Month: February 2023

DIY Garden Seed Starting Setup

Valentine’s Day has passed and that means for where I live in the Pacific Northwest of the US, it’s time to start seeds indoors. Floret did a mini online workshop about seed starting this year {AMAZING, as always} and her final video was how to create your own seed starting shelving system at home with things you can purchase locally. I live about 25 minutes from her so my experience was hers but other parts of the world might be different. My setup looks almost identical to what she showed. I had done about 4 years ago so I’d thought I’d detail what I have going on.

Before adding lights
Potting bench setup using 2 packages of short wire shelves
Upper Lights
Lower lights
  • Wire Shelves I use the short ones because they don’t block the windows in my sunroom. Lots of people use the taller ones.
  • Warming Mats My sunroom is not heated and still gets quite cold at night.
  • LED panels I used these flat panels and wired them into plugs with some leftover wall mounts. You can get any LED or panel light. No need for grow lights
  • Starter trays I have so many of this type from past years. Anything with a lid works great.

I don’t have a picture of the seeds on trays under the lights as the above pics were from later in the year (June-ish) but they would go under the lights on top of the warming mats.

If you’ve not had a chance to watch Floret’s limited series Growing Floret on HBOMax, it’s so beautiful both in content and cinematography.

Down the Rabbit Hole Month 2

February is month number 2 of this skill-builder block of the month quilt. As mentioned in the starting post, I’m doing this for Year of the Rabbit so I’m about 3 months behind what I’m actually being shipped presently.

Month #2 finished progress

What worked?

  • AccuQuilt Go! for cutting circles. For month #1, I used my Cricut to make circle templates for the flower layout. When I looked through my AccuQuilt dies, I realized I had circles already in a couple of floral dies that were exactly 1/2″ larger than the Cricut templates I’d already cut. They worked perfectly for cutting the fabrics. It ended up talking less than 5 minutes to cut 26 larger ones for the flowers and 26 smaller ones for the centers. This included the time to only fussy cut 2 centers.
  • Used Pomegranate #55371 for the larger flower circle and Simple Shapes #55177 for the smaller center circles.
  • Checking template against the die
  • Perfectly cut circles
  • Fussy cut 2 centers
  • All glued down and ready to applique
  • I like hand applique a lot and this month was mostly all that.
  • The foil technique works so good for making the circles.
  • Was super please on the match up with my bias binding around the circle.

What didn’t?

  • No major foibles this month fortunately! My bias needs to be a bit more straight but I’m not worried since flower stems and other things in nature are not all alike.

What did I learn?

  • Slow and steady is working for me. Also waiting until the 1st of the month makes me not rush while still getting it all done and also being able to work on other projects.