A few warm nights and a little rain coaxed up green shoots all around. Many of you are delighting in snowdrops and crocuses. The daffodils across the road were slender, yellow slippers yesterday, and today we’ll reach the low 70s.
The ground is humming with new starts. Meanwhile, in our house, thousands of tiny lives are taking root, preparing to journey skyward. While Mother Nature is engrossed in her subterranean work, Jason has also gone underground, seeding in the basement.
While an early-to-bed schedule helps me accomplish farm work and other projects in the wee hours of the day, Jason is a night owl. With a full-time, off-farm job, he spends evenings in the gardens, and then seeds and cares for plants late into the night.
For the past few weeks, we’ve hosted a relative recuperating from a health emergency, so our room is temporarily in the basement. Curled under the covers, I listen to the comforting sound of Jason shuffling across the tile in his slippers, and smell the heavy “rainy day” scent of the potting soil that he keeps in a big bin.
For about an hour each night, Jason plants between 1,000 to 1,200 seeds. In the past, he used six-cell packs, but these were a complete pain. They’re flimsy, and need to be filled with soil one six-pack at a time. They’re also annoying to store, and never fit quite the same way twice in a seed tray. He’s converted to Bootstrap Farmer brand trays. They’re more expensive, but they’re one, solid sheet of plastic. He fills them quickly with soil from the bin. This switch to Bootstrap Farmer trays made a big difference in the ease of the task.
We purchase potting soil, but then Jason makes his own “soil-less” mix, which he sprinkles over the seeds for a light blanket. For this, he uses peat moss, perlite (volcanic glass), and vermiculite (minerals). After filling about six trays, he stacks them and presses down, making 1,200 “dibbles,” or indentations for the seeds. During this nightly practice, he drinks from a mug that’s flavored and further insulated by the residue of thousands of cups of past tea. He also listens to podcasts (currently, Binge Mode’s examination of Star Wars).
These are the trays Jason uses now. He purchases them from Bootstrap Farmer.
Jason fills the trays with potting soil, and then tops them with a dusting of homemade ‘soil-less’ mix.
When the trays are seeded, he slides them into one of three homemade seed chambers in the basement. Each chamber is outfitted with six ordinary shop lights. Twelve trays fit under the lights in each chamber. When you rotate trays under the light, you can actually tuck 72 flats in each frame. As you can imagine, a heated propagation greenhouse is a future goal.
With the trays cozy under the lights, Jason gives the plants a drink with a watering can. (Another reason a propagation greenhouse will be helpful.) Then, he tends to his pea shoots and microgreens.
This work probably isn’t what most people think of when it comes to vegetable farming, but, as with most businesses, it’s the behind-the-scenes (or basement) work that’s needed to produce the results everyone sees.
~ Stella
Here’s one of three seed chambers in our basement.
The seed chambers use regular shop lights.