After our farming adventure Saturday morning, Andrew and I decided to spend the evening starting some seeds for our vegetable garden.  Yes, we are that wild and crazy.  We’ve been looking forward to spring and talking abstractly about our garden since last summer, when our “garden” consisted of a few plants in pots.  (We weren’t ready to commit to a permanent location in the yard yet.)

   Small, but proud 🙂

A few weeks ago I bought more seeds than we will be able to use (I got a little too excited about the possibilities) and we have been eager to plant them.  After working with Shalom Farms on Saturday, we no longer could resist the urge to start some of the seeds indoors. (<–After writing and rewriting that sentence, I’ve determined there is no way to say what I’m trying to say without sounding like a hippie.  It is what it is.)

Definitely not all the seeds…

Let me preface this by saying that we are far from experts when it comes to gardening.  (Exhibit A: We grew our vegetables in pots last summer. See above.)  We are educating ourselves as best we can, but this is very much a learning process for us 🙂

First we brought some organic soil inside to let it warm.

Then we put soil in the individual containers of a seed starting kit (purchased at Lowe’s.)

We planted the seeds (bell peppers, hot peppers, slicing tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, broccoli, and cantaloupe) per the instructions on each package, and admired our work 😀

Dear Future Children, we are sorry about your giant elf ears 😉

Finally, we put the greenhouse lid on the kit, and set up a light nearby to further warm up the soil (we keep our house way too cold to support life.  Plant or human.)

For months I’d been saving that coffee can.  I didn’t know for what, but I had a gut feeling we’d need it for something.  As it turns out, it’s just what we needed to stake the spotlight at the right height/angle to warm the baby plants.  Win.

Now we are keeping the mini greenhouse in our guest bathroom–it has a skylight, so the room is very sunny most of the day–with a space heater that will automatically turn off when it reaches its set temperature.  We put a thermometer in the container to make sure we aren’t frying or freezing the seeds.  We are checking on them at a frequency that is nothing short of obsessive.

If all goes well, we will start some more seeds indoors.

If not, well, as I said: this is a learning experience.  🙂