Saturday, April 14, 2012

Heirloom Seed Planting

This year I have decided to plant my own seeds for our veggie bucket garden. Better yet, I am using all organic soils and I might even throw in some home grown compost. The best part? I am using heirloom seeds! I have become more and more concerned about our food supply's over abundance of GMOs (genetically modified organism). Many of the foods we eat have been genetically altered to battle disease or ward off pests. The danger? The foods are not pure. There have been studies linking GMOs with human RNA issues. I don't know about you, but anything that messes with my genetic code (RNA is the worker bee that reads/decodes DNA/sends messages to cells based on DNA) is not safe in my book. Adults have been eating these foods with out knowledge or consent for many years, but I am not about to let my kid be exposed to these types of foods if I can help it. The damage has been done in my adult body but I am going to protect his body as much as I possibly can!

So what is on the menu for this summer/fall harvest? 3 different types of carrots (red, purple, and yellow), 4 different tomatoes, salad greens, mini bell peppers, purple bell peppers, a few varieties of jalapenos (including purple), and some herbs. My order also came with a free packet of flower seeds that have been been planted in Europe since the 1500's! I can't wait to see them!

I have started to plant the seeds this week. I had purchased some rotisserie chickens so I repurposed the containers into mini greenhouses! Why buy them when I can reuse these? Not only do they provide a warm, moist environment for my seeds to grow, but they keep Fritz out too! I hope that we have success with these seeds germinating. I have been very excited about this heirloom harvest for a while now and I don't want to disappoint myself!

I purchased my seeds from Baker Creek. You can check them out on the web at www.rareseeds.com!

Check out my rotisserie chicken greenhouses!

Each "greenhouse" contains 6 starter pots.

Up close and personal with some pepper seeds!

2 comments:

Lynne said...

Doing the same here. I used clear plastic salad take out containers and paper tower tubes cut up with seed-starting mix.

Word to the wise: After about a week, those cardboard rolls, some of them at least, will start to unwind with all that moisture. I moved a couple of the early risers out of the salad containers, and I needed a really delicate hand...and a spoon underneath them to keep them from falling apart.

I think it'd help if I didn't mix my seed trays. The lettuce (I wanted a small indoor crop so I planted them despite the fact I live in New England) popped up in days, and the sage is still not up 9 days later (which is to be expected) and tehrefore, I had to move seedlings, I couldn't just keep them all in the salad container and open it quite yet.

Lynne said...

Oh and I get my seeds from Baker Creek too! I had amazing tomatoes last year...which I shamefully neglected and yet they totally produced for me.