It’s been a month since I planted my veggie seeds for this year’s initial garden starts. After garnering good quality seedling growth, I fell a bit behind in transplanting my seed starts to larger pots. Whatever the case, I started the transfer process a couple of days ago. I’ve moved several seedlings from their trays into non-peat pots, as well as a few old peat pots I had left over from past experiments. I’ve even moved a few into old, drilled-out yogurt containers. It’s all an experiment, so we’ll see where it takes us.

Fortunately, the results so far have been beyond my expectations (which, admittedly, were low) and the starts are doing well. I’ve kept them nested under high-UV florescents since their original planting, and at a temperature ranging from 60 to 74 degrees. I thought the space would be too cool, but my tomatoes are thriving. As an additional step to help toughen the starts and ensure they don’t suffer from damping off disease, I’ve added in a low-speed fan to keep the air circulating around the starts. We should be ready to move to cold frames as soon as I complete my construction of said frames.

Just for giggles, I sampled seeds in both plantable compressed soil discs (which expand when water is added) as well as plantable pots with seed-starting soil. The onions are thriving more in the plantable pots than the discs, but tomatoes in the pots are lagging far behind those started in discs, which have produced amazing growth for both varieties of tomatoes. Additionally, my lettuce starts are doing well in both the compressed discs and pots, as expected (lettuce is just plain hardy).

Next up: potatoes! My Ukon Gold seed potatoes arrived this week and I’ve got an organic russet sprouting as I type this. Good times ahead!