Starting Summer Vegetable, Herbs, Flower Seeds. 3.5.22

It's a little early but not as early as last year. I decided to start the tomatoes, mostly dwarf types. Plus some thyme, Ratibida (this is called "Mexican Hat Flower"), some chive seeds saved in 2020, cilantro seeds saved last summer, basil, and replacements for carnations. When I up-potted the carnations, they all died. I think that was fungal rot. I don't know if that was carried by the soil, or I didn't sterilize the used pots. Disappointing. So I sterilized containers, used new containers for planting the new seeds, threw the diseased plants/containers/soil into the trash, and have learned a lesson. I also sterilized the plant stand. The same thing happened to the micro tomatoes.

I don't know why I bought those basil seeds. I have plenty that I saved myself. Oh well. This year I'm changing over all but a few tomatoes to dwarf types and of those, open pollinated rgat I can save seeds. I will also do a pruning experiment with the indeterminates to see if I can prune them into bush types - the exact opposite of the usual pruning. That is to try to raise them without tall poles. I'm hoping I can raise about a dozen in one large raised bed, plus two in large containers (Bush Early Girl and Early Boy Bush). The hand-written packets were seeds I saved last year. So was the cilantro (not shown).