In a PINCH!

 Hello my fellow green thumbs! (and prospective green thumbs!). Sorry I skipped a week or two of posting. My seedlings grew and I've transplanted most of them into pots, and now they've grown even more!

 I had a little helper, which was fun. He helped me massage the water into the soil (I always water the dirt not the transplants. This gives everything an even watering, and ensures that there's actually the right amount of dirt in the pots... no shrinking of dirt!

 I always marvel at just how much more room the plants take up after transplanting! But the reality is, as inconvenient as the larger space is, the plants grow so much better and bigger as a result.

 Here is a prime example of just how much bigger the plants get... add about an extra 1/2 to that realistically, as I ended up just pulling out the cosmos. They were already so big and I decided I don't have enough space for them, once I factor in tomatoes and peppers.  Its a LOT more space, and that's just the first transplant...

MOVING ON!! :)

Today I wanted to talk about pinching seedlings! :)  It's a love-hate thing... It kinda hurts inside to prune a tiny seedling, because youre so proud of it's growth... but the reality is, it'll grow into a much fuller, more productive plant, if you train it to be a little bit more bushy... here's how it works...

remember the disney movie Herculese, when he's fighting the dragon? What happens when he slices off the dragon's head?

It grew 3 more heads in the same place! What happened when he cut off those heads?

Lets just say, it wasn't pretty... haha!

Well, it's honestly the same principle with pruning your plants! You want to cut off their heads, and instead of just one head, it'll grow 2 new ones! So when you do this near the beginning of the plant's life, you end up with a "double plant" so to speak... instead of growing itself in one spike in one pattern, it will grow itself in two spikes in two patterns... if you prune again later, then it'll again produce two branches instead of one at that intersection!

Here... let me explain using Penny the Pointlessly Protected house plant...
Here's penny a few weeks ago when I chopped off her head...

And here's Penny today

Do you see them? do you see right below the cut-line, how the plant has adapted to it's horrors? instead of just deciding to be done growing, it grows twice as well... Penny is now growing into a two-headed pointlessly protected house plant! :)

Here's another example... My avocado seed! (this one was a tough one to pinch...)

Here she is after I pinched off her beautiful big upper leaves.... Sigh!

And here she is now! (ignore the fact that the original 3 leaves have all gotten horribly sunburnt from me having her too close to a hotter bulb).  She's got a full two stems with 3-4 leaves each! I will pinch her again once each head makes a second set of leaves. Avocados are notoriously leggy and sparse. So it'll need a lot of TLC.

WHAT TOOLS DO YOU USE KRYSTA?! THIS IS AMAZING!
This is the part where other bloggers reccomend an expensive product to you, and someone pays them to endorse said product...

Some people like to use tools, but honestly...

I prefer to simply use my fingers! I have a good reason for it... with such small seedlings, scissors or shears are just too big. you can accidentally snip off more than you plan to. And if you have a seedling with NO leaves, chances are it will die because it cant photosynthesize light. It needs some solar panels! :)

So today I pinched a few different plants. Here's my Marigold's before pinching (above) and after (below)

It's not a huge difference in the appearance yet... maybe I could've pinched more, who knows! (I guess a master-gardener might know...)

First, make sure your plant has enough leaves that you can actually pinch a significant portion without ruining the plant. I like to wait for the third set of "true" leaves (not the initial seed leaves, but the properly shaped leaves) to be out and established. Find that third set, and plant your fingernails on the stem beneath their leaves... you're not just giving the leaves a hair cut, you're removing the joint that attaches them to the stem.

above you can see I removed the entire leaves, but missed the base part of the stem where they are attached. I went in a second time and squeezed off that little joint part.

there. Now the only joint you can see is the one between the second set of true leaves. you can also see the iddy bitty baby leaves inside that joint. If I didn't pinch it, those leaves would remain tiny... But now that i've pinched it, those will grow into full sized leaves, and branch out each into their own chunk of a plant.

Thyme, basil and oregano... herbs and things that grow in clusters... They are a bit simpler. Wait till there's several sets of leaves, and just go in with a scissors and give the entire thing a chop.

 There's still plenty of leaves for the plants to photosynthesize, and weaker sprouts may die off (which we want) and the bush should get bushier instead of taller! :)

 Plus now I have a bit of thyme to cook with!

The alyssum was a little trickier... mainly  cause it's not totally ready to be pruned... so I just went in and pinched bigger sprouts, in the same way I did the marigolds.

Again, directly at the base of the stem you can see little points where baby leaf buds are waiting and ready to grow if they need to! My guess is that this is God's built in defenses against hungry wildlife having a meal at the first signs of spring.

in other news, the petunias and snapdragons that I seeded have sprouted! So there will be more transplanting and pruning in the weeks to come! I'm trying to hold off on tomato plants for a month yet, so they don't get too unruly.

Well, that's it for now folks, thanks for reading! Happy pinching!

From darkness comes growth

Happy Sunday folks! I hope today finds you well enough. I’m pretty thrilled because I got to go have a spa appointment by myself without kids, and then I got my evening primrose seeds!! :) I don't know why I love evening primrose so much honestly... it mostly looks like a weed till half way through the summer, and then after that it only has 2-4 flowers at a time. then those ones die, and new ones bloom above the old ones the next day... and on and on it goes, blooming and dieing till it's taller than I am by the end of the summer, building it's own little sky scraper out of life and death... ok, so I like it for it's metaphors!

As you can see, Levi was also thrilled that I found them... (also, I went into Dollar Tree and ONLY BOUGHT THESE SEEDS!! PAT ME ON THE BACK PEOPLE!).

