It has begun!

Gardening season is upon us. Well, indoor growing season anyway. I started some of my vegetable seeds. Seems a bit early to me, but I was recently mocked for not having started my indoor plants yet. I started 4 pots of peppers, 2 pots of tomatoes, and 1 pot of broccoli. They are all in 4" peat pots that can be directly transplanted into the ground so that hopefully there will be less transplant shock. Additionally, I planted half of the peppers in peat pellets that I put into the 4" pots with potting soil. Some people say they are really good for starting plants. We shall see. They are basically discs of compressed peat moss that are encased in some sort of mesh that looks suspiciously like nylon. When you put them in water, they expand to be about 1.5" wide and 2.5" high. They are at least fun to play with.

I don't plan on putting the tomatoes or peppers into the ground till mid-late may (they like to be warm), but the pots are pretty big, so they should be fine till then. I expect to plant a bunch more broccoli (hopefully 6 plants in total), but I'm going to do them in succession, so I'll plant a new one each week.

I did make some minor modifications to my planting dates spreadsheet and my garden map. The biggest change being that I think I can plant my brussels sprouts after my peas in the same spot. I'm not sure exactly when peas finish producing, but I know they are an early crop and I'm not scheduled to plant the brussels sprouts till mid-june. I could always start them indoors for a month or so if the peas are still producing. With the extra room I gave the potatoes a bit more elbow room and expanded the size of the broccoli and kohlrabi beds. A link to the planting dates spreadsheet can be found in my last post. A link to the planting map can be found here. Each square is 6", and south is at about 11 o'clock on the map. Gray areas are likely too shaded to use, black areas are effectively the borders of the area.