Winter blazes on outside, frosting the sleeping trees, while inside we’re beginning to start seeds in our basement. I created a setup with grow lights, a shelf, and several bootstrap trays. My biggest “oops” here is my shelf size. I wanted a semi-portable shelf to be dual purpose: for starting seeds, and displaying bouquets. While this shelf does fold up, which is great, it’s a bit of an awkward size for many of these standard seed starting trays and it could certainly stand to be deeper. However, it’s the first year, so I anticipate space not getting too crazy and if it does, I’ll buy a better shelf for the seeds.

I’ll go ahead and admit that I started some things too early. Particularly baby’s breath. I mistakenly thought I purchased perennial baby’s breath but they’re annuals. Perennials generally take longer to establish, we’d be lucky to get cuts from any planted this year, but starting them early gives us a better chance. I had planned to up-pot them 2 to 3 times if needed to make sure we put in strong healthy plants. All that became moot however so now we have annual baby’s breath seedlings that are growing rather quickly. Ultimately we should be able to still care for them the same and get them into the ground after the frost, it’s just a little more work than was necessary.

We started yarrow, which germinated beautifully, and the first round of basil (varieties: cinnamon and opal). I was, somehow, surprised when the opal basil seedlings cropped up a gorgeous violet color, silly me. We also planted in dahlia seeds I got from a seed trade. I was primarily concerned that few would be viable but at this point, nearly every single seed has germinated and begun growing fiercely. I’m definitely going to have to pot those up too. More work.

We pre-sprouted the seedlings to make sure we didn’t waste time planting non-viable seeds. I’m very glad we did that, while most of the seeds from Eden Brothers sprouted just fine, I only got a few out of the seeds I purchased from Lowe’s. We placed the sprouted seeds in soil blocks and they only took a day to start bursting from the top layer of soil. You’ll also notice, I did some test on whether I prefer vermiculite or soil to top the seeds and I definitely determined I prefer the vermiculite.

Anyway, all this said, regardless of making more work for myself and doing things imperfectly I’m beyond thrilled to see these babies take off!