Blog Entry #5: Planting the food I'll be cooking this fall...hopefully

Before you can cook with the very freshest of ingredients, you have to grow them yourself. Right? Well, maybe not, there's always the Farmer's Market, but I've got some time off currently, so I've decided to grow a potted garden (since after back surgery I cannot bend over). My mother told me I could use the carton our eggs came in to start the seeds, so I got some seeds and soil and voila! A couple short weeks later I have tiny shoots of green (good thing I labeled the carton, or I would have NO idea what they were). The tall ones here are spinach, and the little ones just starting to the right are Roma tomatoes.

Then comes the hard part

I've been told that after they have two leaves on them, you can "thin" them, or transplant them further apart in deeper pots. Well, as you can see, both of these are coming right out of the soil with two leaves, so I jumped right in and got some MORE soil and transplanted the spinach to little pots.

You think you're done? HA!

I texted my brother-in-law, who grows a fantasticly large garden every year, to get his advice about transplanting the tomatoes, since I've heard they can be tricky. He said that tomatoes need very DEEP pots since they send down roots that are equal in height to the plant that grows up. So I find our second deepest pots, since I don't think these tiny little guys are ready for the big time yet. Aaaaand ran out of soil. Ok, so I bring my husband to the hardware store and we get GIANT bags of soil.

Two days later I'm at it again. After adding soil to the shallow pot, I worked on finishing planting the rest of the Romas, which seemingly grew overnight in a clump. At this point, I realize that I'm freezing my butt off, and go inside to get a jacket and a warm hat. I also changed my gardening gloves, as they were soaking wet. For some reason, the soil I bought was already VERY wet. Maybe the bag had a hole in it? I don't know. Good thing I never threw out my old gardening gloves!

The other veggie that I needed to thin out and transplant, were my green onions. I realized that the green onions have not only sprouted, they ALL sprouted. Like, seriously, did I accidentally spill the ENTIRE packet of seeds into the carton? There was literally a WAD of green onions!

Fun Fact: Green onions smell like onions even when they are this small

I very carefully pulled them apart—some of them did not survive the process, but after what seemed like an eternity (maybe because I had skipped breakfast and my tummy was growling) I finally got them all planted in a pretty cool rectangular planter that is designed to sit right on the wooden railing of a deck. Which is convenient, since that's where I planned to put them as soon as it warms up enough to put them outside. Herein lies the next problem.... where do I put them until then? One would think that by April 3rd in the Pacific Northwest it would be safe to assume we'd passed the final frost of the season, but nope. Thanks, Climate Change.