Well, we are starting to put our most cold hardy plants in the ground! That means it’s time for one thing. Our family portrait!
We’ve been doing a family photo of all the plants we’ve raised each season for quite a few years now. We’re quite proud of our ability to raise, from seed, as many plants as we do indoors. It took us many, many years of learning and building our various skill sets and equipment to get here. It takes not only expertise in multiple stages of plant growth, but also expertise across many different types of growing habits and types of plants. Getting a seedling to survive to maturity is an effort, getting over 1,200 of them to survive is “a bit of an undertaking, guvna!”
Despite this pride, we also take a lot of humility in our growing efforts and we hope that shows by our regular demonstrations of failure and issues. Pretty much every single season, we get sent to the penalty box in one way or another. There is no gloating in gardening and for those that do, we’d suspect they are hiding their mistakes! One of the reasons we spend so much of our time and effort helping you all is because we know how hard this stuff is!
If you’ve had some successes this season, celebrate them! If you’ve raised some plants from seed, congratulations! You now know more about biology, gardening and how plants work than probably 99% of the population! You should be proud of your accomplishment! And you should also be ready to learn more, more and more!
Some stats from this year? We know we sowed a bit over 1,600 seeds this year. We had a number of problems with germination this season, but that’s because we’re actively studying seed viability. When we hit the wall, we hit the wall! Our final plant count is around 1,200 plants. Honestly, once we breached a thousand plants, we’ve kind of stopped keeping track. It’s just too many and we’re way too lazy to count them.
We are still technically in the process of hardening some of these plants off. We’re also protecting our peppers and cucumbers, keeping them inside until frost dangers are definitely clear. But, for the sake of all of you, we hoofed all of them into one place to capture our annual photo!
We’re excited to start our gardens and get these plants growing in the real world! It’s so good to finally be at this point again, we’re full on in the process of starting up our gardens now! We’re looking forward to growing with you this year.
