Thawing

We've had some warmth off and on for the last few weeks.  The snow seems to be taking forever to melt.  We got so much this year without any melting in between.  There appears to be a layer of ice under it all preventing the melting. 

As you can see, there has been quite a bit of progress. The area pictured was under over 2 feet of snow for almost a month.   I was able to move the chickens to a better location.  They had been tearing up my front flower/herb bed.  It was supposed to be a temporary place to house them, but turned into a 2 month stint due to our horrible winter.  They dug up some of my irises and we'll see what else got destroyed.  I'm thinking I may have lost my chives and sage.  At least whatever gets planted there now will be very well fertilized. 

Today I started the broccoli, brussel sprouts, cabbage, Asian greens, lettuces, kale, chard etc.  Despite the snow currently on the ground, I'm still hoping to get the peas planted in a few more weeks. 

My plans for the garden this year are numerous, as usual.  The now useless fence will be mostly removed.  I'll leave the back portion to keep the dogs and kids from tearing through it.  There will probably be raised beds made for the main part of the garden.  I'm just finding the raised beds easier to deal with overall than the sloped beds.  I just can't wait for the soil to thaw so that I can get out into the dirt.  There just isn't anything better for a gardener's soul.  Planting seeds is wonderful, but just not the same as getting into the dirt.

Snow cure

It may be snowing outside, but it's Spring in my office.

First plantings

It's been a wretched winter throughout much of the US this year.  New England has been no exception.  It seems that every winter I get a bit of seasonal affective disorder.  This year was a bit worse.  With my driveway a lost cause and everything becoming an effort as a result of the snow, I got a bit down.  Hence, the lack of writing on the blog. 

The past few days we've had a warm up.  A sneak peak to Spring.  Yesterday reached 55 and today is supposed to get to 60.  It's wonderful.  The snow isn't melting fast enough, but it is melting.  There are peaks of mud under trees and bushes, while the vast majority of the ground remains covered.  Even so, the weather has improved my mood. 

In a fit of optimism and downright defiance, I planted my first seeds. 

There are Quadrato d'Asti Rosso peppers, Anaheims, Red Hot Cherry peppers, French Thyme and Large Leaf Basil along with some Black Beauty Eggplants.  They all take such a long time to sprout, I tend to plant these every year around Valentine's day.  If we have a typical summer, most won't fruit until the last part of August.  If we have a summer like last year, I'll have peppers in late June.  What a difference that heat makes. 

Now I need to go spend some time catching up on everybody's blogs.    The gardening season has begun!

Succession planting

This is all relatively new to me.  I'm learning as I go.  In years past I've done some succession planting, but never to the extent I am this year.  Most years I've done second plantings of zucchini, peas and various other things that were direct seeded.  This year I'm taking it to a new level.  Every few weeks I've planted new seedlings of broccoli, cabbage, lettuce, chard, and several other things. 

This is also in preparation for year round gardening.  I have one hoop over my beds, with plans to add several more.  I hope to have many of my new raised beds fitted with hoops to grow lots of cold weather crops.  Our diet has been slowly changing to eat more seasonally.  There has also been an increase in the number of greens we eat.  This is all a part of my master plan for providing my family with fresh veggies all year long. 

Since I don't have a greenhouse, my back porch has been my nursery.  It's very high tech.  The porch is North facing and relatively protected.  This gives the seedlings plenty of light, without cooking them and burning them.  It also allows them to be planted immediately, without hardening off, when I have the space for them.  I didn't want to spend a lot, so they are sitting in the top of one of those seed starter trays.  Since it's so lightweight, it's weighted down with grill tools.  Yup, we're redneck up here in Mass as well. 

Currently, I have chard, Asian greens, savoy cabbage, kale and lettuce going.  The right hand side was just started on Monday.

We already have sprouts.  I don't cover anything while sprouting, just keep them good and damp in the tray.  It rained last night, so they're nice and wet.  So far, I'm loving how this is working out.  Many things are currently in the garden and thriving, that were started in this manner.  Since the garlic was just pulled, most things are going in it's place.  Lots of yumminess for us!

Potted up tomatoes

Today was the day.  I have been putting off repotting my tomatoes.  Normally, I would have done it about a week ago.  I got a little depressed about the failure of the great majority of the cole crops and then just got lazy. 

I am now the proud mama to 50 tomato seedlings.  There are 17 Legend, 31 Amish Paste and 2 Mystery tomatoes.  The mystery tomatoes are from a volunteer that came up last summer.  It was a nice big blocky slicer, so I decided to see what would happen from saved seed this year.

