Seedlings make difficult house guests

Morning temp: 32°F
Afternoon high: 53F
Tonight's projected low: 30F
Humidity: 64%
Moon: Waning, 72%
NW wind at 5mph

1. As M mentioned in earlier posts, we start about 95% of our Garden crop from seed. Since our Garden has grown in size (to about 900 sq.ft.), and our methods have increased in efficiency (we're now using John Jeavons' Bio-Organic methods, see his How to Grow More Vegetables), we have a great many young, maturing plants waiting inside the house for the "last frost date" of April 15th, when they'll be transplanted to the Garden. That's why I built the A-Frame Seedling Shelving Unit (AFSSU), which allows us to keep seedlings and plantlings together, with easy access for watering and for taking them outside during the day (part of the hardening off process), and under grow-lights for as many as 16 hours a day (freeing up our kitchen counters, where they resided in the past). So far, by mutual agreement, I'm not allowed to work with the inside plants unless sanctioned to do so (by M). They're finicky things, and my proclivity for daily watering and weekly worm-tea fertilizing seems too.... intense for house-bound plantlings. My approach works well with the plants outside in the Garden, but these young ones indoors need to be watered but not wet, dry but not dried out, nurtured but not gorged on nutrients. Hence, while M's minimal approach yields strong, vibrant youngsters, mine creates sickly, strung-out teenagers.

2. I Double-dug Garden Bed #8 and the expanded Herb Bed, working in two bags of composting leaves and covering each bed with two inches of peat moss. But isn't peat moss a somewhat rare and nonrenewable resource? Yes, peat moss comes from just a few places in the world, such as the moors of Scotland, and takes hundreds of thousands of years to be replenished by natural processes. My thinking here, however, is that I'm not using this stuff excessively or frivolously; I'm using small amounts of this rare, highly valuable stuff to radically improve my Garden topsoil. By next Spring (2008), we'll have sufficient amounts of compost to forgo using peat moss. We'll emend and improve our Garden Beds with compost that has transformed itself into humus.

Looking to the future: Thus far, we've become somewhat dependent on the plastic, seed-starter-trays that we purchase from Pike's Nursery each year, and we'd like to kick the habit. They're expensive, at $12 each, and we use a dozen or more every year. They also represent yet one more thing we are not yet doing for ourselves, but could easily do with a bit more knowledge and effort. So, I'm researching how to build our own wooden seed-starting-flats. As it turns out, not just any wood will do (apparently the chemicals in many kinds of wood create inhospitable conditions for seedlings), and not just any old top soil will do. Imagine that. More on this as my research continues.