I am going to try and keep you up on my garden this year. I’ve been gardening for 35 years, and each year, I keep a journal. As the gardens got bigger (bordering on farm size!), the journals got more involved with diagrams, varieties and results. I have downsized, but even those little beds get extended every couple of years.
My garden journals were simply spiral notebooks, and they were piling up. A long time ago, I discovered the 10 Year Garden Journal, and it served its purpose for that long with the farm-size garden. With downsizing, I’ve simplified and now use a calendar – the free kind you get from any business at the end of the year. It has to have big enough boxes to write in each day.
On Sunday March 21, I started:
tomatoes
broccoli
Jalapeno peppers
green peppers
lettuce – 2 kinds
kale
I use the germinating mix and APS seed starters from Gardener’s Supply. In all my years of gardening and horticulture school, I’ve found this to be the most reliable system. The soil-less germinating mix is the lightest and best I’ve ever used. The APS starters, with a water well and wicking fabric, keep the seeds moist until they germinate. No matter how hard you try and keep your seeds moist, they almost always dry out and never sprout. In the 15 years since I’ve discovered APS, I have had 100% success starting seeds.
I put germinating mix in a tofu box (recycle!) for a couple of tomato seeds and covered it with plastic. I’ll let you know how that goes. These should all sprout over the weekend!
Over the winter, my friend, Esmaa Self, sent me some chard seed, along with other goodies I will seed right in the garden next month. I started the chard, though, right in a few pots of soil. The top inch was the Gardener’s Supply germinating mix, and those seeds sprouted quickly. Chard is a wonderful greenhouse plant, and I love having greens close to the kitchen!
I had a few pots of beet greens started over winter, too, but the greenhouse was too cold for them to do much. Now that the nights are a bit warmer, and the plants are big enough for organic nitrogen fertilizer, they are looking good!
There are two 4″ pots of sorrel that I over-wintered. I love to cut this up into a salad, since it is full of vitamin C. It’s also a sweet surprise! If you have lived in the woods in New England, you have probably eaten sorrel. The first time I tasted it out of my Taos greenhouse, I was transported back to the woods of Connecticut when I was a kid. Someone told me it was edible, and I ate it. It was good then, and it’s good now.
While I was sowing seeds on Sunday, the 8″ of Friday’s snow was furiously melting! It was coming off the roof in a constant stream all day, and the driveway and paths around the house were thick mud. I bet the temperature was in the mid-50s, the sky was perfectly clear, and the plants in the greenhouse were happy.
So was I.
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Your chard looks lovely, by the way. I tried to post that when you shared the photo on FB but got bumped off the ‘net then forgot.
I have kept journals, too, though this year simply noted what I planted & when on the whiteboard. My own downsizing, let’s call it. It’s wise to keep track, especially the way I seed weekly.
I like to use graph paper for the planning stage. I keep each year’s drawing in a notebook, which helps me keep rotation straight.
I remember when I first started gardening, it was SO confusing! There was too much to learn, schedule, plant, transplant, fertilize and know about sunny days, cloudy days, bugs, compost and on and on. Now much of it is second nature, but with the greenhouse, it’s a whole new learning curve. I started tomatoes last year on 2.14. BAD idea! I only remember that, because…… I’d written it down. :)
Can’t wait to eat chard!
Good article. thank you
I have been looking around desertverde.com and actually am impressed by the amazing content material here. I work the nightshift at my job and it is so boring. I have been coming here for the previous couple nights and reading. I just needed to let you know that I’ve been enjoying what I’ve seen and I look forward to reading more.
Thanks!
Thanks! I’m glad you are enjoying the site!
{ 1 trackback }