Alright, I’ve been at this for a little over a month, we’re coming off a rainy week in Livermore, and there’s a lot to take away from several of my gardening attempts so far.

Fails:

Outdoor lettuce in coconut coir: I think the most epic fail this month was seeding lettuce outside in a think layer of coconut coir and then watering it with a spray hose. Not one single seedling came up in the lettuce patch dig vs. no-dig test. I’ll probably try direct seeding outdoors again, but in the meantime, the kiddo and I started a new seed tray with lettuce a few days ago and she’s been asking to check on it daily. The first seeds sprouted in about two days, so she’s having fun with that.

Outdoor seed trays: I can’t believe how many issues I had with taking my seedlings outdoors. I started these in the window, but they weren’t getting enough light there and were growing leggy. Since the weather was great, I figured I could take them out in the morning and bring them in in the evening. On the list of fails: I forgot to bring them in, let them dry out a bit, caught the kiddo cutting them off with scissors, and then eventually found three seed trays dumped on the ground. None of that was fun, or interesting, so I’m going to install some lights in my window mini-greenhouse and bring what’s left indoors where it’s marginally more defendable and much easier to observe.

Successes:

Wire critter cages: the wire cages I built to defend the veggie patch seem to be working. My gnawed down daikon seedlings are somehow still alive and the early peas are growing tendrils and getting bushier. In fact, I’ll be able to thin these soon and eat the microgreens!

Grow bags: so far I’m liking the compostable grow bags I’m using to start tomatoes and bell peppers. They’re very easy to water by setting the cartons they’re standing in in a tray of water, and I’m looking forward to “potting these up” when they’ve grown without dreading it. Plus, it’s so easy to see when they’ve outgrown their grow bags because the roots should just start poking out.

Making compost fast: I’m definitely sticking with the practice of blending up some of my kitchen scraps before adding them to the compost tumbler. My observation from the first tumbler (which is ready for to use!) is that mushy foods that get blended up end up creating clumps in the compost. This would happen if I just added larger pieces of those foods directly to the compost tumbler, so I’m now only grinding up slow to compost materials like fruit rinds and eggshells. As my current tumbler degrades down further, I might start blending more foods again, but since I’m probably a few weeks from filling out, those pear cores and outer lettuce leaves have time to break down by themselves.

Still observing:

Inoculated peas: I’m really surprised to see that there is a dramatic difference between my inoculated peas and non-inoculated peas. We can’t necessarily credit the rhizobia with that, because a sample size of two inoculated peas isn’t enough to draw conclusions, but it’s neat to look at! Both of the bigger seedlings sprouted on the same day, as did both of the tiny ones. But the rhizobia inoculated peas are much more developed than the non-inoculated peas. This test isn’t actually about what grows better. It’s supposed to be about whether we’ll eventually see rhizobia nodules on the inoculated plant, and whether the non-inoculated plant will fail to show them. But it’s fun to make these observations along the way.

Peas, dig vs. no-dig: The outdoor peas have germinated but it’s still too soon to see much of a difference between the no-dig and dig squares. And actually, I didn’t notice much of an initial difference with the sprouts either. The only real difference is that in the squares that have had more sun (due to winter light) all of the peas, whether dig, no-dig, or sprouted, emerged a little sooner than in the squares that have only stared getting sun in the past couple weeks.

Big takeaway

But, here’s the big takeaway: gardening is super fun and interesting when things are going well. This month, I had a lot of seedling losses and that got to be discouraging after a while. I’ve learned that it makes a big difference to my motivation and enjoyment of the garden to change (hopefully fix!) what’s broken and try something new.