Friday, March 20, 2009

Spring!!!

In honor of this being the first day of Spring, I thought I'd share our attempt at bringing life to some seeds. This has been a long, hard winter and we are itching to get out and start spring. Unfortunately it appears that winter will continue into spring here and we will continue to have cold rainy drizzly days. My hope is that these cold days gradually (or abruptly would be fine) change to warm days. We can keep the rainy part just lose the cold part. Recently we dug up some plants offered through Freecycle in hopes that we could get them in the ground the next day - Ha! They are still lying out in the rain waiting to be divided and stuck in the ground. Perhaps today or this weekend I'll brave the cold rain and just go stick them in the ground - I really wanted them for a new garden area but that requires working out in the cold rain longer than I want to. So on to our project that is bringing us spring.

We started with an empty clear plastic box. I happened to have this extra box after doing some sorting recently and set it aside for this task. I pulled out some peat pots that we had from starting seeds last year (seeds that never sprouted). Then it was off to the store to find some great seeds. After ruling out all the seeds that required 3 full months of very hot weather, my son picked out some great choices to attempt for this year: yarrow, cantaloupe, watermelon. I wanted a few more veges but who can argue with fruit and flowers. Then we got to work.

First he filled the peat pots with potting soil. I poured the seeds out into small containers so we could talk about the seeds and the shapes and requirements needed for each plant. Then came the fun....planting the seeds. On the inside of the lid of the plastic box, I placed a piece of tape with the name of the seed. Then he placed the peat pots on the lid. Matching the word with the seeds he planted several seeds in each pot according to the requirements needed for each plant (yarrow requires light to germinate so it stays on top of the soil). We put the watermelon seeds in a smaller greenhouse we had for growing herbs in hopes of getting extra heat to sprout these seeds. Finally after all the seeds were distributed, we watered the pots and spritzed the inside of the plastic box. My son snapped on the "bottom" of the box to the lid and we carefully slid it into a sunny (well it would be if we got sun) window. Our own indoor greenhouse terrarium.

We look forward to watching these seeds germinate and sprout and grow to great plants ready to be placed outside in our summer garden. We'll keep you posted.

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