Yesterday, we talked about the pressures that we can see from growing indoors around this time. We figure it might be good to illustrate what’s actually going on in our indoor growing spaces. It’s a bit, umm, crazy.
Our absolute, maximum capacity within our indoor growing spaces is currently about 40 square feet. And at this very moment, we are using every square foot of it! It took us a lot of years to figure out what our total needs were, especially since we kept “upping the stakes” by trying to grow more and more from seed.
One of the main reasons we see so much pressure at this time is because we opt to sow our cucurbits (squash, cucumber, melon) into larger, 3.5 inch pots. These plants can really use a fair bit of soil, so it’s good to keep our watering demands down. We only get 18 plants per 1020 tray at this density, so it ends up adding quite a few trays to the mix. Between this and transplanting yesterday, we added 11 more trays to our indoor garden!
Our next objective is to move as many of our plants out to the greenhouse as we can over this next week. We’ve probably got a couple more transplanting sessions to work through, which will mark the point where we’re “fully ready” to move our garden outdoors. This is always a great feeling for us and we’re getting quite close to it!
One of the things we’re experimenting with this year is finalizing all of our sowing at five weeks to last frost. In years past, we’ve held off for another week on sowing cucumbers, sunflowers and a relatively few number of flowers. We do see some potential advantages to being “done” with indoor sowing this early, which will allow us to focus more on preparing our outdoor gardens. Sometimes we find these timing experiments worthwhile, sometimes we find its a bad idea! We’ll know in a few weeks from now!
The next few weeks do get quite crazy for us, with a lot of things in flight at the same time. We’ll be transplanting up, hardening off, prepping our actual gardens, performing continual watering and health checks, moving more plants to the greenhouse, getting some of our plants outdoors and shifting our greenhouse from seedling to summer mode.
We are slowly warming up here, so we’re really excited about shifting our focus towards our actual gardens! We’ve got a ton of work to do in the coming weeks and we’ll be sure to bring you along!
