Gardening with JiliK - Escape from the Propagator of DOOM

So, yeah; the propagator: not a huge success. Mind you, things didn't look that way at first.



Back in mid-March I started to see my gardening efforts show their first signs of life with rosemary...



...and then chive seedlings starting to emerge out of the compost.



Followed soon after by the sage. And a little later by some aubergine seeds I'd planted after the last post (along with some tomatoes and chillies). The aubergines especially, needing a hotter environment to grow, I took as a real sign that I was heading in the right direction here.



But then, everything went south real fast. I started getting a bit worried when weeks after the first seedlings emerged, and well after their germination periods should have ended, there wasn't a peep out of any of the other cells. Then, a couple of the aubergine seedlings started wilting. A temporary side effect of a bit too much heat under the plastic I thought. Nope, they all fucking died. :D

So, totally dismayed and with nothing to left alive at this point but a little sage plant and a couple of chives (yep, the rosemary didn't grow either) , I set another batch of herbs in another propagator; this time one of the big open ones (alongside some pumpkin and courgette seeds I was hoping to get started inside), and prepared their inevitable failure.

But this time...

This isn't the propagator in question though. I transplanted the herbs into a window box after I planted the pumpkins outside. Oh. Spoiler alert.

...they fucking grew! All of them. Same seeds, same compost, but this time I was even more restrictive with the amount of water I put on them. That, I was suspecting was the cause of the first propagator's demise after an excavation of the one of the cells unveiled a seriously mouldy-looking sage seed.

Now that I knew that I had finally some herbs, I rescued the few surviving plants and set about investigating the rest of the cells. While there were a couple of mouldy ones, actually, most of seeds looked fine. Aside from the fact that they hadn't stirred since the day I planted them any way. The compost was all pretty wet though, so over-watering still seemed like the most likely culprit.



To be honest, if that second batch of seeds failed, I think that would have pretty much been it for my gardening efforts, but with a windowsill now bursting to life with herbs and rapidly-expanding pumpkin plants (which of course I have no pictures of. Good job, JiliK.), I was confident it was time to move on to the next phase.