Sunny Spring Saturday

It's pretty and Spring-like here today, sunny and 66*.

Recently someone (not naming names) (John) caused an explosion in the microwave. He was supposed to clean it out, but somehow never got around to it.
So, I figured today would be good day to open the windows and do it.

I read about where you add 50/50 water and vinegar to a bowl, or just vinegar, and bring it to a boil in the microwave. Then you either just wipe the crap out, or maybe you wait 15 minutes then wipe the crap out, depending on which helpful hint website/blog you're reading.

Well, it kind of worked, eventually. I had to boil the vinegar-water several times before it started loosening the stuff up, then I had to scrub with the scrubby side of my sponge. Then I boiled more vinegar-water (more vinegar than water now) and scrubbed some more. I did it as soon as I opened it while it was still steamy, I waited 15 +/- minutes to give it time to work.

In the end I still sprayed cleaner with bleach, and it's still not all that great looking.

I wonder what would happen if I boiled a bowl of bleach in it?

Gardening update:

A week ago I had one sunflower sprout, and two just about sprouting. Now I have twelve good sunflower sprouts up.

My Lima Beans are also coming along really well!

Otherwise, not so great.
My Beefeater tomatoes didn't sprout at all. I don't know if they were bad/old seeds, or maybe they needed the greenhouse effect, or - ?

Also my peppers haven't come up. One cup of the bell peppers came up with something, but since I only planted three seeds per pot, I'm guessing those aren't bell pepper plants:

That's one of my problems with using compost soil for sprouting, I'm thinking. The reason I sprout the plants before putting them in the garden, rather than just sewing the seed right into the garden, is because I can't tell the different between a veggie plant and a weed. I've been known to weed out our veggie sprouts out of the garden!
Turns out I get grass and other things growing in my seedling pots from the compost soil that I don't know what it is. The only reason I was able to recognize that some of it wasn't my seeds sprouting was because the same little plant sprouted in every cup. Since I could see some of them obviously weren't what was supposed to be growing there, like the lime beans and sunflowers, I knew the alien little growth didn't belong in any of them.
Or, at least, I hope not, since I plucked it out of all of them!

As far as the newspaper seedling pots, they are still holding up to watering, not disintegrating or coming apart.
I do have to water a lot. I'm not sure if the newspaper is actually sucking the water out of the soil and drying them out.

Anyway, I think my verdict on the experiment is that I'll sprout my seeds like I originally used to, in the little peat pods/ greenhouse thing.  Then when they sprout, the time I would have transplanted them into a larger little plastic pot to give them room to grow and "hearty" before planting them in the garden is when I'll use the little newspaper cups instead.

These are all Black Russian tomatoes J and his partner sprouted at the station:

We lost several of the original couple dozen J brought home because one night last week we had a freeze warning so I brought them in set them in the laundry room floor, and Kitty had a salad for dinner. Silly Kitty!