Our Babies.... Beautiful Vegetable Seedlings

Springs is here, and we've been super busy preparing our vegetable garden.  

Well technically we don't actually have the actual vegetable garden ready yet, we haven't got that far, but we've been sowing seeds like crazy... and most of what we have sown in the tray's in our city flat are germinating really well... and very quickly!

It's super exciting to plant a seed and then to watch it grow. I've been watering them twice a day, and I put the tray's outside if the weather is good. Bringing them back inside at night to keep my babies warm.

We didn't know what we wanted to grow, so we have set 3 criteria in deciding what to grow:

1. We have to be able to eat it,
2. The plant is a companion plant to another plant we intend to eat,
3. The plant is a native.

So as long as the plant comes under one of the above criteria, we will give it a go to see if we can grow the plant successfully.

I started out ordering some seed catalogues as we needed some ideas of what we can grow, and what should grow in our area:

    www.kingsseeds.co.nz
    www.egmontseeds.co.nz

There are so many plants to choose from!

It can be a little pricey starting out, so here are a couple of tips to keep costs down:

TIP 1:  Compare the pricing between the above companies along with seeds at The Warehouse. Keep in mind the special discounts when making a big purchase. The Warehouse was very cheap with your more standard varieties so I purchased the more common seeds from The Warehouse.

TIP 2:  Keep in mind seeds expire.  Some of the seed packets come with far too many seeds, and for us we will never use them all before they expire. So keep that in mind when purchasing. It might seem good value to purchase the packet with 200 seeds, but when you will like only use 50 of the seeds before the expiry date, just go with the cheaper smaller packet.

TIP 3:  Ask your friends if they have any seeds they are not going to use!

In the future I intend to hopefully try to gather my own seeds from the plants successfully grown.  I'm not sure how to do that yet, but I will give it a go.

Below are some of our babies:

There are 11 different Tomato varities, 2 different Lettuce, Pak Choy, Peppers, Crenshaw Melons, Kiwanos, Sugar Baby Water Melons, Peas, Green Cucumbers, White Cucumbers, Broccolis, Cauliflower, Marigolds.

At a rough tally we have just over 200 seedlings that have sprouted so far. 

We have a lot more seeds to sow, but we are a bit limited on space in our flat.

Sadly the Passionfruit hasn't been successful.   

So we must get a move on, and prepare the actual garden bed. So far this is as far all we have done on that part:

We need to finish the fence, make some garden beds, prepare the soil, sort out the irrigation, so much to do! But if the weather is good over the next couple of weekends I'm sure we can make some good progress. I will let you know how we get on.

Well... a quick update, we managed to do some of the above over the weekend:

We still need to build a gate... plenty still to do.