Sowing seed

It's Spring, people. Spring is one of my very favorite things. Like, at all. It's definitely in the top three. And while it's been chilly outside these past few days, I can feel the wind has less bite. The sun is reasserting itself. 26 degrees feels more like 32, and 32 feels like 40. The trees are budding, the piles of dog poop on the street are starting to wilt. Spring!

I started my hot pepper plants today. On the advice of the nice lady at Pezza's garden center, and the seed pouch, I'm starting them indoors in adorable little seed starting pots. The pots are made of peat themselves, and can be placed directly in the ground when the seedlings are ready to be planted outdoors.

After reading way too much material about how to start seeds indoors, I became discouraged by the need to find a location in our apartment that is warm (the seed packet says "very warm"), sunny, and inaccessible to our pack of marauding felines. In the end, I chose very sunny and sorta warm. Once they sprout I'll move them to less-sunny, less-warm, but totally cat-free lodgings. Following the recommendation of a few sources, I covered the box with plastic wrap, which I hope will both help keep in moisture and generate some more warmth.

I bought a bag of organic seed starting mix, which smells wonderful, and piled it into the seed pots. Then I opened the bag of pepper seeds and, pouring them onto the counter, thought to myself, "Why, they look just like pepper seeds!"

After I finished with the sowing, I sat down to a breakfast of leftover homemade General Tso's Chicken and bit down on a hot pepper seed. I took the seed from my mouth and examined it. "Whoa," I thought, "I could totally, like, plant this."

I can only hope that this gardening experience will be full of such beautiful and humbling realizations.