shydeer gets it together

finally have some progress to report! but it's not quite as triumphant as i'd have hoped.

basically, my seedlings are either dead or hanging by a thread. in the slight chance i can still save them, i transferred the strongest looking ones to a permanent home, and left the others near the watering can outside to potentially recuperate. see, the problem was the soil had COMPLETELY dried out in the germination tray. i didn't realize this until i started gently repotting them and the dirt, instead of staying in a moist clump, blew away in the wind, leaving naught but the thin hairs of the poor, malnourished root system. i felt absolutely terrible. but i refuse to give up.

even if these poor seedlings are goners, i won't let that heartbreak and guilt stop me from continuing to garden this year. i still have those radish seeds, and there's always storebought seedlings i can raise. one only improves their gardening skill after learning lessons along the way, and expert gardeners always tell me their successful bounty rests on the corpses of a thousand plants that they accidentally killed. it's a grim thought, but it does help me shake off the specter of failure.

this coming week, i'll try and germinate some radish seeds, and see if i can nurse those tomatoes and zucchini back. hopefully by this time next week i'll have news.

here's one more subject (and probably the last for now) i've been wanting to track the progress of in this journal: my garden! i wasn't initially planning on growing anything myself this year, since i've had mixed results in recent years due to a mixture of personal and environmental factors that were less than ideal for growing plants. but, part of my fieldwork i'm doing for grad school has me observing and participating a number of events and programs at a nearby library, and one of them was a seed starting class! i fully expected to only observe this class and not participate at all but they had so many extra supplies that they urged me to claim some, and so i started some seeds. i didn't have a high expectations for impressive results though, since my previous attempts at growing from seed (even in a botany class in undergrad!) haven't gone super great.

here's what i planted:

• zucchini (x6, expected 3 germinations)
• roma tomatoes (x12, expected 6 germinations)

here's what's growing:

• zucchini (all 6 seeds germinated)
• roma tomatoes (all 12 seeds germinated)

soooooo i've got a lot of vivacious sprouting vegetables on my hands -- more than i anticipated! not sure what the right call on that is, whether to cull the extras or just see if i can manage them all in the limited garden pots we have. we don't have raised beds in our yard for growing so most of what we usually cultivate at home stays in pots where we can control the conditions. i'll need to do the repotting soon, since the zucchini especially are quickly outgrowing the germinating tray. but first i need to decontaminate the pots, as the teacher of the seed starting class taught me, but i can't remember what the ratio of bleach to water is supposed to be

that's not all i wanna grow, though! i picked up some radish seeds at the store the other day, and i wanna see if i can get those to germinate as well. once i move the current seedlings to their more permanent homes i'll refill the germination tray and see if i have the same good luck with slightly different variables (different seed source, different soil, a couple weeks later in the season). i sure hope so, i love radishes

anyway, that's all i have to report for this first entry. every time i pass by my seedlings in all their humble yet miraculous splendor, i smile with pride. i really hope repotting them goes well and they continue to flourish. 🌱