Skip to main content

Those Darn Cats Ate My Plants

I prepared a complex, very thorough garden plan for this year, complete with planting, transplanting, and harvest charts. Like a dutiful gardener, I got seeds started indoors for those plants needing the longest time growing before transplant. They were looking quite healthy and I was pleased with a 75% germination rate (no grow light or heat mat). The plants were due to head down to the greenhouse now that the cellar has warmed up, but just before I could get them downstairs, I forgot to shut my office door and just like that, nearly all were destroyed by my cats.

Somehow, they are able to jump up on the tray without knocking it over, then they systematically ate the leaves and a few full plants. Several were found on the floor.

Rather than buy $20 in pods, I grabbed some cheap peat inserts at Fleet Farm. It's messier and may be harder to control moisture, but it's a good lesson for me to be more careful with seedlings!

My next batch of seeds starts inside around April 15-20, mainly cucumbers, radicchio, and summer squash, just in case we have terrible weather through the end of the month. I may be able to get the first batch of greens outside directly, but this is my backup plan. My currently growing tray includes bell peppers, sunflowers, wildflowers, and butterfly plants (milkweed).

The rest of my plants are to be directly sowed outside or were ordered as live plants: three varieties of tomatoes, mesclun mix, potatoes, ornamental corn, and garlic (planted last fall). My daughter is bummed we're not growing pumpkins and gourds this year but I promised her we can grow one or two pumpkin plants next year where the corn is going this year.

I wish we had a huge flat yard. I'd let my kiddo have a whole row of pumpkins.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Garnier Olia Hair Color Review

BzzAgent sent me a coupon to try Garnier Olia haircolor and I was super excited to try a new color. Anyone who knows me knows that I've been coloring my hair since I was 13 years old. I've tried many shades from bright blue, purple, and fire engine red to pricey complex process salon dye jobs. I've stuck to mostly brown shades for the past couple of years and wanted a change. Most of my adult life, I've used either reddish tint or bolder rusty reds, so it seemed like a fun idea to go back to that for a while. Honestly, it was a little challenging to pick a shade I wanted to try because my experience with box color "light" and "medium" seems different from the example photos on Olia boxes. The brown and red shades look darker than what I would call "light," for example. At Walmart, there were 14 of the 24 Olia shades in stock, which narrowed down my choice. Since I was fearful of trying any light colors in case they were too light for

eSalon.com Hair Color Review

It's now May 2014 and since my original review, I've had a chance to fly out to eSalon and see how orders are processed, learn the right way to apply color, and find out the differences between box color and eSalon color.  I learned a lot and have a totally different perspective now and would definitely recommend giving eSalon a try. When you order from eSalon, be sure to upload a current, well-lit photo of your hair and don't hesitate to ask their color experts for advice. The eSalon team are experts. Let them help you find the right shade and apply color correctly. It's a learning process if you're used to box color products. Last August, I tried  eSalon . At the time, I found the color was fine in that it was even and matched what I had seen online for that shade, but it wasn't really what I was going for. eSalon's customer service was helpful, with a colorist calling to explain how their product differs from what I buy in-store and the risks of g

Pottery Barn Kids Lunch Bags: Cute, but Annoying

When my daughter transitioned to "big kid school" this fall, I bought her a personalized lunch bag from Pottery Barn Kids. This was our first time having to send lunch to school, so I wanted her to enjoy carrying the bag and also have it be practical. She's just turning 4, so it was important that she be able to open the bag herself and carry it from the car to the lunch cart without assistance. Pottery Barn Kids offers a slew of fabric patterns and four bag styles. Penny picked the MacKenzie Chocolate Zebra classic lunch bag , which is a fairly standard size and shape lunch box. We paid $7 to have her name embroidered on the bag, which I figured was worth the price to ensure her box isn't mixed up with another kid's lunch. I let Penny pick the font and thread color and ordered online. Pottery Barn Kids Classic Lunch Bag Our classic lunch bag has now been used every weekday for nearly three months, but it looks more like a year old. It's still functio