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Sunday, May 15, 2011

Tomato Seedlings

 The seedlings under lights.

Amish pasted tomato seedlings in small soil blocks. they are ready to go into 2" soil blocks where they will grow for 4 weeks and than be transplanted

A close up of the newly germinated maters (I believe they are 2 days old)



Tomato cotyledon leaves ready to lose the seed covering

Tomatoes under 24 hours old

Tuesday, May 03, 2011

Rain and Boredom

It's raining again for the 15th or so day in a row (except last Saturday, the one warm and sunny day in the past two weeks).

We have gotten well over 14" of rain during this time and that means it is too wet to do much of anything outside now. We cannot transplant, we cannot hand weed, we cannot hoe, we cannot plant seed, we cannot mow, we cannot foliar feed.

About the only thing we can do is a bit of harvesting. We do have asparagus, rhubarb, early herbs (tarragon, chives, garlic chives and parsley), lettuce and spring mix that can be harvested (and will be  today and tomorrow for our Farm Share Initiative members).

The other thing we can do is make soiless mix for soil blocks, make soil blocks and start seeds in soil blocks. We can do everything but start seeds as we really don't have any seeds that need to be started in the next couple of days now that the tomato seeds have been started (that was yesterday). of course we will have to make 7 to 8 trays of large blocks for the tomato seedlings when they germinate in a couple of days and than put the best of the seedlings (i.e. the seeds that actually germinated and aren't too weird looking) in said soil blocks.

It has gotten to the point where we are getting bored. We should be working 7 to 10 hours a day right now getting things transplanted, hoed, harvested, sold, etc., and because of way too much rain we are in a holding pattern. This does allow us to get other things done like cleaning out the barn, putting an old Sears tractor back together (for mowing, which we cannot do), think about our marketing plans, clean parts of the house that have been ignored and waste time on Face Book. But we need to do farm work and that simply ain't happening