Spring jumpstart
Friday February 01st 2019, 11:18 pm
Filed under: Amaryllis,Garden

More amaryllises! (And a hyacinth.)

Last year I went through the seed catalogs with great visions, as one does. I did plant a few tomatoes, and as a matter of fact one indestructible Sungold next to the house from the year before survived 22F winter nights–again–and is still blooming and producing merrily away. A windstorm blew it backwards two weeks ago but bit by bit it is growing towards the sun again that is likewise reaching out gradually to it.

I looked at all those unused year-old seeds though (Big Boys! Blue tomatoes!) and figured that if I started in January and nothing sprouted then I wouldn’t have lost much time. And if they did, they could be in pots for awhile inside the Sunbubble; I might as well put that heat to the most use I can, right?

Look who just showed up. Now that I’ve got an extra bag of soil so I can put it in something bigger than a used creme brûlée pot. I can’t remember if this is the zucchini or a Waltham butternut, but either way this little squash needs more legroom stat. If anything comes up in that bigger pot over there then I’ll have (at least) one of each.

Knowing that squirrels sometimes go after new sprouts, I brought it inside for the night. No munching on my seedling. This one’s mine.

Edited to add, I posted this and then looked more closely: two! Two Big Boy tomatoes came up today when I wasn’t looking!

Tiny little things.


3 Comments so far
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Fruit, veggies, chocolate…you’ve got it covered! Yum!

Comment by Jayleen Hatmaker 02.02.19 @ 6:15 am

I still have 14 inches of white stuff on the ground and my pipes froze while I was away from home sick.

Comment by Sherry in Idaho 02.02.19 @ 10:01 am

Squash grow surprisingly fast! We had a zucchini plant a few years ago that I planted along with the slow-growers in January to make *sure* that we had something sprout, anyway (my other seeds were very risky and I would be very sad if nothing sprouts) and he sprouted immediately and kept growing. He grew out of his 8oz yogurt pot. He grew out of the next up, a 4″ pot. He grew out of the milk-gallon-jug-cut-in-half. He grew out of the giant cracked plastic pitcher (it broke in a move, and fortunately we hadn’t figured out how to recycle it yet). By the time he grew out of the pitcher, though, it was just *barely* mostly warm enough that he had good odds of surviving outside, which he did (he remained ornamental rather than productive to the end of his days, though; too much early cooing and coddling? bad year for zucchinis? who knows).

However, it sounds like where you are, you could probably drop a reasonably durable squash plant in the ground more or less whenever outside of the absolute coldest part of winter, once the plant has gotten large enough to be a little less squirrel-snack-y, so you won’t have the “what bigger thing do we *have*? It’s still hitting 20F at night, we can’t put him outside without any protection yet…” question. 🙂

I hope your itty bitty tomato seedlings thrive beautifully for you! (I have no worries about the squash.)

Comment by KC 02.02.19 @ 4:13 pm



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