It's much too early to plant out anything but peas and maybe radishes, but I'm trying the Winter Sowing method, which involves lots of mini-greenhouses made out of milk jugs and plastic trays and whatnot. I'm using a couple of those big round trays with clear covers, like you get shrimp in, or ham rolls, or whatever small foods.
I planted 8 types of pepper, 7 tomatoes, "Hairy Balls" Milkweed (heh heh) Danish Flag Poppies, cilantro, thyme, chiltepin and ground cherries. I have no idea if this will work--it seems absurd, putting these plants out now, as if you could just ask for miracles and get them! But gardening is basically asking for miracles and sometimes getting them, and people swear by it. I hate fiddling with grow-lights anyway, and I have way more seeds than I'll ever plant this year, so if they all die off, I'm not really out anything.
Still, it's nerve-wracking. I have read all the forums full of people in far colder zones who swear by this method, who put tomatoes out on February 2nd in Zone 5 and get sturdy plants (though they are not quite so far along as the grow-light versions, but significantly sturdier seedlings) but it is a weird leap of faith to plant things out when all your nerves are screaming "Bring them in! This is madness! This will never work!"
I have the little plastic cel-packs with four cels each, the kind you buy annuals in, so each cultivar gets four cels, two seeds to a cel, to be thinned later (assuming any of them survive!)
Kevin goes in for the last of the jaw surgeries tomorrow, so we recorded a week of Hidden Almanac tonight. I got another hamster illo done. The garden is warm and I just want to wander around in it, finding things that are coming up (The filberts! The filberts have FLOWERED!) and pulling the occasional weed. It is better than watching the news and waiting for each new body blow, and at least at some point I may actually get filberts out of it.
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