this evening i sewed 18 cells worth of "valentine" sunflowers.
I've been cold stratifying the butterflyweed, asclepias tuberosa, for a few days now in the refrigerator. i have 16 peat pots going. so it will be done with that process about may 5. I'll germinate them indoors, and then once the first true leaves are up, we can transplant them to the garden. i'm going to guess that means tranplanting them about may 25th or so? thats a good enough estimate for now. the packet reccommends planting the seedlings when there's still a chance of light frost. well, if only we'd ordered in january! That really means we should have set them out around april 10th. i'm quite sure they'll survive, but they may not bloom this year.

oh, the first round of sunflowers "evening sun" are just starting to sprout.

i am really glad we got the weblog working again. you really learn a lot about your garden by simply taking the time to write about it. incidently, you learn a lot about yourself as well.
anyway, i started cold-stratifying the butterfly weed. the package directions said put the seeds, sewn in peat pot, in the fridge for 3 weeks before germinating. Some wild flowers require this, and butterfly weed is one of them. it seems pretty tempermental-- won't transplant well if its taproot is disturbed. which pretty much means the plant is 'fixed' once you set in the ground. and i assume thats why the notes on the seed packet suggests a peat pot -- less likely distubance of the roots. personally, i've never been a big fan of peat pots. i prefer to use seed trays if i have a lot of plants, or for specimen planting, i like to recycle used paper cups. we've saved so many seed trays over the years, i think we might have enough to plant nearly a thousand seedlings!

I've recently found out about Square Foot Gardening -- a method of intense organic horticulture.
http://www.squarefootgardening.com/
The book has been around for 20 years and its also been a PBS and Discovery channel series. But i watch about five hours of television per year, so sometimes popular tv stuff misses me completely (oh well!).
I'd be interested in making a 4x4 plot next year and put it inside our garden space as an experiment to see what grows better and what involved the least amount of labor. From the forums on gardenweb, i've read the average cost of a 4x4 plot -- since it involves using only ideal organic soil ammendments (1 part spaghnum peat, 1 part coarse vermiculite, 1 part compost) -- is about $60. Its a one time investment, and afterwards you never have to rototill ever. As it is, we've been spending about that much every year on amendments. And it claims that weeding is greatly minimized as well. Which is everyone's least favorite part of gardening, but actually the part one probably spends the most time doing!
Anyhow, I'm going to look for the book at half-price books this weekend.
The nice thing about this method also is that Aaron has often said that he wants our garden to look like the Campbell County Agricultural Extension Office gardens. And our vegetable patch actually could if the method is a success.