Thursday, May 21, 2009

Finally Getting Around To It

Procrastination is the name of the game. I am only now finally getting around to seeding my tomato plants. Yeah, yeah, yeah ... I know I should have done it at the end of last month or maybe even earlier. Better late than never. Now I have to get going. Here's what I seeded in a matrix of 11 rows and 8 columns. We'll see what comes up.

My procedure is to take a sheet of small rockwook cubes. I use really small ones if I can, about 3/4 inch on a side and about 1 1/2 inches tall. They come in a sheet. I then saturate the sheet with them all together in fresh water and then put seeds into the individual cubes. At this point I don't use any nutrient but I put the rockwool sheet in an aluminum pan (one of those disposable kind of pans they sell to cook brownies in at the store) and flood the pan with some dilute nutrient so that some nutrition, but not at high levels, wicks up through the rockwool to the plants.
There are a couple of rows in there that are there just for curiosity. Row 1 has five French Dona seeds from 2005 to see if they will germinate. Maybe not, but you never know. Row 3 is a row of old pepper seeds that I think I harvested from some jalapenos I grew a couple of years ago. I just found them in the basement so I thought I'd take a chance. Then Row 4 is a row of seeds harvested some unknown time ago from green peppers bought at the store. Probably none of these will germinate, but then I'll know.
I'm thinking about doing a germination experiment just for the fun of it because I never throw out the seeds I don't use, so I have seeds going back a number of years, often of the same varieties. Science is fun!

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