Eeks! I overdid it!

Boy sometimes I think I must have lost my mind....the other day, I started a bunch of vegetable seeds. The really old fashioned way-which is by pre germinating. I remember my Grandmother (award winning gardener in L48) using fine linen napkins, a bit of rain water, and an old cigar tin to germinate seeds. My version, being the new century, is to use damp paper towels and ziplock bags, tossed onto my kitchen table.

I sprinke the seeds over the toweling, fold that up, pop it into the bag, and check in a couple of days to see if I have sprouts. I have a real hard time reining myself in, as far as the number of seeds go-after all, some may not sprout, given the lower percentage germination rate printed on the packets, right?

Wrong! I am up to my elbows in literally hundreds of baby sprouts, just emerging from their hulls, all of which need planted pronto. So this morning I tallied up what I have on hand for flats and cell packs, and managed to load up a bale of ProMix into my car. I have to do this at work because they won't wait a day for me to get home....And in a day or so, I will have to shuffle over many flats to my friends' commerical greenhouse to leaf out in the proper growing conditions.

In short, I have hundreds and hundreds of veggies needing to be carefully picked off the toweling, and set into properly moistened media right now today. Yes, it is somewhat painstaking work, picking them out by hand, but I just cannot throw out all that potential food.

At least I have a place to take them, and this year I am almost 12 days behind when I started last year-which is a good thing! So I think I have about 30 flats worth of seeds waiting for me to get busy with, and that's not counting the 750 seeds of summer squashes I am waiting until April 5th to start!