For this last day of January, it was time to get the garden seedlings started. Last year, I bought a few bags of a Burpee seed starter mix at Menards while it was on sale – that way I would have some ready to go this year. Usually, Menards does have their gardening items out on the shelves by this time of year, but I wanted to still get a good price on the seed starting mix.
In year’s past, I usually just went out to the garden and scooped up some soil. That has worked very well for me in the past and I can’t say there has been any problems with it. I know a lot of avid gardeners say to never use soil from the garden for seed starting, but I personally haven’t had an issue with it.
The biggest thing for me – water from the bottom, not on the top. This has greatly helped me in preventing what is known as ‘damping off’ disease where the seedlings get started – then perish.
I use the black trays as seen below. I then have some 16-ounce cups with holes in the bottom – so it slowly starts to soak up the water from the bottom.
So, I have prepared the containers for the Ventura Celery – which are the red cups.
This year, I revisited doing onions in one large tray. I have always done two large trays of onions with the actual black plastic containers that would separate them. It was very tedious and took up twice the space. However, when I have mixed all of the onions together (like I am doing again this year), it was somewhat difficult to separate the onion roots. Guess I will just hope for the best!
I didn’t want to reach out to Fedco Seeds to purchase only one packet of onion seed this year, so I am hoping that the onions will germinate from one and two year-old seed. The two-year old seed is my favorite standby – Copra Onions. These can grow to be very large. They are a yellow onion and if dried properly, they can last for months in storage.
The other onion I tried last year is a purple onion – Red Bull Onion. That onion seed is only a year old. I guess I won’t know what kind of onions I get until they start to bulb up in the summer time, but any onions work for us!
I have had a container of liquid fertilizer for several years – so I got it back out and mixed that with some water when getting the mix started.
With the Ventura Celery, I didn’t sow them right away – but will be doing that tomorrow. I always soak them in a little bit of water before hand. I also did the same with the onion seed, but I only let them soak for a few hours.