We had a sunny day...

We had a sunny day yesterday and now my arms and back ache from the raking and seeding and other various outdoor chores that are the price we pay for sunny days. Our whole front yard is seeing a makeover courtesy of my even-more-back-sore hubby. A season of leatherjackets and skunks digging for the leatherjackets left our front yard looking a lot like an old minefield with craters and upturned soil everywhere. So no pictures of the gardens this year, even though we've had the pleasure of seeing the galanthus bloom and fade and are enjoying the first of the crocuses now, because I'd have to wade through grass seed and top soil to get to them.

Inside the house, we've done some planting as well...

... and I am completely satisfied with my new soil block makers. I used Eliot Coleman's recipes for making the soil blocks which produced easy to handle blocks that got my seeds germinating in record time.

We started with just the microblocks because I was lacking in trays and containers in which to mix and store the block mix. The microblocks were great since they allowed for many seeds to be sown in my limited indoor growing space; and because they each had a tiny divot in which to place a single seed, they helped me resist my temptation to sow more than one seed per block. (As you can see in the above picture, I could sow 240 seeds in a single tray!)

In addition to being space saving, soil blocks are great for the plants and their growing roots, don't contribute to plastic plant pot waste or the manufacturing waste of degradable plant pots. All big pluses in my book.

The kids had fun counting out seeds and placing them into the tiny little blocks.

Strangely though, they had no interest in getting their hands dirty in the sloppy blocking mix which suited me just fine because I had no interest in cleaning up dirty hands (and pants and floors and walls and...)

So that was two weeks ago and the seeds have since come up beautifully. My son and I potted on today and when I finally get around to getting those pics off my camera, I'll post them post-haste :)