Pansy Update

More Planting

Got some more planting done today. I planted cherry tomatoes for the vegetable garden, white salvias and gold drumstick flowers for the wedding, and snapdragons because that is a wicked awesome name and they are fresh.

Here are the snapdragons in their little greenhouse. They all got little greenhouses eventually. (I can't find my freaking plastic labels, so I resorted to masking tape. I knew you wanted to know.)

Still no germination for the first round of salvias. They still have another week before they are officially overdue, so that is cool. Of these new guys, the snapdragons could be the first, 10-21 days. Or potentially the last I guess. The others germinate in 12 and 18 days.

Pansies Out of the Bag

Here are the seedlings when I took them out of their plastic bag greenhouse on Friday.


And here they are today.

Pansy Seedlings

The first seedlings popped up in the pansy tray. It's not that easy to see them in the pictures:

I'll be acclimating them to the "outside" air by periodically cutting holes in their plastic "greenhouse," before taking them out of the bag altogether about this time tomorrow.

No sign of life yet with the Purple Salvia, which is supposed to germinate in anywhere from 4-21 days. The pansies said they would germinate in 12-21 days. They are a full week early.

Wedding Garden

Yesterday, Tina and I started our garden planting. This year, we decided to use most of our garden space to grow flowers for our wedding. We're totally aware that there are a million factors outside of our control (and another million in our control) which could make this not work out, but if it does -- we'll have homegrown flowers for our wedding. How cool.

Yesterday we planted White Pansies and Purple Salvia. The pansies are for the wedding, but the salvia is just for fun (Beth gave us the seeds for Christmas!).

This year I'm relying on The Garderner's A-Z Guide to Growing Flowers by Eileen Powell. It's a great, VERY comprehensive book with advice on hundreds of specific flowers, and really great general advice with cool pictures. I love its emphasis on do-it-yourself alternatives (making growing containers from old milk cartons, egg cartons, newspaper, etc.).