Starting the planting season
Last season we started off late with the seedlings which turned out pretty bad. This season we decided to turn things around an try to get our own home-grown vegetables again.
A few years back we rented a small space in a professional green house were we could sow our plants directly into the soil. Since it was a green house, we could start pretty early with sowing and the plants would grow a lot harder because of the extra warmth from the green house.
However, last year we moved into a new house where we wanted to create our own allotment on our roof terrace. Because this would require a lot of work we decided to give up our space in the green house to focus on our own allotment at home. This has caused some issues with our vegetables as we were too late with sowing our seeds and the ones we sowed, mainly pepper species, they didn’t germinate.
Because of this, we decided it was time for a change this year. After a few hours of searching online (and asking ChatGPT) we decided to give a heating map and a grow light a shot.
For those of you unfamiliar with those, the heating map is a small plate you can put under a grow box which will heat up the soil for about 5° celsius about the room temperature. And the growing light is there to provide the same wave lengths as the sun, which allows you to give the seedlings more “day light” allowing them to grow better and stronger.
Using this setup, we planted about 12 different species where we have at least 2 seeds per species. We’ve done this because not all seeds are guaranteed to germinate, and this gives us a better chance at getting seedlings.
The plants we’ve sowed so far are:
- Broccoli
- Bell pepper
- Cayenne pepper
- Jalapeño pepper
- Pimentos pepper
- Eggplant
- Cherry tomatoes
- Flesh tomatoes
- Honey tomatoes
- Leek
- Sugar melon
- Zucchini
We sowed these plants on a friday evening right before the weekend was about to start. During the weekend we didn’t really look at the seedlings as I thought it would take at least a week or two before anything visible would happen.
But, lo and behold, the next monday the zucchini’s already germinated (both of them). It was something I wasn’t expecting at all, but at least we get home-grown zucchini’s this year!
A couple of days later we saw the different pepper species sprout and the sugar melon was also popping up above the soil.
As of the writing of this entry, almost all of our seeds have germinated except for the cayenne peppers. So we might need to get other seeds for those as the ones we’ve used are already a couple of years old.