Many of the seedlings are looking a little ragged right now from their hard day, but should perk up in a few days.  They still have another 4-6 weeks until plant out time. 

After my last post about seedling failure, I began wondering if my whole problem could be a result of being cheap.  You see I bought prepackaged seed starting cells from a very cheap store around these parts.  Yes, for you New Englanders, it was the Job Lot.  Bad Heather!  Anyway, I may try again next year with some higher quality soil.  I'm not sure what I was thinking.  I know that good soil produces good plants. 

Hopefully all the tomatoes will make it.  There are simultaneously too many and too few seedlings.  There are too many for just me and too few to share as much as I wanted to.  I would start a few more, but don't have enough seeds.  Next year I'll save more. 

What really needs to be sown inside?

I've been thinking about this a lot this year.  After the unmitigated disaster that was my lettuce and cole crops, I'm rethinking how best to proceed in future years. 

What I'm realizing, is that there aren't terribly many crops that need to be seeded under lights in my zone 6 climate.  Sure, the tomatoes, peppers and eggplants must be.  How about the lettuces and cole crops.  I had initially started them inside in an attempt to get an earlier crop.

I do realize that in the case of the lettuce, I had started it far too early.  The lettuce isn't a huge issue though, it's the cole crops.  We eat a lot of them and I've had terrible luck thus far.  They come up beautifully and then proceed to die one by one.  When I realized that not very much had survived, I direct seeded more crops a few weeks ago.

So far they seem to be coming along nicely.  Currently they are getting rained on, so they'll be even happier, even with the cold weather we're having right now. 

The lettuce and chard are doing quite well also.

Enter the hoop house.  I fully plan to maintain the hoops with cold tolerant crops all winter.  In early spring there will be plenty of space vacated by veggies that we've eaten, to start whatever I like.  Since I've had lousy luck inside and seem to do better out, it would make sense to just wait and start things where they'll stay. 

If this works for me, it will mean less work babysitting seedlings inside.  Less space taken up in my tiny house and less electricity used by my grow lights.  Sounds like a win win situation to me.  What do you think? 

Back with updates

It's been a crazy few weeks.  The flooding has ended for most, with damp, moldy remains for many.  When the rain was finished, we proceeded to have 2 weeks of sunny, abnormally warm weather.  It's been absolutely wonderful.  With all the beautiful weather, it's difficult to hold back from planting out everything. 

Last night was a return to reality with below freezing temps and more to come tonight.  Thankfully I don't have anything out that should be affected.   Above you can see my garlic.  It's been coming up perfectly this year.  So far it looks like the best year yet for garlic.  It's something I use in most meals, so I'm happy to have as much as possible.

This is one of the cabbage seedlings.  It is only one of 3 that survived.  The bok choy and broccoli didn't make it either.  This seems to be what happens to me every year.  I'm not sure exactly what I do to kill them.  A few weeks ago I direct seeded more brassicas and they seem to be coming up nicely.  That may be what I do each year instead.  I think my biggest issue is that I'm planting them too early and trying to hold them inside too long.  I keep learning.

This is the lettuce that was seeded far too early.  (seeing a pattern here?)  I thought it was dead and just left it where it was.  Lo and behold, it's coming back.  Again, I'm learning.

Those hard to see wisps of plant material are my onions.  They were planted out last week with the brassicas and are doing quite nicely.  I'm very happy with how these behaved this year.  It's actually my first truly successful year for starting onions from seed.  Usually they are killed off by fungus.  I planted far too many, but they'll all get used.  

The main garden is all turned over now.  I rented a rototiller for the very first time.  I have to admit that I was absolutely terrified of the thing.  It turns out that it was a reasonable fear.  Hubby was off meeting a wedding client, but J was home as my backup.  At first the plan was to have J help me get it out of the truck and I would do the tilling.  Hah!  Then the tiller started dragging me across the garden.  Thankfully, J took over and in not too much time, had it all tilled up for me.  He looked like I had almost killed him, so when his wife came home, I thought she might kill me.  She just thought it was funny.  Have I mentioned how great my neighbors are?  

Lastly, the fruit trees are flowering and leafing out.  This is the 3rd year for this peach tree.  It's still not very big, but seems healthy enough.  We'll have to wait and see if it produces any fruit or not.  Since we're getting another freeze tonight, and it's still only mid April, we won't get anything.  The warm weather has everything blooming and sprouting earlier than usual.  Hopefully, there won't be too much damage to the trees and plants that came back to life early.  

