Seed Starting

The maple sap is still flowing, the rootstocks and scionwood are coming soon, and some of the early seeds are being sown.

While I started some onions  a few weeks ago — Walla Walla sweet onions — I added parsley, statice (a flower, great for drying in fall) and a few red cabbages under the grow lights to keep them company. It’s been a whopping 24 hours and the statice seeds are already germinating(!).

The one other thing I have growing is “Sweet Annie,” although it’s known but many other names (http://davesgarden.com/guides/pf/go/1140/#b). While it won’t win any beauty pageants, I fell in love with the scent at a farmers market a few years ago, and have been trying to grow it ever since. It’s a bit unusual, in that it requires stratification — freezing, or just nearly freezing temperatures — before germinating. So the past 2 years I’ve gotten seeds, stuck them in the freezer, and then planted them out in early spring. And then promptly lost them among all the weeds, if they even germinated in the first place.

So this year I went a different route. I stuck them in potting mix and crossed my fingers.*

And it worked!

And now I have flowers 3″ high that can’t go out into the garden for 2 more months! (Oops.)

Well, we’ll see how they fare indoors, but at the rate they’re growing I may have to re-start some younger plants alongside the rest of my flowers in a few weeks.

Spring, here I come!

*I realize now that these guys were probably stratified through the mail this winter, inadvertently. But hey, gift horse, y’know?