The Rhythm of Potting

I've found a pleasant rhythm for working in the greenhouse. After my husband takes the girls off to school, I head out to the greenhouse and spray everything down with water.  If it's Tuesday, I spend half-an-hour giving everything a nice long drink of fertilizer. I use Neptune's Harvest fish and seaweed fertilizer, well diluted with water. If it's hot inside (and it's often so hot that my glasses steam up the instant I walk in), I open the vents and the front door in the hopes of luring bees in to pollinate my peas and bush beans.

Annelise, super-picky eater, loves fresh peas right off the vine.

Now if only she could find the peas...

And then I get down to potting. I take my largest Tubtrug and fill it up with soil starter: half soil, half compost, plus a little perlite to keep things loose. I mix well with my daughters' shovel, which is just the right size to get into a small tub. I start rolling 3" pots out of newspaper, adding a bit of starter to each of them as I go. When I have an 11x22" tray of pots, I pull down a seedling flat, pick a batch of seedlings that are clearly ready for transfer, and start gently teasing them apart and laying them in the pots. I finish filling the pots, label everything carefully (I'll often have several varieties in one tray), spray it down and set it on an available shelf. Repeat. Rinse. Today, I transplanted 36 Valencia tomatoes, 8 Brandywines, and 6 Sun Golds. That seedling flat is starting to look pretty empty.

When the Tubtrug is only about a third full, I switch to 5" cowpots. I put down a layer of starter in each, then I go find something in a 3" pot that needs more room. Today it was Chile de Arbol, for which I just got an order. I peel off the newspaper and dump it into a smaller Tubtrug full of stuff destined for the compost tumbler. If there are multiple seedlings in the lump of earth I'm holding, I gently tease them apart and deposit them in individual pots and fill up the pot around each seedling with soil.

At this rate, I am rapidly running out of room in the greenhouse, and running through my supply of Cowpots with dizzying speed. I have hundreds of seedlings available to buy, and yet I can't seem to find buyers. Two ads on craigslist (one in Beverly, one in Cambridge/Arlington) have yielded no orders. I have one customer from the girls' school, two from our old haunts in Cambridge, and two friends who are paying in kind. (One is paying in buckets of compost!) That's nowhere near the capacity of my greenhouse. I've been casting about for farmers' markets, but most of them don't start until June. Newburyport's market starts this weekend, but they're full up and have no room for me. I have emails out to several other markets. Right now, my best option may be a flea market in Salem, NH.

If anyone has suggestions for where I can hawk my seedlings, please let me know. And bear in mind that the profit margin here is slim at best. Any advertising will probably eat that dubious profit. As it is, I'm not sure paying $30-40 for a vendor space at a farmers' market will be worthwhile, but I hate to see all these seedlings go to waste. Worst case, I may just donate them to area community gardens.