These are about a week old, but with the frost-free recent evenings, a few flats are living outside night and day.

Shown are the lettuce and greens flats, with close up of some of the lettuce, and Swiss Chard Bright Lights.

Here are some pics of the three seedling flats that are underway.  There is the pansy/snapdragon/sweet pea flat, the Asian greens/beets flat, and the lettuce/spinach flat - including some close ups.

They are clearly enjoying their lives under fluorescent lights in my cool garage!

On today's agenda - planting the first flat of veggie seedlings - focusing on the slower growing peppers and eggplant, and those for which the seed is a bit old, so could result in slow or low germination.  

I've now seen it all - some of the Asian greens I planted germinated on ONE day!  Just remarkable....pretty anxious to see the world, I guess.

Back to filling details on what I am growing.  My second plug flat is filled with different types of lettuce - no surprise that we don't limit ourselves to just a few types.  And when one of your best gardening buddies (my long time pal Jeff) is a lettuce seed saver, it provides many options!

Here are the lettuce varieties that I planted a week or so ago, and are now up and growing under lights in my garage.  There are green leaf, red leaf, speckled leaf, romaine types, crisphead types, leaf types - it makes for quite the lovely salad!

Crisp Mint
Mikola
Forellenschluss
Laitue Grosse Brune Paresseuse
Cherokee
Magenta
Red Lepracaun
Italianischer
Dalgali
Mottistone
Teide
Blackjack
Kagraner Summer
Bunyards Matchless
Bioinda a Foglia Riccia di Taglio
Spotted Aleppo
Sunset
Grettona
Brauner Trotzkopf
Purplus
Jeanne
Australian Yellowleaf
Brown Goldring
Cracoviensis
Bologna
Dark Lollo Rossa
Encore Lettuce Mix
Amaze
Red Fire
Grand Rapids Concept

And in the same flat, a few non-lettuce greens

Spinach Renegade
Spinach Tyee
Spinach Scarlet
Spinach Emu
Arugula Astro  


I will likely have mixes of different seedlings with me at the Market along with my usual peppers, tomatoes and eggplant this spring for purchase.  

I start the lettuce densely using my typical technique - 20 or so seeds per cell.  Lettuce is easy to transplant, and I move it to 4 inch pots, 6 to 9 plants to a pot, in which they reach a size that is suitable for setting into the garden.  The earlier I get the lettuce into the garden, the better - it gets hot here quickly, and lettuce doesn't care for that at all!

Once the plants get a little bigger, I'll take some pics of the developing seedlings.