Sneak Preview

One of the great joys of starting plants indoors is seeing them sprout.  There is a genuine thrill to be had from the first sight of leaf.

We did very well with that first batch of seeds which produced new sprouts and new varieties of sprouts from about day 4 onwards.  This batch is also pleasing me, but this time it is by revealing themselves gradually.  They're showing the phases of sprouting in ways that their predecessors did not.  

I am not an expert gardener and therefore have much to learn regarding the proper depth to put seeds into the soil and the proper soil covering once they're in.  I planted the current generation of windowsill-dwellers by poking my finger into the soil until it had made a hole about the depth prescribed by the seed packet.  I plonked a seed into the depression and followed up with a bit of a sweep over the pot (still with fingers ... I love to bake and the only way to properly accomplish most things in baking is with bare hands) to dust in some loose soil over the deposited seed.  

The end result (of which I was aware while I was doing it, but I wanted to know how it would turn out so I didn't change anything) is slightly compacted soil beneath the seed and very little soil above it.  If it were in the wild, the lack of covering would presumably make the bean irresistible to some hibernation-hungry rodent.  But on my windowsill with only Chutney the cat above it in the food chain, I think less soil is OK.  The compacted soil beneath is another question.  What happens when the roots meet resistance?  I think they just squidge around it until they find a happy path to water.  I also think, as a result of careful observation of cracked sidewalks, that "resistance" has to be pretty serious for roots to re-route.  (See what I did there with the pun?  Oh, what a wit am I!)  Possibly, it would be good in a wide pot to make sure that the roots don't go straight down and ignore all of the lovely soil around them.  One could put a little rock right under the seed.  I suspect that the outcome would be one small rock, shifted out of the damn way.

The scarlet runner beans are growing.  There must be a correct way to put them into the earth so that they don't emerge like this:

Instead of like this:

See the first leaf just starting to make its way out of the bean?  It's fantastic to get this view of the beginnings of the plant.  I hope it survives and I get to see it bear fruit.  I am as pleased as punch to watch the seed split open and push its plant out.  What a marvellous thing. 

Actually, I love the alien-ness of the root-first emergences.  They're so creepy and hairy and completely unlike the stuff that is usually revealed to the viewing public.  Is this gardener voyeurism?  

There one scarlet runner with a leaf properly out.  Even in the thin rainy light this morning, I could see the veins clearly.  Isn't it neat how the small thing is so like the large thing? 

I can't leave out the sneakiest preview of all.  The string beans will be a while before they come out in earnest, but one of them is hinting at things to come. 

I show the picture above to indicate just how sneaky the preview is.  It's so sneaky and underground that my camera just refuses to focus on the little hint of deeply-buried green and instead brings the soil into sharp focus. (I have terrible eyesight and couldn't possibly do better than the camera.  Trust me on this one; I've tried.) But the green is there.

I was going to say that planting things outdoors also provides the joy of seeing the sprouts, but basically I am not good enough (nor is my garden in any shape) to distinguish between the joy of a seed sprouting and the pain of a weed coming up to choke ones carefully chosen plants out of the garden.  I was going to make that distinction, but I can't, because one of the pots under plastic on the windowsill has a damn weed coming up.  Curse you, miracle-gro!  You didn't cook this batch long enough.  It pongs a bit and not all of the stuff once living in it was done in.