Do Overs (or More on Watering)

Wetting the Soil

I'm wondering what I did wrong or at least what I could have done better.

One thing I keep thinking about is water. Did I get the soil wet enough before I planted?

When I first mixed the soil (that is, made Mel's Mix), I watered just enough to keep the peat moss and vermiculite from blowing away. I did not want to water too much because then the whole mix gets so heavy that it's hard to move into the boxes.

However, when I had the soil ingredients mixed and in the boxes, I should have completely drenched the soil. Mel says that I can't over-water because the soil drains so well. Remember the analogy of the sponge?

When you take a dry sponge and slowly add water to it, it just keeps soaking up water until it's finally saturated. At that point, any extra water just drains out the bottom. Well, it turns out that two of our ingredients--peat moss and vermiculite--do exactly the same thing. It takes a while to wet them and keep them moist so you have to keep adding water, but finally, when they become saturated, any excess water just drains right out the bottom.

I wonder if the peppers were mad because the soil was not wet enough?

I noticed that the leaves on the peppers were turning yellow, so I pruned them off the plants. No leaves have been lost in the last week, so I'm hoping that they are done being mad at me.

I do have a few squares of soil that do not yet have seeds in them. I'll be planting lettuces in them over the next several weeks (so that I have lettuce ready to harvest over weeks rather than all at once). When I water, I water these empty squares as well so that the soil is ready for the seeds when I am ready to plant.

Soaking Roots

Mel says to soak the roots of transplants before putting them into the soil. Seems that I should have read that before I taught my students how to plant! I had two students who planted plants rather than seeds. One of them planted cherry tomatoes and the other planted peppers.

I should have taught them to soak the root ball in water before putting the plant into the soil.

As for the community garden, I did soak the roots! I soaked the roots in the 180 Plant Dip, remember? (See the post titled "A Vitamin Boost for the Plants.")

The tomatoes seem very happy, so I'm glad I soaked their roots in the 180 Plant Dip.

The peppers had been losing leaves. I'm not sure if they were upset with the plant dip, with being planted earlier than Mel says they should be, or with not having wet enough soil. I guess I'll just have to re-read this blog entry before planting next spring and then watch to see if I have different results.

Soaking Seeds

Mel says to soak the seeds before planting them. I didn't do that. :-(

I did not understand from Mel's book how long I should soak the seeds or exactly how to do it, so I chickened out and didn't soak them at all.

That means that I did not teach my students how to soak seeds, either. Ugh!

Many of the seeds were so small that I could hardly pinch just a couple to get them into the soil, so I can only imagine that I would have lost the seeds in the water if I had soaked them first.

But perhaps I could have put them on paper towel and then got the towel wet?

Mel says that soaking the seeds will result in faster sprouting. He also says to be careful because some seeds will fall apart. Perhaps the boys and I could experiment with the extra seeds... I'll let you know what we learn from our experiments.