cherry), two sweet mini bell pepper plants, one cucumber plant (‘salad bush’), a cayenne pepper, and an anaheim ‘salsa pepper’. Oh, and a wee oregano plant. All those came from the seedling sale we went to on the weekend, and if those were all I had to plant, all would be well. But, um, there are also the seedlings I grew myself — two yellow bean plants (doing very well), brussel sprouts, chard, turnips, more cherry tomatoes (all very wee), and a bunch of herbs. So yes, Not Enough Pots.
In addition to the pots for planting, I now have two large-ish rectangular containers full of last year’s dirt. Coupled with the fact that I’m attending a vermiculture workshop on Friday, I’m having composty ideas for those.
On the indoor front, my spinach experiment has gone awry in the strangest way. After a good start, the wee plants sort of…faltered. They didn’t die, but they didn’t thrive either. The first set is now 5 1/2 weeks old, and here’s the thing — they’re only a couple inches high, and they only have a few teeny leaves each…but they’re flowering. That’s just so not right. Flowering, to me, suggests that a plant has found all the nutrients it needs, reached the peak of its growth, and is ready to reproduce. There’s no way these spindly seedlings look ready for that, and yet there they go. I can’t explain it. The mesclun mix in the same container is all bushy and leafy. Maybe a bit pale, but definitely not failing in the same way as the spinach. I’m stumped. Maybe it’s a light issue, or maybe it’s the soil (they’re planted in pure coco coir), or maybe it’s the seeds themselves. My plan is to plant some more outside, and perhaps set up a daylight lamp next to the existing indoor planter, and see if either does better. Hopefully I’ll figure out what’s going on, because I really would like to be able to grow greens indoors year ’round.
Okay, time to go finish rehydrating the coco coir. Ta!
The Lustful Vegan 
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