World's biggest klutz gets a pleasant surprise...

Sigh.

Yes, I have a lot to say today.

I consider it my responsibility in particular, having volunteered to do this blog, to chronicle the DUMBEST things that I do - so here goes - bearing in mind that it's probably too soon to know if it was really dumb (feels dumb right now). I'll have a better feel for it tomorrow, when I see whether the poor things are going to die or not. This is another indoor seedling story.

The picture on the left is my beautiful (though leggy) bush baby zucchini sproutlets as they appeared yesterday, with their full new leaves coming in. In my zeal to do something (anything!) I thought that they might be getting too big for the little pots that they were in, though now that I have seen what was going on in there root-wise I can see that this was not the case. Can anyone say, "how to learn the hard way?"

So I found some bigger pots and transplanted them. I knew immediately that this was a mistake, it occurs to me as I write this, because they had no rootball, so they couldn't just be slipped out of one pot and into another. Though robust looking in the before picture, they proved themselves to be very limp and almost impossible to handle once out of the original pot. To add insult to injury, when I was carrying them back inside I dropped one of them. Ack!

So I set them back in under the grow bulb looking quite sad - them and me. We'll see what happens. They'll either perk back up or not. All I can say in my defense is that I have a really difficult time being in process with physical things. I can cultivate an idea over a long period of time in equanimity, but in any instance where there's physical evidence of what I'm doing I want to see PROGRESS - I'm voracious for the finished product. I think this is what I find so unnerving about sticking seeds into the ground. Moving on....

As for the surprise part...when I went outside to get the bigger pots from my collection of little pots, I found this!!! A few weeks ago, whcn I decided that half of what I'd put in hadn't come up, I took the pots outside and dropped them into a bigger pot without emptying out any of the dirt, which I figured I'd get to eventually. I just wanted to save the pots. But when I went out there digging for a bigger pot this morning, this beautiful little Black Beauty Zucchini was sitting in the bottom of a big orange pot, in a puddle of water, looking just as perky as can be. My miricle baby. It would be nice if I ended up with the Bush Baby AND the Black Beauty, which was my original intention. I'll keep you posted.

I did stick a few of the Hansel Eggplant seeds in pots again about a week ago, bigger pots this time, that I intend to KEEP them in until they can be satisfactorily tranplanted outside - into either pots or the garden. I have them on the seed mat with the Ziploc bag domes. When they start to sprout (and I think I may be getting one sprout up in each pot) I will transfer them to the grow light.