Dateline 11-22-2016

Time for another garden update...

It's been a little less than a year since I started my venture into outdoor gardening. Up until I started this attempt my only other effort to grow food was during 365 Days of Resolution where I tried to get a vegetable garden growing in the bay window of my apartment in Seattle. 

To me, it feels that indoor gardening is all about starting with small containers and transferring successful plants as they grow. Though I never managed to get an indoor plant to produce anything I could it, this transfer method did seem to create a forced need for quality control. With very limited space, I was forced to weed out the unsuccessful plants before they got anywhere near their final home.

I didn't read this indoor gardening advice anywhere and have no idea if it's at all accurate, especially since I didn't grow so much as a taste, but I think the mentality stuck in my head. This is why, even though I now have an outdoor gardening space, I've been trying to start my plants in separate containers to then transfer into the main garden once they seem durable enough to last. 

I've had on and off success with this technique but I still have limited space so I can only start a handful of plants at a time. During the spring of this year, I had the entire upper portion of my planter filled with successfully started plants only to have a heat wave come in during the summer that killed almost everything off.

After that, I started a few more plants that died soon after transplantation. This led me to try a couple different germination techniques to get the seed started to then plant in the ground as soon as the seed sprouted, in hopes that the sprouted seeds would make themselves at home more efficiently than an older plant that's already started to settle in its smaller home, again this is just the logic that plays out in my head and by no means legitimate gardening advice.

As always, I think I may have been over-thinking everything. First, I've been way too reluctant to experiment with more than a couple seeds at a time. I've been treating them like gold as if I had one shot to make things happen. Meanwhile, I recently bought over 10,000 seeds for around twenty bucks and here I am tinkering with twelve at a time.

Meanwhile, my close to three-year-old nephew has been fascinated with the process and started his own pretend garden in the front yard. At first, he would just shove sticks in the ground and claim he had plants like his favorite uncle. Since I had a stockpile of seed, I figured, why not, and gave him a handful to plant just to see what would happen. 

Keep in mind, this three-year-old couldn't care less about things like soil conditions or how deep to plant the seed, or when to water. All he did was burry seeds in dirt and dump water in the general area. About a week later we found this...

I'm not sure what any of these plants are as seeds kind of got mixed up and thrown around as dirt from one area where seeds were planted was used to fill holes created for other seeds to be planted. I also had low expectations that this would actually work so I didn't pay much attention to what went where.

After seeing the success of this three-year old's planting technique I was reminded that plants have been reproducing without any human intervention far longer than any of us have been around and that I've been overthinking the whole thing.

Since I now live in San Diego, I have an extended window as to when I can experiment with gardening so I decided to take the seed that I have and plant them straight into the ground. If none of them take, I'll consider this attempt a fail in my trial and error approach to planting. Otherwise, I might just have some homegrown eats to start out the New Year!

As always, I'll keep you posted on my progress either way and will check in tomorrow with more news about what I'm up to.

Talk to you then,

The Wicker Breaker