Seeding the Veggies

The veggie garden prepping is basically finished. The area you see in the foreground (above right) can wait a few more weeks when I take possession of several tomato seedlings. A few weeks after that I have 6 more seedlings arriving and then I have black plastic mulch to install as well as drip irrigation.

The seeding flat follows a familiar pattern of late: recycle. It's made from an old, weathered garden fence that my love hated to see pulled out. I did too, but I couldn't see why the garden should be half the size you see in the pictures just because someone placed a cute, but ill-advised fence for the weeds to climb on. With the grape vine sprawling past the fence one couldn't make any use of the fence to venter into it.

Carrots will be planted adjacent to the grape vine. THe tomatoes last season did great here and I pulled the vines away towards the sun. If the carrots don't do well here I might rest it for a season, plant flowers or some nitrogen fixing crop and put a temporary picnic table platform on it.

The seed screen is that chickenwire frame seen below. The purpose of this screen is to help me plant veggie seeds.

What I do is use the screen as a guide to poke my holes in the dirt and then drops the seed(s) in. I then pinch the hole closed.

If you haven't planted lettuce and carrot seeds by hand it can be rather stressful having a method to prvent overseeding as some lettuc seeds are the same color as the soil. The screen helps me keep my hand adjacent to the next seed hole while enabling me to confidently watch how many seeds I'm pinching between my forefingers.

I remove the screen and close the holes and then spread a little more dirt on top to account for the fact that watering will tamp it down. Done. The whole seed flat takes about an hour to seed and will provide me with about 70% of the veggies I will be growing this year.