Besides my vegetables I've also got a strawberry plant, thyme, basil and sage started up. The Thyme's popping, but it's SO tiny! I don't know what to expect from it, since I've never grown herbs, but still, those are some teensy sprouts...
Hopefully the other sprouts will pop soon, but I've got them on my kitchen windowsill, which is usually pretty chilly. All my other sills are fortunate enough to be directly over a heating runner, so they stay pretty warm. And thus, do all my other plants.
In the case of my strawberry plant, it's one of those starter kits from a big-box store, so we'll have to wait and see how it turns out. It LOOKS like it's doing well:
But there "mite" be a problem. A small, white, disgusting problem, that I discovered this morning. I watered the plant, and put about a half inch in the dish under the plant, so it'd get a nice soak from the bottom-up. After I'd given some of the other plants a drink, I look back and see little off-white things gathering in the dish's water, only noticeable because there are so many of them, and they're MOVING – but individually they're so small that I can't tell if they've got arms or heads or whatever bugs have.
After shoving the plant away from my other (seemingly unaffected) plants, I did what any self-respecting daughter that's grossed out would do. I called my dad. After a groggy chat (I HAD just woken up) I dumped the water in the dish out, mites and all, and used really hot (I mean just shy of boiling – my water heater must be powered by its own nuclear reactor) to wash it out. A little later, wondering if more mites might appear, I filled the dish and let the plant sit in it again, and a few more came out, but nothing like the first time.
Neither books I have on gardening, or my dad, knew what they were, so next stop was google. Apparently, there are many bad mites, ones that inhibit growth and are almost impossible to eradicate. Oh, joy. But I thought my plant looked too healthy for any of that. And I didn't see anything around the plants – granted they'd be pretty hard to spot in the soil. No browning, no signs of nibbling though.
So I kept looking, and apparently there are little white mites that infest compost bins and systems that have a lot of organic matter in them, or ones that haven't reached an equilibrium yet (IE, too much water). These guys don't do a lot of harm, thankfully, and they should even die back as long as I don't water quite as much, and should naturally die off when they've chewed up most of the excess organic matter. I also found mentioned that fast moving mites are 'good' (relatively), slow moving mites are bad – these guys were very speedy, so I'm taking that as another positive sign.
It's a bit of a waiting game too, since I'm not completely positive what these little guys think they're doing in my strawberry plant. Weirdos. Maybe I'll try to float some more of them out later. They better not have gotten into my vegetable seedlings though, or else the gardening gloves are really coming off!
