Well, hello peeps. It's been a while.
It hasn't been all that comedic around here for a bit, with ill parents, deaths, and the like. My brother died unexpectedly right after Christmas. On the upside, we also had a wedding (youngest daughter) and a first grandbaby (oldest daughter. Boys need to Get Busy. NOT REALLY. ) So writing had to get shoved to the back burner for a while. But I am back, y'all.
So for this first posting in the New Era I thought I would share something practical. If I were more patient and more tech-savvy I would post a video but the photos will have to do!
In case you hadn't noticed, the weather patterns of the United Stated have gone Stark Raving Mad. I say this because, well because they have, but specifically because while my kiddos in South Louisiana are contemplating a winter storm and my friends in the Northeast are contemplating suicide, I am sitting here in the supposed-to-be-gray-dank-and-wet Pacific Northwest contemplating the blossoms on my cherry trees and the fact that my daffodils have been up for weeks.
It is almost certainly a ruse.
We will be lulled into a false sense of Spring, go to a fat lot of trouble getting gardens ready and Stuff planted, and then - bam. It will snow or we will have an ice storm in April. I have seen it before. So, while I did in fact spend a fair amount of painful energy yesterday ripping the godforsaken mess that was my herb garden out of the ground, I am not going to bust my hump getting a garden planted just yet.
In an effort to feel productive and because I am a sucker for producing little anythings (Let's plant tiny trees! Let's incubate eggs!! Let's get baby chicks or ducklings!!! Let's watch them poop all over the garage floor and remember why that is a Bad Idea!!!), I had the fairly brilliant idea. The lady at Wilco told me I was brilliant, so I will choose to believe her. If nine million of you out there have already thought of this DO NOT TELL ME. On the other hand, if there are nine million of you out there reading my blog you can tell me any damn thing you please.
I am also a Saver. I instinctively dislike wasting perfectly good bits of this or that, and when you live on a farm you can almost always find a use for this or that. To that end, I had been saving milk jugs. My original intent was to make scoops. If you cut around the handle you can make a dandy scoop for feed or dirt or whatever. One only needs so many scoops, though, and I am fairly well caught up in that department. So faced with nine perfectly good milk jugs in search of resurrection, I had the brilliant idea.
I personally do not like those little commercial seed starting thingies, the little disks wrapped in biodegradable cloth of some kind, that you stick a seed into and plump up with water. I find them pricey and annoying. My alternative is --ta daaa -- the Milk Jug Seed Starter! So here you are, complete with step-by-step instructions, as if you couldn't just stop reading now and figure it out all by yourselves. But hey.
Step 1. This is a milk jug, in case you have been living either under a rock or in the lap of luxury such that you have never had to pour yourself a glass. These are gallon jugs, but any size would do. Just remember the bigger the jug the more seeds you can stick in there!
Step 2. I actually used a knife here, but that was before I decided to take pictures. When the time came the scissors were what I grabbed for illustrative purposes. Start near the base of the jug handle and cut around to the other side, leaving about an inch and a half. This will be your hinge.
Step 3. Fill the bottom half with dirt. Potting soil, dirt from your garden, pick your poison. Actually, do NOT pick any poison, I am an organic sort of gal. Plant your seeds. I plant generously, about nine little spots per jug, knowing they may not all come up and I can thin them as needed. You could poke little drain holes in the bottoms, but if you do you will need something sizeable to set them all on. Otherwise you will have brown water all over your rug, table, wherever.
Step 4. Seat the top back in place after watering gently. I taped the seed packets (not completely used) to each jug to easily keep track of what is planted where. You could mark on the jug with a sharpie, but since I plan to reuse mine I did not want them permanently marked.
Step 5. It is important to save the caps - when you first start, the cap will be on. As the seedlings get started, you can vent the container by removing the cap. When they get well started, you can tip the top half over as shown in Step 3.
Step 6. Pretty maids all in a row! Mine are in a windowsill in my Purple Couch Room (we are wildly imaginative with room names around here) which gets primarily morning sun this time of year. You can easily move them around to suit your own sunny spots. Just, ahem, remember NOT TO PICK THEM UP BY THE HANDLES. Doh.
Step 7. Because I am occasionally a teensy bit OCD, and because the research scientist in me didn't completely die, I made a whiteboard chart for mine. The Force (of Habit) Is Strong With This One. I still have all my research notebooks. So I recorded, for each seed type, the planting date, the days to germination, the anticipated and actual germination dates, the days to maturity, the plant spacing for when they are transplanted, and the mature height for garden planning purposes. Yeah, I'm a little bit a geek that way.
So, for all my friends huddled under blankies and shoveling your way to freedom, NEENER NEENER NEENER. Actually, stay warm and safe, and I will keep you posted. In the meanwhile, as you sit around plotting ways to assassinate Punxsutawney Phil, Milk Jug Starter Gardens are a great way to keep on believing Spring will eventually be sprung. Sproing!!
