A Weird Hillbilly's Garden

[Ninurta]

13 March 2022

10 days into the grow experiment, and ain't nothing sprouting so far but the tobacco. I may have to reconsider, and become a gentleman tobacco farmer, or tobacco magnate, or something like that, assuming the tobacco survives my not so tender touch with my brown thumb.

The "1000 year old tobacco" is sprouting and standing up pretty good, so far. So now I have two varieties of tobacco, and nothing else. I think I've figured out what those strange filaments are on the sprouts, by accident. They appear to be filamentary roots growing off of the tap root. Not all of the seed managed to make it on to peat plugs, probably due to my ham-fisted approach to planting them, and some have ended up at the bottom of the tray rather than in the dirt. This is one of those seeds. Note how the stem and cotyledons have not yet even emerged from the seed coat, yet the root and filaments are pretty well developed:




So before the plant even stands up. it looks like it is pretty well anchored due to those filaments.

That tobacco is standing up pretty now:



And nothing else is.

The quinoa is being particularly problematic. It's molding, big time. I've had to remove half of the peat plugs and quarantine them elsewhere, in another greenhouse tray, to protect the rest of the planting.

Here is my grow diary, with the expected sprouting dates:

2022 Grow Diary

2 Mar 2022 - Soaked peat pellets, started soaking hemp seeds.

3 Mar 2022 0200 - Planted hemp. Sprout expected 5-10 days (8-13 Mar)

3 Mar 2022 1300 - Planted stratified breadseed poppies. Sprout expected in 7 to 28 days. (10-31 Mar)

3 Mar 2022 1600  - Planted Midewiwin rustica. Expected to sprout in 7-14 days (10 to 17 Mar)

3 Mar 2022 1630 - Planted pampas grass. Sprout 7-14 days (10 to 17 Mar)

5 Mar 2022 1745 - Planted quinoa - "Great Value" organic white Peruvian quinoa.

6 Mar 2022 - 1416 - Midewiwin tobacco sprouting, quinoa already sending out "tails", roots to find the soil.

8 Mar 2022 - 1740 - Planted "1000 year Old" rustica. May have found a poppy sprout. re-seeded Midewiwin tobacco on a plug I clear missed first time around.

10 Mar 2022 - Midewiwin tobacco re-seed on missed peat plug starting to sprout. 1000 year tobacco just starting to sprout, no spiderweb roots yet.

13 March 2022 - 1000 Year Old tobacco standing up nicely. Nothing else sprouting yet. according to the sprouting schedule, the hemp should be showing something now, but nothing. I'll give them a month, to 3 April, before I incinerate the little bastards. Some seeds sprout later than others. Last fall I had tobacco still sprouting a month later.

So, the hemp should be showing, but it isn't. The poppies and pampas grass still have time. The quinoa? That crap is gonna have to fight through the mold, so I'm not holding out a lot of hope for it.

We had a winter storm that dumped about 6 inches of snow on us from 2 am Saturday to about 4 pm Saturday, then the temperatures dropped to about 10 degrees F last night. Don't know if any of the outdoors stuff survived that yet or not. I reckon time will tell, so I'm gonna crack open another beer and wait some more.

On the bright side, for my tobacco magnate aspirations, every single peat plug with tobacco in it has at least two seedlings so far, and some have up to 10. that's gonna be a pain to thin out when the time comes, but it beats the hell out of the no-show for the rest of the stuff! So I should have at least 24 tobacco plants of two different varieties, assuming they all survive and the damp-off doesn't mow them down again.

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