Week 12: 3/17/2024 - 3/23/2024
Starting seedlings, caring for seedlings, and announcing a seedling swap!
Easy Street Gardening
Weekly, step-by-step guidance for gardening on the front range.
Each week, this newsletter will contain three sections:
How things are going
I will share an update on my garden as a point of reference for how my weekly tasks are adding up and looking.
What to do this week
Here I will present the 3 - 5 things I am planning or doing this week.
Resources
A deeper dive into information and perspectives that are inspiring or informing my gardening.
If you are coming to this newsletter mid-season, please take a look at the posts from the past few weeks to get a sense of context for where we are at this week!
Week 12: 3/17/2024 - 3/23/2024
Announcement!
I’d like to invite my fellow front range gardeners, whether experienced or starting for the first time, to gather in Curtis Park on Saturday, May 4th, from 10 am - 12 pm, for an informal seedling and seed swap.
Because we each may end up with a surplus, I think it would be interesting to gather in early May to swap and share our seeds and seedlings. This could be a great way to meet other local gardeners, learn about the varieties they are growing, take home a few unique plants for ourselves, and make sure that all the extra seedlings we’ve grown are planted in the ground somewhere in our neighborhood.
Even if you don’t have seedlings to swap, you should join us anyway, and take home some spare ones to kick off your summer season.
My hope is that we then might gather again, in August, to celebrate our successes, for something like a neighborhood gardeners state fair, showing off the yield provided by all our shared seedlings.
How things are going:
This week, I’m continuing to pot up my pepper seedlings, as they are ready. I’m really happy with the progress they are making this year compared to last year. I believe this is both because I started them in a warmer location in my house, and I’ve taken more care to water more evenly.
Many of the seedlings are reaching a stage where they will need larger pots. You can see how quickly these ones grew when I potted two of them up from their smaller cell (There were two seedlings in that cell, so I potted up both of them). The potted up ones are in the back, and they came from the smaller cell tray directly in front of them.
I have also started growing tomatoes this week. I grow a lot of varieties, and am planning to plant about 25 - 30 between two of my 8x4 beds. I trellis them up, and single stem them, so I can grow very densely. Some of my favorite varieties are Black Krim (great for eating on sandwiches or salads) and Amish paste (giant plum tomatoes, great for sauce). I mostly grow indeterminate varieties, because I trellis them, but I will likely grow a few determinate ones in pots as well this year.
I’ll continue starting tomatoes this week and over the weekend. We are about 6 weeks away from our average last expected frost date, which has been moved up to May 4th. So now really is the time to start your tomatoes and other seedlings you want to grow this summer.
What to do this week:
Here’s what to do:
Start some seedlings!
If you aren’t starting seedlings indoors, make sure you are gathering the seeds you’ll need for the summer. You may also want to place an order with some local seedling growers to get more unique varieties. I have bought seedlings from Heirloom Tomato Farms and The Irish Farm, and they’ve provided excellent seedlings!
Next week:
Planting Spring crops outdoors
Resources:
Resource 1
This is a really thorough seed starting guide by Dr. Alison O'Connor (Horticulture Specialist, CSU Extension in Larimer County) and Amy Lentz (Horticulture Specialist, CSU Extension in Weld County) from CSU’s extension about starting seedlings