Plants
This is the first summer in the new house that I have the full growing season to garden. I did have a garden last year, but we moved into the house late and nothing really turned out very well since our growing season is so short here in the Pacific Nortwest. You really have to get a head start on your gardening if you want it to pay off.
I did quite a bit of reading and educating myself over the fall and winter so that come spring and summer I’d be ready. I did a little bit of jam making and canning last fall so I really want to grow a lot this year in the garden and can my excess, especially my tomatoes and tomatillos (salsa verde).
We have several local nurseries around here that provide a pretty decent selection of seedlings I could just go buy and plant, but 1) they are expensive ($8 for a tomato plant??) and 2) they don’t have the selection the online nurseries do. So.. this year I’m starting my own seedlings indoors. I bought a regular old shop flourescent light, built myself a little shelf in my office, and ordered some seeds from Territorial Seed Company.
Tomatoes
I ordered two different tomatoes, Northern Delight and Oregon Spring. Both are 65-75 day producers, which means they’ll bare tomatoes 65-75 days from being planted. That’s pretty fast.
The tomatillos I chose are called Organic Mexican Strain, and I got some jalepenos as well. These 4 plants needed 8 weeks head start so they are the only ones I’ve planted so far. My 4 week plants will get planted around April 1, and all of them will go in the ground May 1, our “safe frost date” here.
As you can see, they are growing like little weeds. I planted probably 12 seeds per container, which is way too many. 4-5 would have been plenty. I only plan on planting 4 plants of each one. That’s still a LOT of tomatoes, tomatillos and jalepenos though.
Jalapenos
Pretty soon I will up-pot to larger containers and have only 1 plant per container. I need to figure out a better system than just a shelf. Ideally each plant could be raised and lowered closer to the light as it grew, since they need to be about 1 inch from the light.
More to come as things grow!