Just nice looking plants. Not much to eat though. So after Jennifer from www.alibisrandom.blogspot.com reminded me that it is “only three more weeks until garden time”, I decided it was time to start some corn.

I had planned on one large corn patch of two varieties, but after reading a little about corn, I discovered that you may not get the kind of corn you want if you plant two varieties. In order to stay true to the variety of corn you plant, different varieties must be at least 100 ft. apart (so they say). I have two garden patches this year, so if I plant corn in the farthest edges of the two, they’ll end up being about 60 ft apart. So that’ll have to do. If it isn’t far enough – well, hopefully the corn I’m starting now will be finished pollinating before the later corn is ready to begin. And if that still doesn’t work out, maybe I’ll get funny corn. Either way, it’s worth a try.

So the variety that I’m planting today is ‘Fleet Bi-color’. Its very early for corn – just 59 days. If I’m calculating right, that should give me corn on July 26th. Hmmm, I’m not sure I’m that optimistic.

This hadn’t happened in the two previous years of starting seedlings indoors, so I wasn’t sure what I was doing wrong.
So I did a little research on the internet and it wasn’t hard to find the answer. It was… lack of fertilizer. As I was reading several articles that explained this to me, I realize that I had neglected to fertilize my seedlings this year! So, today I gave them a healthy dose of fertilizer (though I was tempted to do extra, I refrained…). We’ll see how long it takes for them to recover and if my problem was actually what I think it was.

If you’ve got a more accurate understanding of the problem, let me know!

First I collected my supplies:

• A plastic starter tray complete with transplanting inserts (72 cells)
• Some potting soil
• Plastic labels (plastic margarine container lids cut into strips)
• And yes, seeds

Then I filled the cells with the potting soil and lightly patted them down. Each cell then received a finger poke in the center. My daughter and I then dropped two seeds in each little hole. (The weaker of the two seedlings will get pinched out after they’ve sprouted.)

Here’s what I planted:

Peppers

• Blushing Beauty
• Early Prolific
• Fat ‘N’ Sassy

Tomatoes

• Oxheart
• T & T Monster
• Brandywine
• Betterboy
• Sugary
• Sweet Baby Girl
• Sweet Cluster

Cucumbers

• Summer Dance
• Improved Long Green
• National Pickling
• Diva

Watermelons

• Sweet Beauty
• New Queen
• Canada Early

Of course, I wanted to plant a few more varieties, but I was slow to get my seed order in. So I still wait for Lemon Boy and Big Beef tomatoes, Jade Star and Sweet Favorite watermelons, and Atlantic Giant pumpkins.

Then I covered up my little seeds with soil, dampened the soil with water from a spray bottle on ‘mist’ setting, placed a clear plastic lids on the tray, and placed them all under two florescent lights I had set up. (That gives me four bulbs/tubes set about six inches above the soil.)

So now we wait. I only started planting my seedlings indoors last year (as opposed to directly sowing them in the ground), so I’m still working on perfecting the art. Last year a lot of plants were leggy, but I think I’ve figured out the reasons why – but that’s for another post.

As for now, my question for you is: When do you start your seedlings? Lemme know!

Update: April 12, 2008

Here’s what things look like after five days. Several cucumbers are a solid inch tall already, the tomatoes have just started to appear (you can see them in the background, and a few watermelons have popped out of the dirt. I’m always amazed at how fast these things sprout!

Update: April 21, 2008

I got my other seeds (see above) shortly after my last update. Here’s a couple of pictures of what everything looks like now.