The Gardening Begins... Late

I was supposed to start my tomato and pepper seeds indoors on February 26, but Sprout Robot did not send me an email reminder!  I don't know why.  Or maybe they did send it but my email account rejected it as spam, except that plenty of other spam made it through, so I think something's wrong with Sprout Robot's automated system.  Whatever.  Two weeks probably won't matter all that much in the grand scheme of things.

The nice thing is that my personalized gardening calendar on Sprout Robot will follow along with my tardiness, adjusting in real time the expecting sprouting dates of my seeds.  So, I planted jalapeños, green chiles, and three different kinds of tomatoes today (March 10), and they should sprout around March 19.

In the past, we always kept our indoor seedlings near some always-sunny windows.  But the angle of the sun isn't quite right, or we have too many seedlings crammed together, or we're not tending to them frequently enough, or something, because the seedlings have always turned out pretty scraggly and didn't transplant outdoors particularly well.  It was frustrating.  So this season, I decided to get serious and buy a grow light, which should produce sturdier seedlings. 

(I suppose if I was really serious, I would have bought several grow lights and built a special seed-sprouting shelf, but we're not sprouting money here—or time, for that matter—so we'll see how it goes this year before we expand the indoor gardening operation.)

The grow light and the first seeds planted for 2012.

The light is just hanging by twisty-ties over a little tray balanced on a drying rack, of all things.  The twisty-ties will make it easy for us to move the light to a higher rod on the rack as the seedlings grow taller. 

So, the 2012 gardening begins!  Eggplant seeds are slated to be planted next week.  ...If I remember. Or if Sprout Robot gets its act together and reminds me.