Broccoli Babies

So far so good. I've thinned a little already as some were growing right on top of each other. At the moment I have 14. No sign of the cauliflower or brussels sprouts coming up.

I'll be starting some cabbage and celeriac soon...hopefully this week.

After that, it's tomatoes, peppers and eggplants...

Broccoli seedlings are up!

Here's the good news - the broccoli sprouts are already up!

Bad news is that some of them are moldy....they got too wet. I'll watch and see what happens. Maybe they'll be all right....

Winter Wonderland...

What better time to be thinking about planting then when I can't even see my garden because of the snow? You can barely make out the very tip of the fence. This is the biggest snow we've had this year so far.

Based on the garden plan and my estimated planting dates, the first seeds that I need to start are the broccoli. They'll go in the ground around mid-April, and I'd like to be setting out good, strong, big, healthy plants. I'm shooting for twelve.

It would appear that in one of my fall cleaning frenzies I threw away all of the little black seedling pots I had accumulated last Spring and Summer, so my first order of business was to figure out what I was going to start these little seedlings in. I came up with this.

Last week I dumped what was left of a bag of garden soil on the deck (frozen solid with clump of ice included) into my canning pot and added some cold perlite. It's been sitting inside ever since to warm up.

My husband brought the seedling starter mat in for me that had ended up back out in the shed, and I moved a table into the dining room so I had somewhere to put all of this apparatus. I cut the bottles down, cleaned them thoroughly, and punched a few holes in the bottoms for drainage. I mixed up my soil and perlite, which was nice and warmish and moist, and filled the pots.

We put the seeds in liberally. Since I want a dozen plants I'm shooting to end up with two good plants in each pot, four in the large pot.

I put thier Ziploc bag tents over them, placed them on the plugged-in seed mat, and walked away. I'll check them daily until I start to see seeds coming up. Hopefully by next weekend I'll be moving these new little babies under the aerogarden light, misting them every morning, and starting something else on the mat - cauliflower and cabbage, I think.

Garden Dreaming and Planning

Happy New Year!

We’ve been resting up around here a little after the fall garden, and making big plans for the coming year. We’ll be tilling up more yard this year to accommodate everything, and we’ll be placing a special emphasis on preservation and storage. We’re planning lots of companion planting and will experiment with row covers to protect against cabbage moths and vine borers.

Here’s the space. It doesn’t look like much right now – sad, unkempt, wet. We want to focus a little bit more on aesthetics this year as well as productivity, so we’ve been talking about putting a real fence around it, possibly a white picket fence, which may still need to have rabbit guard stapled inside. We’ll see.

Right now the garden (in my mind anyway) is divided into three separate plots:

Plot 1: was freshly tilled up this past July and this is where my fall garden was planted in '09. It was mostly brassicas, and about a 1/3 of it was not planted with much of anything at all.

Plot 2: This was the '09 summer garden. It was planted primarily with potatoes on one end and tomatoes on the other, with peppers and a few root veggies mixed in. Turnips were the only brassicas in this section, and there weren't very many of them. I’ll do all my brassicas in this plot this year; what you see listed in the spring, and then probably exactly the same in the space below it for the fall.

Plot 3: This is the grassy area in the foreground of the picture above that has not been tilled up yet. Here’s where most of our heavy feeders this year – tomatoes and potatoes and some corn, as well as a few other things will go in. We’re planning a LOT of tomatoes and potatoes.

All three plots are approximately 20 feet x 40 feet.

This picture shows all three plots laid out side by side as they will actually exist.



Here are the larger views of each individual plot, in hopes that you can read what will go where. I’ve spent a lot of time reading about crop rotation and companion planting. Things may seem a little weird, especially in garden plot 1, but I’m trying to make sure that I’m planting the right thing after what was in there this past fall. I’ll be writing a little about each crop we plan to grow as we finalize our plans.

In plot 1, where you see the squares with Xs inside, I'm contemplating getting some garden obelisks for the peas, beans, cucumbers and possibly some squash. I'm still up in the air on that we'll see.














We’re still eating primarily our own vegetables from the freezer (green beans, yellow squash, and all kinds of greens) as well as our sweet potatoes. We’re also eating our own green tomato relish, which is just great. We ran out of canned tomato products well over a month ago, and I very much miss them. I also miss having our own potatoes. Hence the heavy emphasis on preservation and storage for this year.



That's it for now. I'll be checking back in when we decide what varieties of everything we'll be growing, what we'll be starting from seed and when, and what we'll get as transplants.

Outdoor gardening comes to an end...

It was inevitable that the day would come; still, it seems unreal that I no longer have a viable garden to tend to, and that I won't, again, for months. This morning I brought in the last of the broccoli (frozen) and one frozen kohlrabi.


The row covers I put over the kale and the Swiss chard were no match for 18 degree nights.

The brussels sprouts were not planted early enough, I think, to fully mature; or else I just had them so doggone crowded because I didn't realize that there were more than one plant in each pot when I bought the set of six. I did not get one brussels sprout.

You can see that my broccoli has been blooming - a sure sign that I had more than I could contend with. Again, as they got bigger it became obvious to me that I had way more than a dozen plants. I won't be making that mistake again.

Here's a good shot of the general state of things...

I'll be honest though; for the time being, I'm ready for a break. I'll be checking back in here periodically with winter growing projects and I'll be posting as I start to sprout seedlings.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year everyone!

This afternoon's harvest

It went down to 29 degrees last night! The row covers that I put over the kale and the swiss chard worked perfectly. This basket represents (I think) the last of the carrots. The verdict is still out on whether or not I'll be getting any more turnips...

The Indoor Winter Project

Well, we managed to well and truly kill off all of our pepper plants, but we have had a few surprises. Of all things that we might be able to grow inside the house over the winter, tomato would not have even made my list of possibilities, and yet tomatoes are exactly what ARE doing well. Go figure.

These were our two volunteers that we found in the garden when we were doing our cleanup at the end of the summer. No doubt they came from some rotten or bug-eaten tomatoes that I tossed across the garden at some point. a couple of those seeds sprouted, and voila! There were two tiny tomato plants coming up, in September. So we brought them in and potted them up, and I'll be darned if they're not getting bigger, and looking fabulously healthy to boot. I'm curious as to whether or not they'll actually bloom...

My spinach outside finally did come up, but not much of it, and it's not exactly burgeoning. So as an experiement I dug up a little of it and potted it and put it in the vestibule under an agri-bulb. It still gets cool in there, but there's lots of light. It's too soon to tell how that's going to work.

I also planted a shallow pan with mixed baby lettuce seeds and put it in there under the bulb. And it looks like I'll those seeds are coming up! Awesome! This is going to be my Christmas salad! I'm really interested to figure out what we can successfully grow inside over the winter to keep us in fresh veggies, and so far the lettuce is looking promising! Pics to come.