Germination Mix

It's time to get the tomato and onion seeds into some dirt. I know this not only because town meeting is next week and because it's about 8-12 weeks before last frost, but also because I think I might begin to lose my mind if I don't.

There's a lot of snow up here, and I love snow and all the sports that go with it, but sports aren't my life anymore and this family of ours does a lot of eating and I like to grow our food. I'm not very good at it. Last year I didn't label my tomato seedlings and when only one variety really took off, I figured that would be okay, except that we ended up with about forty cherry tomato plants and three full-sized ones. The year before that I thought I'd plant asparagus and I asked our friend, Josh, who was here working on some drainage with his excavator, to dig me a trench. Four spears of asparagus surfaced before I gave up and filled it in. Every year, by August, the weeds and I have to carry my kids on my shoulders through the pigweed, orchard grass and jerusalem artichokes to look for the squashes.

Every year there's at least one garden success story. Last year it was the potatoes and the green beans, which only sort of climbed up my teepee, but were happy to produce a bumper crop in a heap near the ground. The year before it was the tomatoes, early and perfect and ten different varieties and well supported by their cages. The year before that it was the carrots. Before that it was the peas, and even once it was the corn. It's never the lettuce.

If I was a good gardener, I would grow all the lettuce for the family reunion camping trip that goes for a week in the middle of July. It shouldn't be that hard, really. Lettuce seed is cheap and I can plant it early. Somehow, though, I always get it wrong and end up with either a bag of baby lettuce good for a few salads or bolted, bitter lettuce that is barely fit for chickens. My mom is one of eight kids and they come from all over with their families to camp at Lake Dunmore and they eat a lot of salad. I bring the milk and the eggs and usually Earl will come over for supper with a tub of ice cream once or twice, but it would be really nice to do the lettuce, too.

This year I'm going to buy germination mix. It's a odd thing for me and it feels a bit like when I got my first automatic transmission truck. Outside of the kitchen, I'm not really a specialized equipment kind of girl. I use bottle caps as screwdrivers and am holding the oven door together with a lobster cracker. I plant things in dirt. But last year, my friend, Kate, used germination mix and I had plant envy. She had plants when I still had sprouts and though she was kind and modest about it, I could tell that she was pretty excited to hit the ground running. That's going to be my story this year.