The Planting Begins

April 1, 2007

No April Fool’s here… the planting has begun! Well not out in the garden yet but here in the house in seed flats and starter trays. We need to get everything started as soon as possible so that we can fit everything into our growing window. Up here in the mountains of Arizona the summers are hot, but they aren’t very long and the nights can get cool… So all of our seeds have been selected for short growing seasons and high altitude gardening. After searching over the entire area yesterday, we couldn’t find any grow mats/heat mats… but since we needed to get started we did! I ordered some online last night and have jury rigged some heat sources to hopefully work… I put my oil radiator in between and underneath the doors of the wood stove in the inglenook; and put a wire rack on top of the doors and then put the seed trays on top of that… That should give them some heat until the heat mats arrive.

We opted to use some different systems for starting our seeds. We used both Jiffy peat pellets and seed trays with Jiffy strips. The Jiffy peat pellets are soaked in warm water and they pop up to a 1 ½ to 2 inches high filled with sterile mix. The Jiffy strips are peat pots that need to be filled with a soil mix. Last night I set up a station in the kitchen and began adding warm water to the Jiffy pots… they didn’t make a sound but they did “pop” up!!!

I started in on the slowest to germinate and slowest to grow which are the peppers and tomatoes. I started the Alcalde Chile seeds and some unknown seeds from a pepper that Paul “F-ing” Mier gave us. We ran into him on our rounds about town yesterday and he just happened to have some peppers that were too hot for him. Paul is a tall, Lutheran gringo so we weren’t surprised! I have decided to call the unknown peppers the Paul “F-ing” Peppers! So we shall see… I also got all the tomato seeds planted as well. It was pretty exciting. They spent the night on top of the refrigerator until I could fix up the heater.

Today, I planted even more seeds… We also received some bell peppers seeds from another teacher at school. He gave us some red, orange and yellow bell pepper seeds. I hope the come up true because not only are they tasty but the look good in just about everything! Salad, stir fry, and fajitas! I also got started on some melons. I started almost all of the melons: Baby Little Flower Watermelon, Tigger Melon, Sweet Granite and Maverick Cantaloupes as well as the Chimayo Melon too! I haven’t planted any flower seeds yet… but those will be next weekend! Once the garden is completely enclosed I will also be able to set out the lettuces, radishes, carrots, etc. We will also plant the beans and peas too! They don’t mind the cooler weather so much…

And speaking of the garden enclosure, we borrowed a come-along from Adam’s father and were able to secure the last section of fencing. Adam has been tidying up and placing the rabbit fencing up as well. It should be varmint proof before too long! We still need to add our 7-8 foot wire to stop the deer from jumping over. That should be fairly simple though. The hard part will be fixing up the gate so that the javelina can’t knock it over. Adam built the portal wide enough to drive the 4x4 through… so if it’s one gate it will sag. I am thinking of making it two smaller gates that come together in the middle. But I will have to add a stop to make sure nothing can push through. Adam already placed a railroad tie threshold down so that nothing can dig under it. It will be nice and we are getting closer every day!

I have to go clean up head over to a birthday party! That should be fun but nothing like installing your very own garden!

The crew at Rancho Gringos Blancos