So many seedlings!

Our seedlings have come up! It's a really joyful thing to watch the first seedlings come up inside, and see them doing well. Right now most of what has been started inside is tomatoes, peppers, or eggplant. We started a good variety of various seeds this year and I'm looking forward to seeing how they come out, and being able to share a lot of seedlings. One of the main differences in our seedling starting right now is that we have the seedlings up on the baby clothing rack that used to be our seedling station. It works though!

This year we probably planted too many seeds again, but that's ok. We always can share. We planted 2 sections of 72 seed pots each, with 2 to 4 seeds in each pot assuming germination won't be %100. The bonus is, in some of the seed potlets we have over %100 germination. What that really means is, I slipped and planted more seeds in that pot. I don't really mind since we're involved in the local seed saving community and really enjoy having extra seedlings to share that don't really cost us much to be able to hand out. A few cents for the amount of seedling starting and potting soil we use for them is really all that it takes. Especially since we mostly used salvaged pots for the step up where we distribute seedlings.
One of the things I particularly wanted to highlight is our Honey Drop tomato seedlings. Our friends at Crabapple Farm created this variety. It is a mostly stabilized variety that is intended to have the traits of the Honey Drop hybrid tomato. I really enjoying having a local variety of seed that actually is specifically going to be only a local variety. We also have some squash that is like that, but those seedlings aren't started yet, so I enjoy talking about the ones that already are! All of the seedlings we have started are to be planted ~ 4 - 6 weeks before last frost,  which is why we just recently started them. The tomatoes are mostly already up and going well. The peppers are much slower to start, as is normal for peppers.

Left you can see some Poblano peppers just starting to show the first signs of seedlings breaking the surface. That tiny little arc of green in the seedling put in the center is the plant breaking the surface. Our full list of seeds we started this year is:
Honey Drop Tomatoes
Green Zebra Tomatoes
Roma Tomatoes
San Marizano Tomatoes
Black Beauty Eggplants
Pequin Peppers
Limon Peppers
Thai Hot Peppers
Spanish Hot Peppers
Habenero Peppers
Poblano Peppers
Orange Bell Peppers

And last but not least:
Stevia

The Stevia and the Habeneros are the ones I'm least expecting to survive and produce. I hadn't actually expected any of the Habeneros to come up, but there are a couple seedlings up already as you can see Left. The Stevia is considered one of the more difficult plants to grow from seed, so if none of it comes up, we'll just buy a couple starts and grow them that way. For the most part though I'm finding that with bottom watering, and heat mats we're getting really good germination. We'll keep you updated!

On the Boris front, he's still slowly recovering. It's going to be a couple months before we know how he actually is, but for now he's able to balance for more than just a couple steps which is encouraging.