Getting Seeds Started

Since the weather has gotten warmer, Ashe and I have started working more on our garden projects for this year. On Saturday, we started a bunch of seeds for the garden that need to be started indoors for the best harvests. We planted a bunch of varieties of eggplants, tomatoes, peppers, onions, herbs, and edible flowers. I’ll talk about each of those individually as I learn more about them.

Then on Sunday, we went to the hardware store and bought a bunch of wood to assemble a tiered bucket planter that we’re going to use for the tomatoes, peppers and eggplants. We already have a ton of buckets from a friend of ours who works at a local restaurant, so a bucket planter seemed like the perfect thing to repurpose some of those buckets.

Five gallon buckets are some of the best things to have for gardening. Since we didn’t have a wheelbarrow when we moved into the house, I used a bunch of buckets to move mulch and compost from the driveway where it was delivered all around the property. It wasn’t nearly as efficient as having a wheelbarrow, but it was effective, especially when I had someone to help me fill them so that I could focus on moving the buckets. In addition to being able to use the buckets as planters for things like tomatoes, they also make really great bokashi buckets for dealing with food waste before putting it into the compost.

I expected to have to wait a while to be able to see growth in the seedlings since we just started them three days ago, but as you can see in the above picture, we’re already seeing quite a bit of growth in some of these pods. What I’m holding for you to see there is the Love-lies-bleeding Amaranth and has edible leaves that are supposed to be a passable substitute for spinach and seeds that can be cooked like quinoa, ground into flour, or even popped like popcorn, supposedly. The other flowers that are really starting to show a lot of growth are two varieties of Zinnia which are not only absolutely gorgeous but completely edible. As more seeds start to pop, I’ll post some more information about each one.