I was just about to congratulate us for starting the garden early this year, but then I saw the date on last year’s “first planting” post… 3/23. We’re only 8 days ahead of last year? It feels much more like winter this time around. I’m still glad to be starting.

After our experience trying to grow peppers from seed last year, it is obvious that we need to start earlier than we think. Even the package of seeds says to start them 8 to 10 weeks before you can plant outside. Looks like we may need to start even earlier next year. But this year we have a few secret weapons that Charmaine picked up during her Master Gardener course last fall.

Instead of sacrificing all available kitchen counter space all spring long, we decided it was time to build a seed starting rack. We picked up what I call a “Baker’s Rack” (it looks like it would be great for cooling baked goods) at Home Depot. We also grabbed a cheap shop light and some fluorescent bulbs to act as grow lights. We didn’t buy “grow” lights as the research done at USU indicates they only cost more than regular light bulbs, but they perform the same. A little bit of chain and we had our adjustable height grow rack. We’ll probably need to add more shop lights, but we’ll wait and see how it goes before we get too crazy.

After putting the rack together and preparing some seed beds, we planted the first wave of peppers in a heated seed bed.
24 Poblano
24 Jalapeno
24 Sweet Banana

The other seed bed isn’t heated, but it has room for a lot more seeds… maybe 200 or more. It was a real chore getting the dirt in the seed beds on that one, but at least it’s ready for next week.