There is so much going on here now, I'll be busy until next November.  I love it!

Seedling update

Things are getting a little crazy in here.  I went and got the plastic for my hoops, but was unable to get the right PVC piping to get them up today.  Hopefully, tomorrow, I'll be able to take Hubby's truck and get everything warming up. 

The lettuce is huge, as you can see.  The onions are ok, but I think I've lost a few.  I've never had good luck with onions.  They start out well and then I end up with them damping off, despite doing as much as possible to prevent it.  I can't plant them for a while yet, so I'll have to continue to baby them inside.

These are the brassicas and a few flowers in the background.  The plan is to erect the hoops and warm the soil, then plant them out in about 3 weeks.  We'll see how that goes.  The weather has warmed nicely and doesn't look like it will be cooling down too much in the foreseeable future.  Even the weatherman said that he thought that the worst was over.  Since we haven't had much in the way of spring here in New England for the past few years, it would be very welcome.  Yes, Kiwi, we do have spring every once in a while. 

I had a picture of my peppers, but they seem to have disappeared.  They are coming up slowly, as is expected.  The first came up within a week, but the rest are popping up here and there.  They are certainly doing better upstairs than they have in the basement. 

The chickens wanted to say hello again as well.  How are your seedlings doing these days?  Have you started anything yet?

February seed starting

 

Things are starting to get busy here.  This week I potted up the lettuces, basil and dill.  I had planted to much dill and lettuce, so some of the seedlings went into the compost pile.  This always kills me, but is necessary.  I don't have unlimited space inside or out.  Everything is looking good, but there is a white fungus starting on my onions.  I've started spraying them with a diluted hydrogen peroxide mix.  Hopefully that will keep them healthy.  Onions have been my nemesis in the past.  

This was also the time for me to start the next round of seeds.  The list for today is:

Prize Choy pac choi

Tatsoi

Nutribud broccoli

Early Jersey wakefield cabbage

Shasta daisy

Impatiens

Black beauty eggplant

Early jalapeno

Anaheim pepper

Poblano pepper

Big Red bell pepper 

Quadrato D'Asti gallo pepper

This is my first year growing the Asian greens, eggplants and flowers.  The rest I've grown in one form or another, although many are new varieties to me.  Everything is on a heat mat.  The eggplants and peppers will stay on the heat mat until they are ready to go outside.  

There are some signs of impending spring around here, but we still have at least another month until anything can be done outside.  They are predicting snow over much of the week, it is still February in New England.

Seedling update

 

These are the seeds planted on 1/31.  From left to right are Pinetree lettuce mix, winter density lettuce, bouquet dill and genovese basil.   They all came up quite quickly.  I had a heat mat under them until they germinated and then shut it off.  In past years I've done this in my chilly basement.  Even with the heatmat, I had very slow germination on everything.  This year they're in my schoolroom, which is still relatively chilly, but better than the basement, by at least 10 degrees. 

I'm really curious to see how the peppers do.  In years past, they've taken weeks to germinate and then were very slow to do anything.  I typically start them in mid February for that reason.  With the new setup, that may be too early, but we'll have to see.  

 

In this tray are my onion.  Yellow sweet spanish and red bull.  The yellow sweet spanish came up 2 days before the red bull, but both seem to be coming along quite nicely now.  The heat mat was turned off on those as well.  

My plan for next weekend is to start peppers, and eggplants.  It's still ages until anything can be done in the garden yet.  The ground is frozen quite solid, with snow in the forecast for midweek.  The month of February is always the month I decide that I want to move somewhere warmer.  It will never happen, but I wish it every year.

Sprouts already

 

They're up already!  Those are sprouts from Winter Density lettuce  and Pinetree Lettuce mix.  They are coming up rather quickly.  Just 2 days and I'm in business.  I love instant gratification.  

 

These are a little harder to see, but are sprouts from the Yellow Sweet Spanish onions.  The Red Bulls haven't poked their heads out yet.  Only 3 weeks until I can plant more seeds.  Patience is not one of my virtues.  

And so it begins

 

The wait is over, I sowed my first seeds of the year.  It was so fun to play in the starter mix.  Getting it to soak up the water and getting muddy was refreshing to my winter weary soul.  On the top shelf, only part of the flat is planted.  There is dill, basil and 2 types of lettuce.  The bottom is filled with yellow and red onions.  

This year I am trying to keep meticulous notes on what I've done.  In years past I've kept more haphazard notes.  Last year I was so sick that I was happy to just get things planted.  Every year I think that I'll remember all the details, but my addled mind can hardly remember my name these days.