This article offers practical advice on starting eggplants and pepper seedlings, covering topics like lighting setups, overcoming light deficiencies, thinning, transplanting, and hardening off. It provides insights into using natural light, fluorescent tubes, and grow lights, emphasizing the importance of adequate light for photosynthesis. The author discusses challenges when starting seeds without artificial light and suggests solutions, such as window sills, winter-sowing, and alternative containers. The role of unheated greenhouses, containers, and grow boxes for larger plants or later starts is explored, along with tips for managing temperature. The article touches on container and growing mix selection, germination requirements, growing on, thinning, transplanting, and the continuous process of hardening off. It concludes by inviting readers to suggest additional topics for future posts. Overall, it serves as a comprehensive guide for seedling cultivation at various stages.
There are so many wonderful looking vegetable varieties that it can be easy to ‘buy all the seed.’ Unless you have a team, a tractor and a farm, it’s unlikely that you are really going to ‘grow all the seed,’ never mind ‘harvest all that veg!’ Leaving you to decide what to grow. We’re going […]
There’s something about hot peppers that collect stories. Perhaps it is because their different flavours and uses are special ingredients in different, often regional, dishes and these make people think of ancestral place or important person. Maybe its the bravado of a food that bite’s back. Hot peppers originated in the warmer regions of the […]
I have learned so much from growers all over Eastern Ontario and beyond so I really enjoy plant conversations. One of the trickier vegetables for many gardeners to grow is cauliflower. Gaia Organic Seeds have a number of interesting varieties. Here is my interview with Gaia team member Manish: “I never really focused on growing […]