A tray of Fairy Tale eggplant suddenly begins to break out after six days under plastic wrap. In just a week or two, I won’t have time for this sort of…intense observation, watching for the very first signs of emerging seedlings. In a month, there will be a couple of thousand to keep track of. The micro-view is fun for now!
The grow racks are starting to fill up. First trays of eggplant and peppers, seeded yesterday, sit up top where it’s warmest. The lights run 14-hours a day, on a timer, with an extra hour or so of early morning ambient sunlight from windows on three sides of the room.
The seedling workstation… This high and narrow table is where I put seeds in cellpaks. The triple sink, a leftover from the dairy days when this was the sterile milk collection room, work out well for seed-starting, with all of the soaking, rinsing and draining involved. Today, the first eggplant and peppers.
By mid-August, the CSA shares are nearing their peak. Here we have eggplant, carrots (including a new purple addition, Purple Haze), onions, beets, potatoes, yellow beans, summer squash, tomatoes, rosemary, plus salad mix out of sight. Still waiting on melons, winter squash, main season broccoli, fall cauliflower. And there’s more! :)
Tomato, eggplant and pepper seedlings heading out from the Milkhouse (seedling room) to the unheated hoophouse for some real sunlight and a taste of the harsher field conditions, before transplant time in a couple of weeks. The small riding mower does double duty, mowing the paths and ferrying around seedlings, tools, harvests.
Some of over a thousand little tomatoes, eggplant and peppers living it up, warm, well-watered and basking under the fluorescent light, in the comfort of the seedling room. Fluorescents as a plant light source don’t hold a candle to the Sun, but in the cold of early Spring, they do the trick.
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