My first flower seeds have germinated. It’s a miracle for me considering that 8 days ago I wasn’t the slightest bit prepared to begin sowing seeds for this year’s garden. Last Monday evening I had the urge to grab a calendar and began counting back the weeks from our last frost date (May 15th, but I always tack on 2 extra days for good measure) to determine when I would need to start sowing my flower and vegetable seeds. I counted back twice because I didn’t like what I saw the first time. Surely I’d made a mistake. Nope, the second count didn’t end any better. It was already Week 12 and the first batch of seeds should’ve been planted that afternoon already. Say what?
It doesn’t sound like a big emergency, but when you sprout over two thousand flowers and vegetables indoors and you only have so much space in your small basement, you need a plan. Uncharacteristically, I didn’t have one. I usually spend the dark and dreary days of January poring over notes from last year and making list upon list as I decide how many of each cultivar will make the cut for this year’s garden. Eventually I crawl out from under all the lists with one document that tells me which seeds I need to sow each week. It was February 22nd and that list did not yet exist.
Because I didn’t have my master list, I also hadn’t prepped and labeled the plug trays. I like to round off the sharp corners of the flimsy plastic trays with a scissors so they don’t snag my clothes or slice my hands when I’m moving them around or watering my seedlings for next 3 months. When that’s finished I write the names of my plants and their heights on over 400 of the trays with a silver Sharpie.
I tried using plastic plant markers one year, but I hated them. The soil plugs are already very small, and the markers just take up valuable root space. They get in the way when I’m watering, and they’re a prescription for disaster for someone clumsy like me who has beheaded a tray of seedlings with just my sleeve (more than once I might add). That’s right, I’m remarkably talented. I’ve also dropped a full tray of almost-full-grown plants down the stairs. It was heartbreaking to watch them bounce…boing, boing. I certainly don’t need pieces of pointy plastic making things worse. The silver Sharpie ink is waterproof, doesn’t fade in the sun, and stays out of my way. It works like a charm.
So there I sat last Monday night feeling very, very behind. For someone who rarely procrastinates (except in my recurring nightmare where I’m back in college taking a final exam in a history class I apparently didn’t attend all semester), it was a moment of reckoning. I didn’t panic at first because the first week of planting (Week 12) is generally pretty light. I don’t grow a lot of annuals that need such a long germination time. Last year I sowed 18 seeds that first week. My busiest weeks are 10, 8 and 5, so I usually have some time to slide into my routine.
I grabbed my garden journal and flipped through the pages until I arrived at last year’s seed-starting notes. That’s when I started to freak out. Past Me left a page of instructions for Future Me. The first said: “Start rudbeckias at 12 weeks instead of 10 weeks.” I usually love hearing from Past Me because she knows I forget things. She takes great care to leave me notes and impressions that save me a lot of time and hassle. This time she was simply getting on my nerves.
WHAT DO YOU MEAN START THEM 2 WEEKS EARLIER?! According to the note, I should’ve sown all the rudbeckia seeds that afternoon already. I looked down at the only list I’d created so far for my 2010 garden. It was a simple alphabetical list of every seed packet. On it I counted FOURTEEN different rudbeckia cultivars. Yikes, so much for an easy first week. As I frantically paged through the rest of the list I remembered the lovely new lilac impatiens cultivar that had called out to me from a beautiful photograph in one of the seed catalogs. I usually buy my impatiens at a garden center each spring, but I’d decided to grow my own this year. I would need to sow an entire flat of them if I wanted to fill all of my whiskey barrels. It was becoming quite clear that I had my work cut out for me.
My relaxing evening became a blur of activity. I would need to start sowing seeds right away the following morning if I was going to stay on schedule. There was no time to sit down with the entire seed list and figure out counts, so I just concentrated on the rudbeckias and impatiens. It made me uncomfortable because if I planted too many of them, I wouldn’t have as much room in subsequent weeks for other favorites like salvias and zinnias. I slapped together some numbers, trimmed the plug trays and sloppily printed the names and heights of all of the flowers on them. It wasn’t my best work, but I finished before bedtime.
Early the next morning, I descended into my “plant lair” and spent the next 6 hours mixing soilless growing medium with hot water, stuffing it in the plug trays with a spoon and tucking in my teeny, tiny seeds. Although my day had been abruptly planned, I had to admit that it felt really great to be gardening again.
When I finished sowing all the seeds, I had one last task to complete. I went back upstairs and turned to a new page in my garden journal. I wanted to leave a note for for Future Me. It read: “Don’t you EVER do this to me again.”
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