Seeds are sprouting!

Our sugar snap and snow peas are coming up and you can see a pair of spinach "ears" poking out. Since those are all frost-hardy, they'll probably be ready to go out by mid-April. If the weather cooperates and I can get some cold frames built, I might put some out earlier just to experiment.

Since this is our first dive into gardening, we're experimenting with different seed starting tools. In the picture above, we're using a Jiffy Self-Watering Greenhouse. Basically, it's a flat of dehydrated coir pellets wrapped in netting sitting over a wicking mat and reservoir. Add water and, insta-presto, you have 2" soil blocks. Since they're not in containers they should be easier on the roots. Roots will self-prune when they hit air whereas they'll grow back on themselves and turn into a gnarly mess in those traditional seedling flats.

To help us figure everything out, we've been using a garden planner and it's helped immensely.

We've re-purposed a small workbench as our potting station for making soil blocks. On the shelf below you can see our watering pitcher, chamomile tea, and cinnamon sticks. The chamomile and cinnamon helps kill off fungus and otherwise keep the ick off your seedlings and soil. I add a little plant food as well although the plants should be fairly set with the compost in the blocks.

Our growing shelf. We're going to need to buy another one soon but this one is great to get us started. The bottom shelf (not shown) has a heating pad. Those are 4' long shop lights with two T-8 florescent bulbs in each (1800 lumen 5000k bulbs with a CRI of 90).

To keep your plants from getting too leggy, you want to keep the lights as close to the seedlings as possible. Florescent lights are real low temp so there's no worry about frying your plants. As you can see in that awesome action shot, it's trivial to raise and lower our lights.

The lights are plugged into two power strips that are cinched to one of the shelves. This makes moving things around really easy. The power strips are then plugged into a timer that cycles them on and off for a set amount of time every day. Eventually, I want to build some custom LED blocks to replace the shop lights, but for now, this set-up seems to be working very well.