No Pants on the Ground...Plants in the Ground

Whereas Sunday is normally my "cook up a storm" day, I opted to devote today to gardening. I mentioned in my previous post that my new puppy had chewed up my seeds packages while I "rested my eyes" for a short while. I checked out the packages today and it seems she had only wasted two of five packages. So I searched the two for any seeds remaining that would allow me to identify those I swept up the other night.

What luck! The first one checked was lettuce....a wispy little green thing. The other was spinach.....a roundish little seed easily distinguished from the lettuce seed. So my work was cut out for me. I dumped the contents of the Ziploc bag I had swept the seeds into on a dark-coloured magazine cover. Then I got my trusty Swiss Army knife and separated the seeds. This occupied around three hours. When I was done, I had lunch. It turns out separating seeds is hungry work and leaves one bleary-eyed.

I had done my due diligence and determined that three of the five could be planted directly in the prepared raised-bed. The other two wanted to be planted in a nursery and one of them wanted to be blanched!

So I planted the lettuce, spinach and the basil more or less according to the instructions on the packages. Then I turned to the web to try to learn how one blanches seeds. Now I know how to blanch spinach and broccoli before freezing but this did not seem to me to be a very kind thing to do to a seed. I could find nothing! The more research I did, the clearer it became that the instructions were meant for temperate climates and the reason for starting plants in a nursery was to avoid potential frost damage.

So I planted the eggplant and the onion seeds according to instructions for transplanting. We'll see what happens. But the seeds are in the ground and I look forward to chronicling the development of my little raised-bed garden in the rainforest.