It's mid-April, which means that gardeners intending to grow tender veggies in New
Hampshire's harsh climate are starting their seeds indoors. I'm a geek for tomatoes and basil, so I tend to start them early and in large quantities. With basil I stick to genovese and sweet basil varieties, planning to use most of it for pesto. With tomatoes I'm fondest of heirloom varieties, which I haven't found difficult to grow and which yield the most wonderful tastes of just about anything out of the garden. Cherokee Purple and Rose de Berne are two of my favorites, and this year I'm also trying a few new varieties from the
Fedco catalog, including one named after the athlete and activist Paul Robeson. The ultimate favorite every year, however, are the Sungolds-- a hybrid variety, you just can't say enough good things about them, and I can't grow too many of them. Those that aren't eaten straight off the vine or put in salads wind up in an all-Sungold tomato sauce that I've made four years running, and which has a delicious, complex sweetness not often found in tomato sauces.
Over the last few years I've acquired a few bits of paraphernalia that have made indoor seed starting infinitely easier; one is a growing rack (originally used for orchids) complete with grow lights that hang from chains, allowing me to vary the distance between plant and light. The grow lights are useful even without the rack, and are available at big box stores and hardware stores-- the bottom picture shows the grow light unhooked from its rack and resting on some boxes and books on the ground, allowing it to get nice and close to the baby seedlings. Placing the light too far from the seedlings causes them to get leggy as they reach for the light-- I made this mistake the first year that I started seedlings under lights. Leggy seedlings can take a long time (i.e., until July or August) to become as sturdy as their more carefully raised brethren, so it's worth taking the extra time to make sure the light is as close as possible to the emerging plants when they first get going.
Another incredibly useful tool that I've picked up is a heat mat-- I actually have two of these, and they've been well worth the investment. The smaller mat (which fits one flat-- the middle picture shows the heat mat and a standard sized plastic flat) cost around $40 when I purchased it at a high-end garden center; the larger mat (which comfortably fits four flats) cost about $95. Both well worth the money, as they gently warm the roots of the plants and jump start their growth. I tend to keep the heat in the winter quite low, around 58 or 60 deg F, so having these pads to keep the air and soil around the seeds warm has been very useful. They're very sturdy, and I've had no trouble with mine.
I tend to leave the heat pads plugged in all day and night during the first few weeks of growth; the lights, however, are plugged into a power strip and hooked into a timer. They come on at around 7am and stay on until roughly 10pm; because the lights are stand
ard fluorescent bulbs (no need to buy the "special plant spectrum" lights-- it's a marketing ploy--just pick up standard full spectrum tubes), they use very little energy, so your bills shouldn't go up much. I calculated at one point that our electricity bill only went up about $5/month when the lights were plugged in, and because they're only used for about three months out of the year, that seemed reasonable.
The plants won't be ready to go outside until June 1 (our frost-free date), but it's exciting to watch them grow in the meantime. I've got about 120 tomato starts, and another 100 or so basil starts, so many of these will wind up being gifts to friends, but I love the anticipation of watching summer spring up all around me-- even when snow and sleet are still occasional visitors to our region.
I'm currently reading OUR LIFE IN GARDENS, a wonderful book by Joe Eck and Wayne Winterrowd, a couple living in Southern Vermont who run a landscape design business. The chapter titles progress alphabetically through an eclectic range of topics, including "Arborvitae," "The Bay Tree," "Forcing Branches," and "Hedges." It's a lovely book, simple and eloquent and full of stories about the various successes and failures encountered during 40+ years of gardening. Useful bits of information are scattered through the stories, including tips on how to grow tender plants beyond their recommended zones (just as useful here in New Hampshire as in Vermont!), the different shapes and sizes intended to increase the longevity of Bay trees, and various arrangements which can be made to overwinter camellias and banana trees. The book also introduces and comments on the history of several plants, including Cyclamen, in an effort to shed light on the plants' preferences and peculiarities. Rife with latin names and lacking photos or illustrations beyond the beautifully executed ink drawings at the beginning of each chapter, I fin
d it necessary to tote out my enormous copy of The American Horticultural Society's A-Z Encyclopedia of Garden Plants as I read through each chapter-- photos of the plants in question are helpful for those of us who aren't familiar with all the plants in question. The necessary cross-referencing hasn't dimmed my enthusiasm for Eck and Winterrowd's book, however-- the flow of their beautiful prose would be lost if interrupted by grainy black and white shots, or by overblown, overwhelming color shots. OUR LIFE IN GARDENS isn't for the pedestrian reader; it can be quite technical at times and requires a real interest in plants and garden design. Expertise is not required, only interest, so even this fledgling gardener has heartily enjoyed settling down with two of my favorite books and dreaming away the end of winter. I look forward to reading some of Eck and Winterrowd's other titles; more information on their other titles and pictures of their gardens can be found by visiting the North Hill website.
