I am, all too often, an eager gardener.
Seed catalogs start arriving in the mail right after Christmas. Seed packets are available at the market at almost the same time. So I spent much of my free time, starting in January. I built my square foot gardening (sfg) frame in January. A week into March, I had the SFG soil mixed after tracking down the materials; got the vermiculite at an hydroponics shop, Canadian peat moss, and retail mixed compost. One of the boys helped me roll out a tarp and use Mel’s suggestion to mix the three, then poured into the frame.
Once the soil was in, and the frame segmented into 1 foot squares, the first things to be planted were the few broccoli and brussel sprouts that survived the three weeks of snow before Christmas. They are doing very well, one of them has grown two feet.
Still cold, most nights in the 40’s, sometimes the high 30’s. So everything is starting a little slow.
Two squares were planted with sweet pea, some carrot, some spinach, and one tomato, a Sweet 100 hybrid. The tomato has gotten a slow start, mainly due to my eagerness to get it outside and placing too much hope on the intermittently warm days we’ve had over the past few weeks.
Here are the pea sprouts. So far, about 60% germination. The (former) dog and a neighborhood cat have disturbed some of the planting.
Brussel sprouts, doing quite nicely. Better than the broccoli.
Some butterleaf lettuce. I cheated here. I tried start a few from seed, but they didn’t really thrive. So I picked up a pack at the market.
And here is the teeny, tiny tomato plant.
Some Related Links
- The Garden Helper’s Calendar of Monthly Gardening Tasks
- Low Impact Living’s Building a Rain Garden
- Curbly’s Hints to a Vegetable Garden
- Mr Brown Thumb’s Homemade Seed Pots
- GreenDaily’s Growing Butterfly Garden
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