The seedlings after potting up

Oregonflora and Joanna - welcome, and thanks for following the blog!

Are ya tired of looking at seedlings yet? Well if not, then EG has more to show you on the propagation front...I'd like to start off first by showing these little fellas in the picture below. The variety is Rutgers, they were propagated in the 2nd cat litter bucket propagation system, and are being grown for my good friend James McCoo at work....That one in the front is pretty leggy, so I decided to put them under my lights in the biggest propagation unit, and will let him take over once his grow light is in place...It appears that a 60 watt bulb isn't enough to make the plants stocky, so i'll be going with 100 watts next time I use the little propagation system....

Now for some of the others that were shown in the video the other day....... This first one is Brandywine Red, and looks really good at this stage. It was appreciative of the extra room in the large cup, and is looking much better since I can now water it much less than before. When the seedlings are tiny things in their little cells, I am the worst waterer of all time. However, I improve after potting up takes place.

Photo below - here's a Black Brandywine seedling of which seeds for it were shared by my good friend in Canada, Dan - who also taught me how to save my own seeds each year. You can certainly bet that seeds will be saved from this one at the end of the season, and hopefully i'll have lots to go around, too.

Photo below - remember the little "surprise" Amana Orange I showed in the video too? Well, it's still getting stronger, and I feel confident that it'll make it to transplant size later. I sure hope so, because it's the only one in there, and the ones last year didn't make it either...

Photo below - Here's some poppies that have germinated already, and lots more are yet to come. As stated previously, they're for my little girl that expressed her desire to have some for her own flowerbed at home, and it's a big secret - so nobody tell her, ok? Lol. Hopefully they'll be a big surprise, because she lives in Birmingham and doesn't get to visit very often.

In other news, I turned a couple of compost piles that were really wet from the recent rainfall, and also added more UCG's to hopefully get the internal temperature back up again. I'd like for them to dry out a bit, but with the wettest months of the year upon us - it's doubtful that'll happen.

I also pruned the rose bushes around the house, and could really benefit from a class on the proper way to do them. Yeah....i'm pretty pathetic at pruning roses apparently. Ha!

Six bags of pine mulch were also purchased for enhancing the soilless mix used in the swc's - mainly because I didn't want to add more perlite to it for better aeration properties. I figure 2 parts of mulch will be added to the current mixture of  Peat moss (6 parts) and Perlite (4 parts), which should definitely introduce more air into the root zone. Although the current mixture performs quite well, I feel it can do even better if altered a tad...

Take care, and happy gardening

EG