Getting Back on Track!

I'm pretty sure some of you think I might have fallen off the face of the earth. I seem to be posting less and less these past few weeks. For that I am sorry. It's been a cold, hard, long winter and I have gotten very lazy. I have enjoyed reading others' post, trying to leave cheerful and witty comments, but even that has been an effort some days.

Today, however, we had lovely blue skies and temperatures close to 60! Those things combined with a seed starting seminar at a local garden center have somewhat renewed my energies. At least my thoughts have once again turned to gardening and more importantly, to blogging and sharing.

Rose and I made our way to the garden center about 9:00 this morning. Grabbing a cup of their free coffee, we seated ourselves close to the front-all the better to see my dear! I think she is going to do a post on the actual information we received so I won't go into that, but we did get a 20% discount on all seed starting necessities.

I bought several of these type of peat pots. Last year I had very good luck with them and when it came time to transplant they easily went straight into the ground or container without worrying about damaging the roots. I think I will use these for morning glories ( Heavenly Blue!), sunflowers , Sweet Autumn clematis(from Racquel) and Verbena Bonariensis and Shirley single poppies (from Cheryl). Also, I am going to try, moon flower and Purple Hyacinth beans (from Monica).

I also got a plastic tray with the cell packs and a top. I used this last year also and was pleased with the results. I stopped short of buying anything else as I knew I had some things left from last year and just need to take inventory before getting too carried away.

In these flats I intend to plant some zinnias, Antirrhinum, Love-in-a-Mist (from Cheryl), Mexican Mint Marigold, Cow Pen Daisy (from Aunt Debbi) and probably several other varieties I haven't bought yet. The seeds from Monica and Aunt Debbi were part of a seed swap started by Monica that Rose and I participated in. That was a lot of fun and we had a great afternoon looking through all the seeds and deciding which ones to try.

When thinking about doing this post, I Googled seed starting and found a few great sites with much more info. One has the time it takes for different seeds to germinate and be ready to transplant outdoors. This one is really interesting and tells how to plant each flower by name. The other site has information on seed starting medium, light, water, etc. Also very interesting and was a lot of what we discussed in the seminar.

With all this seed starting to look forward to-still a couple of weeks too early here-I am beginning to dream of flowers blooming in great masses all over my gardens.

Hope you have a garden dream going!