Blondkopfchen

Since my Blondkopfchen tomato seedlings were started way back in February at Little Miss' birthday party, it makes sense that these are the first tomatoes to ripen in our garden. In fact, I believe the first grape tomatoes turned yellow-orange at the end of June.

And of course, we ate them immediately.  And by "we," I mean the kids.

Little Guy assured me they were quite tasty.

Little Miss kept asking for more, and I had to stop her several times from picking the unripe tomatoes.

And now, Little Miss is absolutely hooked on fresh Blondkopfchen tomatoes. Every other day, we check the vines to see if any are ripe, and end up eating them right then and there.

A week or so ago there were almost 20 ripe at once. I convinced Little Miss to wait until dinner to eat them.

At least, I thought I had convinced her to wait.

But these little tomatoes are just too tempting for Little Miss.

As it turned out, we didn't have any tomatoes to go with dinner. 

I am totally okay with that.

Starting from seed

Last year, all my vegetable plants (with the exception of pole beans) entered my life as seedlings. This year, almost everything will be from seed.  I bought seeds for Little Miss's farm birthday gardening activity, and once I started planting them, it just seemed the route to go for this year's garden.

Twelve days ago the kids and I started our King of the North pepper seeds from Seed Savers. 

We used a Burpee seed starting kit I bought on clearance at the end of last season. It came with these fun pellets of seed starter mix that expanded once they were wet. 

Clearly, it was really entertaining to watch them expand. The process was quite interesting.

Once the pellets had expanded, we planted the seeds. I let the kids do this part and they had a lot of fun.

So now we have 25 pepper seeds planted, and hopefully all of them will germinate and grow into fine seedlings and plants. 

I'm not sure I'm a start-from-seed gardener, but I have high hopes for this method.  After all, I'm totally thrilled with how my first two homegrown projects are turning out.

Have a great weekend, everyone!