Thursday, July 31, 2008

Tommorow is D-Day, or is it?

We had a nice little surprise in the mail this week. Our seeds arrived from Seed Savers Exchange. I'm quite intrigued with the little packets of seeds, but can't imagine we'll ever get them to grow into real live veggie-producing plants. The seeds came really quickly, much to our surprise, and arrived with a little card saying that Seed Savers Exchange is a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving more than 25,000 endangered vegetable varieties. Fancy huh? So now I have the added pressure of making sure these little packets of seeds grow so I don't disappoint the Exchange - I know they won't know...but I have serious guilt issues. Seed guilt. I'll add it to the list.
The boys and I went to Lowe's and Home Depot this morning to buy our seedlings. When I see the cost of seedlings, I see why it pays to start from seeds. But our plan was to do half seeds and half seedlings our first year, which is much less intimidating than an entire garden of seeds. We brought the seedlings home and loaded them into the boys' little red wagon. As we're loading them it started to rain. I panicked and quickly pulled the wagon into the garage so the plants wouldn't get wet. Yeah, I really did that. Then I realized that the seedlings actually need rain, so I ran into the garage and pulled the wagon out... as the rain stopped. I'm a natural, don't you think?
Tomorrow was supposed to be the big planting day. August 1st - our gardening D-Day - the first day of the Fall planting season. But there has been a snafu. We've got the seeds, the seedlings, the garden has been tilled, hoed and left to sit ready for planting. But the rain. Oh the rain. Oh the never-ending rain. If you don't live in FL you don't know that much of FL was once a swamp and the developers came in and built subdivisions on the swamps. So when it rains, our yard returns back to its prehistoric swampy state. Aidan is just shy of 50 lbs and when he stood in the garden today his boot was surrounded by a little pool of water. It makes a fun squishing sound when you walk and it moves like a pit of quicksand. But something tells me that this swampy wet garden isn't the optimal medium for planting seeds and seedlings. Although I can find nothing online that says you can't plant in this - I have a gut feeling that it won't be a good thing. So now what? Do we wait for the rains to stop? That's another month at least. And then we're in the meat of hurricane season. What do we do with this wagon full o' seedlings? I think Farmer B and I need to have a gardening conference tonight and figure out what to do next. This is not in the gardening book.

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