Planting

I checked and yes, it's past time to plant to tomatoes and peppers.  So I tracked down the Root Trainers, brought them up to the house, and rinsed them out.
I laid out the plan for planting in them.  We have 8 Root Trainers with 32 cells each.  They are good for starting plants in because they are set up for deep roots and don't have a tendency to get root bound.  However, we also have peat pellets which are easy to transplant at an early stage.  The root trainers are harder to transplant because they are about the same depth as the pots we transplant into.  So we decided to put the tomatoes in the root trainers--sometimes they can go straight from there into the ground.  See below for the planting schematic.

Root Trainers

Peat pellets--hydrated on left, dehydrated on right.

It was nice in the greenhouse on Friday, as it snowed outside.  I labeled and loaded up two of the Root Trainers and planted them, except that I can't find the Marvel Stripe seed.  I know I spent a bunch of time finding it.  Is it backordered?  I'll have to go back and see what the deal was.  Apparently I got distracted.  We're off to Seattle this week, where perhaps they sell such seeds.  We tried everyplace in here town and no luck.

Saturday we got two of the peat pellet units planted, and Sunday the other of each.  There are a few plants which can be sold.  We'll see how it goes.  We're using saved seed for the Alma and the Red Demon.  If it works out well, I think we'll work on tomato seed as well.  With the peppers, we have dried versions of several, so it was easy to grab seed.  It's supposed to work, but I'm not 100% convinced there won't be cross pollination.

Peats waiting for the seeds to be pushed in.

The root trainers working on germination.  Small lettuce to the right.

The extra space onion experiment continues, but we decided we'd just buy some starts anyway.  Shawn smartly remembered that last year we didn't open the box until we were ready to plant, and then found that all the onions were moldy.  So the onions are hanging in the coldest room in our house (our bedroom).

The potatoes are keeping the onions company.