A Start To Gardening

     Even though there is still snow on the ground, if you want a garden in the Interior of BC, you have to start germinating some of the seeds now.  I always grow a variety of tomatoes and peppers in my unheated greenhouse and if I want to have bedding plants big enough to plant when the greenhouse does heat up, I have to plant the seeds, then keep the young plants under a grow light inside the house until they can be transplanted.

    The photo show me filling “flats” with potting soil that has been stored in the greenhouse all winter.  I brought the flats inside and will plant the seeds once the soil has warmed up to our house temperature.  The tomato plants usually take a bit more of than a week to pop out of the ground, the pepper seeds take a lot longer, more than two weeks.  

    A lot of the seeds I plant are seeds that I have saved from plants I grew in previous years.  After I plant the seeds it is always a nervous time for me, because I never know how many will come up.