To top off my day, curtis took charge of making a video for Josiah’s birthday party so I didn’t have to do it! He’s going to have a Dino detective birthday where his friends have to solve the mystery of the missing dinosaur bones! It’ll be a whole big thing with crepe-paper lazer beams, dusting for prints, invisible ink... it’ll be a fun time! So curtis managed to convince his buddies to play the villain and head detective for a few key videos throughout the party. I’m pretty excited! It was even better that I didn't actually have to film any of it!

THIS WEEK'S UPDATE:

Anyways! On to some updates! The flowers I planted last week are all up! It only took them about 3 days really and they are now doing quite well! I may need to transplant them within a week yet! Craziness! Some of them are already starting to get their first set of true leaves. Once again, let me preach it from the mountain tops, dollar tree plant seeds are amazing quality and bargain.

Even some of the hot peppers sprouted this week! None of the sweet peppers yet though... I’m so anxious to start other things but I know I need to hold off a while yet... might get another tray of flowers underway soon though. not sure I can hold myself back ;)

The seeds I ordered on amazon from Ukraine have finally arrived. I’m very pleasantly surprised that they are in proper seed packages and not just someone’s seed-saved seeds! The only problem is I can’t read the packages!! Haha! And yes Josiah is in Ukrainian English program at school but alas, only grade one, so he can’t read them yet... I probably have an uncle who could help out if needed, but I think I’ll just use my intuition and gut instincts and roll with the punches! I’m really excited about those striped snapdragons though! If they actually look like that, it’s gonna be epic!

VALENTINES DAY IDEAS:
 

The other thing I’ve been up to this week is Valentine’s Day prep! With two of my sons' birthdays being Jan 21 & 27’th, we have birthday parties to occupy my time for the next few weeks! So I was very happy to find a Dollarama that was actually stocking it’s gardening shelves this early!  My older two boys are getting their own little gardening kits for Valentine’s Day. :) I’m looking forward to sharing the joy and green thumbs. 

 Each of them is getting the little kit (which contains a tray and clear plastic greenhouse lid, small jiffy's and large jiffy's, small and large plant tags, and a few seed sewing tools),  a very nice looking metal watering can, 5 packets of seeds (peas, cucumbers, cherry tomatoes, morning glories and watermelons), and a red lolly pop! It works out to about $10 per kid basically, not including dirt. The watering can was $4, the seeds were 4/$1.25, the greenhouse kit was $4 and the suckers were 2/$1! Budget-wise this also encompasses what I would have spent on an Easter basket... Since both of our families celebrate Easter, we are going to forego our smaller family Easter baskets... there will be enough chocolate to go around I think!

I also updated the seed packages using Microsoft paint and stolen imagery off the inter-web ;) I like how they turned out! I started with a random seed envalope template off google images, and added in a cartoon veggie, did my write ups, and voila! I also did write-ups on the back that my 7 year old can read all by himself. They say something interesting about the plant variety, when to start them, when to put them outside, and how long till we can eat them! I know for sure my oldest son will love it... Not sure on the middle child, he's been a bit of a wild card these days... but I'm hoping he'll  be into it too! If they get very enthusiastic about it, I'll be trying to convince my husband to build a little flower bed along our dog pen that they could use for their plants this year. It's closer to the house so they would take more ownership of it, than they would if it's simply part of a row in my veggie garden.


A LITTLE LESSON TO LIVE BY:

Anyways, I should try and explain my title for this post I guess eh? Well, let me start with the analogy/plant lesson...
Did you know its possible to give a plant too much light? Yup, they actually NEED darkness.

Did you know that it’s the dark side of a plants stem that grows? When you see a sun flower always bending toward the sun, did you ever wonder why?

It’s because the giant head shades it’s own stem from the sun... the parts that are darker, grow faster than the parts where the sun is shining. Therefore the stem is longer on one end then the other, which causes it to bend, subsequently leaning the entire flower head toward the sun. Day after day, slowly getting taller one shadow at a time.... it’s the same reason that a house plant will start “reaching” for your sunny window, because it’s dark side is growing faster than its light side.

Here's the scientifically worded version for you nerds out there, from this source.
"The sunflower plant contains hormones called auxins. These hormones are sensitive to sunlight and do everything they can to seek shade! Therefore, they migrate from the part of the plant bathed in sunlight to the shaded region in the stem. Once there, the auxins (which are essentially growth hormones) stimulate the growth of cells. This causes the stem to become bulkier in the shaded region, so the flower ends up bending in the opposite direction – towards the Sun!"

Darkness has its place in horticulture, just as it does in life. Even my little seedlings all appear to be reaching for the light bulbs, as their own darkness encourages their growth.

This is a tough time of year for many people... and this year particularly so it seems. I know too many people dealing with illness, relationship issues, health problems, tragedy etc... it seems so bleak sometimes.... and I don’t have all the answers, but I do have this one take-away from God’s creation. And that is that darkness can create growth and maturity in us... we can’t always see why or how at the time, but usually in hindsight we can see it pretty clearly!

I know this is a little bit cliche but I hope some of you can find it encouraging the way I do.

Anyways, I’ll leave it there for this week!
Here's a couple pictures of how my avocado seed and "Penny the pointlessly protected bedding plant" from last summer. I've pruned the avocado already, removing the top two leaves and stem, so that the plant is forced to branch out instead of growing super tall without any branches. :) 

I've pruned penny a bit more, so I could stick her under a hotter bulb and give her some real light and warmth to bring her out of dormancy!

 

Have a great week folks! Until next time, KEEP YOUR THUMBS DOWN IN THE DIRT!! :)