Sunday, October 21, 2012

You Can Always Cheat

If your seeds, little packages full of promise, don't live up to their promise, you can cheat. You can buy plants and plant them.

My spring seeds did great. My fall seeds--not so much. I planted broccoli twice. All of them died.

My cheat (please realize that I am joking. I don't really think it's cheating. I just wish the seeds had done well.)
Broccoli seedlings from the store. I am fighting a little bit of
purpling of the leaves, which is supposedly caused by a
need of bone meal (phosphorus, specifically). I have applied
bone meal. Do I need more?
 
I planted 100 onion seeds. All but 3 of them died. I bought sets at the store. (And forgot to photograph it.)

I planted Swiss chard twice. Only 2 came up. My "cheat".
Swiss chard by the Lincoln English peas. I have 7 more planted.
I hope they do well. I really want these this year. 
A couple years ago, I planted milkweed for the monarch butterflies. All of it died.
My "cheat."
Yellow flowers flopping over with the weight of their seedpods are
milkweed. Watch, I bet the seeds will have me overloaded
with volunteers. But the seedpods are so cool! I will have
to post pictures of them. Do you know that they gave children
money for collecting seed pods during World War 2? The seed
pods are so light that they used them to stuff life jackets for flyers, so they
paid children to collect them. Cool trivia, in my opinion.

2 comments:

  1. Its nice to have a backup, isn't it? We had to "cheat" with our cayenne peppers this year. They started out strong in the seedling nursery and completely failed out in the garden proper. So....cheat to the rescue!

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    Replies
    1. You are so right. I am really grateful for the back up onions, Swiss chard and broccoli. I really wanted them in the garden and was so happy to see them locally when the seeds didn't work out this time. :)

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