Herr Riesentraube

Remember our winter sowing experiment?

Moving adventures!

I have come down with a case of bronchitis with laryngitis and since I'm on my 5th day without a voice, and assigned a day of rest to get over the hump, I thought I'd do a blog post to update a little bit. 

 

Here are a bunch of photos of our recent move.  We still aren't moved in yet since we've had to do cleaning, repairs and repainting and tonight will be the first night everyone will sleep on a real bed.  Soon I will give you the tour of our new home, but for now here are some glimpses of the glorious chaos minus the severe thunderstorms we loaded and unloaded during and the tornado that touched down within miles of us while we were trying to get the truck unloaded and back on time.

Sow what?!

I am enjoying watching my own style of recycling bearing some happy greenery.

 

I have watered them a few times, but mostly we just admire them and get excited as each new variety decides to play along and germinates while we just stand by and watch.   I am hoping I have at least one pepper plant that I can do a comparison with in the garden with the pepper plants we started indoors with the heat mat and under lights.  My enquiring mind wants to know!

Winter sowing update...signs of life!

We noticed one exciting day, March the 28th to be exact, that we had signs of life in our fun, little pop bottle winter sowing experiment!  How wonderful!  Part of me was truly surprised that it was working.

 

We both had some new seedlings coming up.  Emily had Double Zinnias awakening 

 

Winter Sowing Part 2

The next day, with the aid of my lovely assistants we scooped out the potting mix into a large bowl and wet it a bit and filled the bottle bottoms up to about 1 inch below the rim.

I let Emily have one of the trays to sow her flower seeds in.  We each chose our seeds and labeled popsicle sticks to keep track of what is in each bottle.

Winter Sowing Part 1

In my research efforts to try to minimize my risk of failure at starting seeds indoors, I stumbled across a curious concept that I've never heard of but am intrigued by...winter sowing.  Since I have so much time on my hands and nothing better to do but dream up things to keep myself busy with, I just couldn't resist jumping right in and trying it.  I figure with attempting to start seeds both indoors and out maybe I can up my success rate.  Couldn't hurt.

I spent a little bit of time reading around online about it and my darling beloved brought me home some wonderful scavenger treasures and we have begun the experiment!

Steve is so very green and brought me a love offering (which scored major bonus points) of plastic pop bottles and a handy-dandy plastic tray to hold them ever so nicely.  This will be wonderful!