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The Importance of Organization

© Erica Myers-Russo

This was my year to organize my garden. Every previous year, my garden has been an example of what a quality control supervisor would call "failure of product identification and traceability". I would start, for instance, with 6 types of tomato seeds. They would sprout into 3 million seedlings (I always err to the side of caution), which would then be culled into several dozen sturdy little transplants, all crammed into the tiny space under my lights. As they grew, reality would set in, and I would start trying to find homes for the 80% of the plants that were not going to fit into my garden. And then the chaos would begin.

"It's a Porch Tomato - perfect for a container," I would say. "I think. Or maybe an heirloom like Pink Petticoat. No, wait, Pink Petticoat has potato leaves and this one doesn't, which means it must be a Big Beefeater."

But all that disorganization was behind me now. The stakes, so to speak, were high - I had 15 different varieties this year, and room (under the most wildly optimistic of garden plans) for just one of each variety. Several varieties were seeds I had saved from a garden back in Ohio in 1995, which I had transported through 6 years and as many relocations, and the viability would probably be low.

So I armed myself with scores of plant tags, a pair of permanent black markers, a carefully drawn map of the seed-starting flat, and raw determination.

At first everything went swimmingly. The first few seeds sprouted; I consulted my map, marked them, and moved them under the lights. Then the next batch sprouted and I removed them from the flat, but then sat the flat back down the wrong way. I had marked top and bottom on my map, but not on my flat. I caught my error, or at least I though I did, but just to be safe I marked these new seedlings with either of the two types they could be.

It was downhill from there. Once I removed several seedlings from the flat and set them down for a second, carefully memorizing their locations and names. Then I got distracted and when I returned several hours later, I had no idea what types were in front of me. Ultimately, one seedling was decisively labeled "Sasha," a Siberian tomato variety, but when its true leaves emerged, it was clearly a pepper. Something that had the telltale hairy stem of a tomato was nonetheless carefully marked "Italia," which is in fact a pepper. I crossed my fingers and switched the labels.