Well, we’ve hit a major seasonal hurdle! We now have more plants out in the greenhouse or in the process of hardening off than we have in seeding trays! We are finally well over halfway done with our seed raising process!
This weekend was a huge transplanting session for us, possibly the largest yet of the season. We transplanted four hundred plants yesterday! It’s been good to get those seeding trays out of the grow room, which allows us to focus more on bringing our plants to transplant maturity.
At this point in the season, we need to start accounting for some huge amounts labor that will need to occur in coming weeks. Starting next weekend, we’ll be beginning the prep work of our gardens! This work takes much of our weekends and sometimes several weeknights. It is also physically exhausting and we’ll simply have less time to focus on our plant raising process.
What this means is that we’re often transplanting young seedlings at a far less mature stage than we usually would. While this is a delicate process, and is slightly more risky than transplanting a more robust seedling, it’s worthwhile for us to take those risks.
Over the years of working a larger production focused garden, we’ve definitely learned to minimize the amount of future labor our seed raising process requires. Sometimes it’s better to do things sooner, just so they can be done and over with.
The next five to six weeks will bring us to the brink of everything we can possibly do. Between our full time jobs, preparing and planting multiple large gardens, our social media efforts and all the basic life stuff that we still have to do, pretty much every minute of every day will be valuable to us.
It will bring pain, exhaustion and a questioning of our life choices. But, we’ve been through this many times and we know it’s worth it in the end. We’re sitting on the eve of it all and are looking forward to the end!
