Friday, July 15, 2011

Tricia's tip - seed depth

This morning I got a bunch of free pots at a rummage sale.  I spent the afternoon planting seeds.  This is my second time planting seeds, and I ran up against the same problem I had last time - how do I know what the right depth is?

Last time, I eyeballed the depth, but near the end of the planting I had a sneaky suspicion that I was going too deep.  I sent one of the boys in for a ruler, and sure enough, I was planting the seeds more than twice as far as they should have gone.

Is it any wonder that only two of my seeds sprouted?  (I planted twelve, originally).

This time, I gave the matter a little bit of thought.  At first I thought "Well, if I take a stick out of the yard and cut notches into it at each half-inch, that would work as a guide"....but that seemed like an awful lot of work.  Then I thought about making the marks with a marker rather than notching the stick.

Then I remembered that I had some cheap wooden chopsticks in the junk drawer.  Eureka!  I took a chopstick and marked it every half inch, and I got my seeds at exactly the right depth.  I'm far more confident that my seeds will grow properly this time.

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