Posted by maco on April 07, 2015 at 15:40 and edited at March 06, 2020 at 08:57

Most of the seeds I started a couple weeks ago have sprouted and gotten going. It looks like I will need to pick up one black beauty eggplant, one butternut squash, and one basil plant. And maybe oregano if I still don't get around to starting those (I didn't have the seeds on hand like I thought I did).

As of two days ago, the seedlings were looking like this!

As of this morning, the squash (the things with huge cotyledons in front) have started putting on true leaves too.

Also this weekend, in my backyard beds I prepared the bed I built last fall for planting. I dug it up and broke up the clay and mixed some leaf mulch I had leftover in, and some coir I had left from the seed starting, and the leftovers from seed starting mix (it was coir, compost, and perlite) into the clay as I did so. Then I added two bags of garden soil. Then I dug some of the more broken-down compost out of the compost heap and spread that around. It was still chunky, but some matted grass bits and still-solid leaf bits won't hurt anything. They'll just break down in the ground. Then I put two more bags of garden soil on top of that. I'm going to grab some more garden soil and try to dig more of the done-ish (it spent enough time at temperature, it just isn't "finished" in that the worms haven't finished their cold process afterward yet) compost out of the heap to fill up the other two beds better. They're low because they originally were just a couple inches of dirt on top of the ground with no frames, then I added 6 inch frames around them.

But anyway, here's how the new bed looks

I also stopped by the garden center on Sunday and picked up 4 more bushes. Two are for my front garden landscaping project (another Rhododendron periclymenoides (pinxterbloom azalea) and another Viburnum dentatum (arrowwod viburnum–already had a "Chicago lustre" variety, this is a "blue muffin") and two are blueberries for the food forest. I picked up one lowbush blueberry and one pink lemonade blueberry which is a variety of rabbiteye blueberry.