Seed Starting Redux

Things are starting to come up! Yay!  The quickest is the baby bok choi "Green Fortune" from Renee's Seeds, up in under a week.  I planted a square foot of 16, with 2 or 3 seeds in each space.  Once the seedlings get a bit bigger, I will snip the smaller one(s) and let just one plant grow in each space.  Always always always snip your seedling thinnings with scissors.  If you pull them out, you will disturb the roots of the seedling you want to keep!

Pole beans "Gold of Bacau" are starting to come up,  of seeds sowed Sunday 3/27.  I'm surprised they have taken that long, but it's still cold at night.  It may be that the warm days we've had this week spurred them into action.  With respect to bush beans, I saw one bean each of my Roma Italian and of my Golden Wax just starting to break the surface this morning in the garden.  Those were planted March 29th after work.

My Beit Alpha cucumbers are up, and just this morning, so are the Persian cukes (photo further down with the squash).   I actually found a 4-inch pot of Persian cuke seedlings at Yamagami's Nursery last weekend and snagged it-- I figured I could always have extra cukes or give them to a friend.  My Persian seeds are a few years old, so they might have been slow.  Hard to see, but I have some chard up in the six pack in the front and one or two in the back.

Squashes had me worried, as I hadn't seen any for the longest time (ok, really, just a week or so), but now they are starting to come up.  Sunshine kabocha are up this morning (with the Persian cukes), so I moved them outside.   Kamo kamo came up yesterday, and ditto.

A tour of the garden this morning revealed that I have about 10% of my chiogga beets up, and maybe 5% of my golden beets.  I'm excited to see more beets come up!!   No carrots yet, but they can take 21 days to come up.   Meanwhile, the bare-root strawberries are starting to flower.  Of my 10 plants, 3 of them dried up despite watering-- the roots just didn't take.  When the current plants start to send out runners, I'll ease those into the spaces left by the 3 that didn't make it, so that I'll have a full planter box of 10.

The rhubarb crown has put up 3 big leaves so far, and I peeked down at the base-- more leaves coming.  So tempting to pick just one stalk, but I need to let the plant establish itself and get strong.

Still need to start my lettuces, plant nigella seeds, replant some of the zinnias that don't seem to be coming up-- I've had good luck with the cosmos, and have a number of seedlings in the planter box, but only two zinnias so far.   My dahlias started coming up, and were promptly eaten down to a num by the snails, ARGH.  I don't know if the dahlia will regrow or not.  I might seed zinnias in that bed too, between the alyssum that I planted there (you can see the dahlia bed behind the rhubarb).