Rosemary pie...?

Before i sowed my rosemary seeds, i tried to read up on how best to go about it. Half of the sites i encountered claimed that rosemary was bordering on impossible to germinate and took forever- better start with cuttings. I even found a paragraph on the garden watchdog site where a person was berating Richter's rosemary seed age and germination rates.

My seeds are from Richter's ... so i was thinking, maybe this was going to have been a disappointing waste of my money, since my Rosemary seed are from last year and not fresh right off the bat.
So i sowed the whole packet, i didn't even squander a precious seed flat on the doomed seeds,  i sacrificed a single pie tin and about 3 handfuls of soil covered with a sheet of clingwrap.  The seeds were planted 3-19-10 and set in the window sill of the bathroom upstairs in anticipation of being forgotten with no regrets and no expectations....

and imagine my surprise when i happened to go to the window and move something...and i saw a few specks of green...

So, since i didn't wintersow them, i have to provide light artificially for now because its too cold to plunk them outside. 

Planting tool....
Ok, so i'd say "i need a hobby" when i get excited enough about a new found tool to blog about it, but its a rainy day and i'm too achy to do much housework and i thought it was such a neat thing i took pictures of it.
 
But this IS my hobby.


Ha-ha....

 Strawberry seeds are tiny... not the tiniest seeds on the planet, but very small!
And there are neat things that can be begged off the nurses at the Pediatrician's office.

I don't  know if they simply call it a probe or if it has a special extractive name, but its a pencil shaped tool for extracting things from kids' ears, noses and who knows where else a small child will stuff any number of foreign objects. They come in a few sizes, but this one looked immediately promising from the second i saw it: 

Handy-dandy tiny seed tool.

See how small they are in their cozy little glassine packet?

When i dredge the stick in the packet, it tends to pick up only one teeny seed at a time, exactly what i want. My fingers are too dull to do this job as they are.  So this is an awesome help!

So i was able to plant 27 seeds into 27 Kcups with little effort and i didn't drop any. No seedlings wasted to thinning.  Strawberries are a little iffy in germinating, so this is probably the best way to go about it.


Apple trees.

Hubby went to Home Depot during his lunch break and i had him pick me up a pint of Bonide Fruit Tree spray.  I don't think it is organic, but this year i'm going to simply attack the apple problem with the biggest guns i can find.  I can go organic once i get other preventative measures in place- like deep fertilization, companion plantings-( the ring of chives and welsh onions i plan to plant at their bases) and i can get the trees pruned correctly and get their trunks straightened.  So the non-organic spray will hopefully beat out anything that might add to their weaknesses...

SFG.

I need to figure out if my soil will be fertile enough to do the square foot gardening system this year. It looks like the method begins with raised beds...which i  am not going to do, and they want you to use a combo of premixed soil, compost and vermiculite.  I need to find a way to make sure that after my large amount of kitchen compost (from the outdoor Darth Vader helmet-like composter) and the worm castings from the indoor worm hotel, plus the horse manure and the tilled-in rye grass will be potent enough to feed my plants in such tight spacing. I also need to look at drainage of the soil....  vermiculite might be a challenge to find in large quantities,  i can get peat moss in large bales though.

I won't know any of this until it is all tilled and mixed together... but i want to be prepared if i have to buy more amendments.

So, those are the things i am thinking of on a rainy Tuesday afternoon.... with 52 days left 'till last frost date.