New Starts
The morning sun has broken over the hill, and as its warmth begins to spread on the snow on the metal roof above my head, the meltwater runs down the icicles and off onto the snow. After the first few minutes, the inistent rhythm of the drops becomes background music, until the sun passes behind the trees to the west and the temperature drops. The next morning when the sun breaks over the hill once again, the dripping resumes. Rhythms layered upon rhythms.
I check the weather every morning. My favorite weather site is Weather Underground, mostly because of their 10 day forecast screen which compresses an insane amount of weather information into one graphical interface.
Weather Underground’s forecast for this week
After a while of staring at this dense madness , more rhythms emerge: the slow rising and falling of barometric pressure and the strengthening and ebbing of rainfall as the storm approaches and passes. At present, I’m paying a lot of attention to the daily rhythm of high and low temperatures, since this is the start of maple season and the flow of sap in the maple trees depends on the fluctuation of temperatures between above freezing in the day and below freezing at night (more coming about this soon).
But on top of the daily rhythms, there is also the rhythm of one season passing to the next. Spring is coming! The sun is getting stronger and the day is getting longer, and so we are on to the start of a new growing year. It’s time to start seeds!
The growing season here is pretty short, about 125 days. Some vegetables, like leeks and tomatoes, need longer than 125 days to grow enough to harvest, so we have to start growing them in a protected environment inside and them transplant them out into the garden when the weather is warm enough. Appropriately, the little plants are called “starts”, and hence the title of this blog since this week I seeded the first “new starts” of the year.
The starts are new in another way, since I am planting seeds for the first time in my new indoor seeding setup.:
As you can see,, it is just a shelf with some lights on it, but it has some features that I really like.
First of all, it is two feet deep and four feet wide, so four seed trays can be put on each shelf. This is a two-fold improvement over my old shelves.
Second of all, the shelves were super easy to put together and will also be easy to take apart when I am not using them. For anyone interested, these are Husky shelves that I got from Home Depot.
And thirdly, the light fixtures are wide but relatively inexpensive LED lights, four of which can be chained together, which simplifies the number of wires snaking around.
On the shelves you can see my first plantings of onion, leeks and shallots, as well as some early tomatoes that I am going to be trying in the greenhouse. I wish you could smell the earthy goodness of the potting soil and feel the anticipation as we await the new green life starting in their seedling trays!
I love this time of year. It’s a time of forgiveness and hope, when you can learn from the past and try again. As I say every year, it’s a new start.
