First dumb mistake of 06

Hah.

In my 30 years of nursery work, I've sown literally hundreds of thousands of seeds. Way more than the average bear ever had to handle. I've done it automatically, I've done it by hand using more "systems" than you can believe exist.

And every one of those seed flats was labelled. They have to be in order to tell what's there.

This past week, I put my tomatoes, cole crops and peppers into a flat of Jiffy pellets. All mixed up in there but all properly labelled.

Normally, I use a pencil on a small plastic tag - sometimes I use a nursery marker pen. I grabbed a pen from the table I was working on and carefully labelled each strip this past week as normal. But when I went there yesterday to check on the seeds, I found I had used a water soluble pen - NOT my normal nursery pen.

So all the writing has disappeared. I'll be able to tell the peppers from the tomatoes but won't have a clue about the cabbage from the broccoli until they start growing a bit in the garden. I won't be able to tell the varieties of tomatoes apart until they start fruiting. All I have to say is that it was a really dumb thing to do but it will make the surprises in the garden this summer all the more exciting.

Moral of the story - even pro's make dumb mistakes every now and then.

And always use pencil or check to see the pen is a permanent nursery marker.