Well, to keep up the blogging streak I seem to have stumbled into, I’m going to continue to talk about gardening.
For just a bit.
Our seedlings are doing well, with one exception… the onions. We’re on our third try of germinating seeds and starting seedlings as a result of very few seedlings surviving from the first two batches. They germinate perfectly, lovely little green shoots pop up, and a few weeks later they sort of rot away. At first I thought it was a result of too much water, but honestly once the seeds germinate and I get shoots, I mist them daily and give them a light dose of water (in the well drained seedling bags we make) a few times a week. The other seedling varieties are thriving where these are dying.
After a little homework, I think I have the solution. Light. Lacking a greenhouse, we have to raise all our seedlings inside, and the best place is near the west-facing windows of our dining room where we get the most light during the day. It’s not as much light as I’d like, but we’ve had decent success there. Doing some poking around online, it seems a lot of folks who start onions from seed use grow lights to get them to the point where they can be transplanted outside… depending on the “season” your onions are (long or short), it can be up to 12 – 14 hours a day. We don’t get anywhere near that much light, and with the glorious rain we’ve been having the sky is more often than not overcast these days. I think the poor little guys are just dying off from light starvation.
So, I’ll be setting up an inexpensive grow-light system in the next few days that will hopefully let me generate strong onion seedlings, and will more than likely give a good healthy boost to the tomato, broccoli and Brussels sprouts seedlings. Stick it on a timer, and there’ll be nothing to monitor except growth.
There, that wasn’t so bad, now was it?