Starting your Vegetable Garden - Day 1

Hi All!

Welcome to my blog. This is my first blog ever so please bear with me here.

I stay in Pune, India and have passion for just about three things... Gardening, sowing and training/grooming dogs (though I can't have one now because my husband is allergic to dogs).

I just love love love the blogs put up by so many wonderful people out there teaching new things every day and I thought I'd give a little back myself.

So this is about starting your own vegetable garden. I live in an apartment and am don't have the blessing of a garden so my options as well as imaginations are limited. To start with, you should either have nursery bought plants or should have the patience of starting plants by actually germinating the seeds. To me this seems like a cheaper option because I get like 30-50 seeds in a 10 gm seed sachet for Rs. 30 but I guess I will most likely just get one plant with that much. Without much further ado, here's how I started with it:

1. Get some good quality seeds from your local nursery / agriculture store.

I'd never bought seeds before though I'm supposed to come from a family of farmers. I went a little crazy and got me a lot of packets of different veggie seeds that I have no way of sowing them all. I don't even happen to have space enough to place more than ten-twelve 20-liter containers in my balcony.

I got seeds for broccoli, cos lettuce, okra, chillies, ornamental chillies, bottle gourd, bottle gourd, red cabbage, parsley, spinach, big tomatoes (cherry tomatoes weren't available... bummer!). BTW, I had gone to the nursery to get me a packet of just the cherry tomato seeds and came back with a huge bunch of seed packets all except for cherry tomatoes :(

2. To start the the Germination process, use either a seeding tray or something similar for the seeds. if you're using a seeding tray, grease the compartments before filling them with coco-peat (or seedling premixes). I just used coco peat and used an egg crate for a seeding tray :) I used a cling film to line the sides on the egg tray so that the seedlings will come out fine. Sometimes the roots can penetrate through cardboards and you may injure the tender roots while transplanting so its wise to use the cling film there.

4. Moist the potting mixture with a spray bottle.

5. Make tiny holes about 0.5 cm in the mixture and place seeds, cover with more mixture. I planted two in each cell about 0.5 cm apart. This ensures germination with seed packets with germination rates as low as 50%. :) I have planted ornamental and cayenne pepper seeds and regular tomatoes.


6. Now cover it all with a cling film of newspaper and leave it alone for 4-6 days depending on the germination period of the seeds you've planted. I didn't really cover mine with anything, just closed the lid. Oh, by the way, this is a good time to add some name tags or something to the seed slots as you won't know which plant is which after 3-4 weeks if you're germinating seeds from multiple plants.



(I know I spelt chilies wrong here)

5. After the seeds have germinated, uncover and move to an area that gets a bit of sunshine (not direct though) like on a window sill behind frosted/milk/textured glass.

For impatient gardeners like me this is a very testing time. I can't resist the urge to open the lid every 2 hours!

Well I guess I just have to wait with my fingers crossed until they germinate. I grown plants from seeds before like mustard or coriander (a spice almost like parsley) but I didn't really go through all this trouble. Just sprinkled the household spices in an empty pot.. watered a few days and then gave the spare seedlings to friends and kept a couple or so in the pot. So I'm really excited how this comes through.

Thansk for stopping by to read all this :)

================

For the benefit of whoever bothered reading through the whole post.. the update on the projects was that I had to go away for a weekend and the seed lings that were just germinating wilted..

I scrapped the project eventually because they were likely not going o be very good specimen to plant...

:( Sad.. but true...

I had a much better success rate by just tossing the seeds in a pot already having some plant in it..
================