Wednesday, January 27, 2010

The Cycle Begins Again

The 2010 gardening season is starting again. I planted broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, parsley, chard, and celery in seed trays and will finish with the Chinese cabbage and assorted lettuces today. Still too early to get the tomatoes and peppers going but I will in a few weeks. I am trying something new this year. We and friends have been saving the cardboard tubes from paper towels and toilet paper all winter and I am cutting the TP tubes in half and using them to hold my potting soil for starting seeds. Much cheaper than buying the peat pots and it is finding something useful to do with all that cardboard. It allows me to get sixty plants started in a standard flat. Not absolutely 'organic' but close and it is recycling. The worms don't seem to have a problem with shredded newspaper so I figure the cardboard tubes couldn't be that far away. We shall see.

I been getting all the seed catalogs for weeks now and am just about ready to start ordering seeds. I saved a lot of seeds from last year for tomatoes, peppers, okra, squash, beans, etc. but things like cucumbers and such don't reliably save since I have multiple varieties planted and they cross. I would still get cukes but who knows what would come out in the end.

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