Todays Garden Tip

First, I want to thank Owen for sharing the story of his school's subsidized food program, very worthy of recognition I think. (My last post "growing food")
Today we are going to talk about starting plants from seed. I was determined to start as much as I could this year from seed. So I want to share what I have learned so far.
1- Don't over plant, it pained me so much to through out perfectly good plants that I just didn't have room for. I thought it would be easy to "offload" the excess but no, everyone has their way of doing this.
2- Don't start too early, but don't start too late. Ya I know, confusing for sure. I'm sitting here looking at snow, and more snow and cool temps that have kept my fast growing plants inside. I was really hopping to get some to the greenhouse, but it is still too cool to leave them out. Of coarse I could heat it, but that is not cost effective and my greenhouse is not quite finished so I'm stuck waiting for some warmer weather.
3- Make sure you have the time to tend to the plants. I spend about an hour every day looking after them. The onions when they pop up need help as they have trouble pulling the seed pod out of the soil. A quick snip and they do fine, they also need to be trimmed to about 3 inches till the third leaf comes. By then they need to be transplanted to deeper pots (at least 4"deep) and then trimmed to 5" to keep them from falling over.
As you can see it is involved to do this. This is my first year, but I have had the time to research everything on my number 1 tool, the iPad, and am learning quickly as I go. One thing is for sure, I'm going to have a lot of tomatoes this year, and will need to learn to can them. I plan to have a canning party and share the bounty with everyone that helps. And what a party that will be!
7 billion, canning food, and growing