Seeding

Last year I seeded about 3 weeks earlier than I am this year.  My peppers were big and had to have flowers picked off them every couple days and the tomatoes went a little crazy and outgrew the space I had for them.  That is why I am just starting to seed now.  On the top shelf I planted a half tray of peppers, chocolate, and king of the north, jimmy Nardello and sweet banana.  Space is going to be a little more limited this year so I don’t have as much room for everything. A half tray of medusa (because I have tons of seeds that I collected) and the other half of the tray is bok choy and kale. The middle shelf has a tray of tomatoes (Isis, black, yellow cherry tomatoes, alpine, black Ethiopian and polish linguisa tomatoes), and the other tray is half black prince tomatoes and half green onions.  Finally on the bottom shelf I have a full tray of leeks, and in the other tray I have a row of peas, kale and broccoli. My plan is to use that last tray mentioned as sprouts. They are all extra seeds I have leftover that do not have a place in my garden, so figured I might as well try it out.

Preparing the Growing Room

The shelf I used last year is now in the shed covered in all of the empty pots and trays I have, so I decided to make a new one.  It is identical to the old one same measurements, same wood so that it will work just like it did last year.  I will be using the exact same setup as well, 3 overhead shop lights hung on chains, and water with a small watering can and spray bottle.

New Gardening Year

The weather is finally warming up and time for me to start thinking about gardening again.  Last weekend I bought a few seeds for new things I am going to try, but for the most part I have enough left over from last year that I didn’t need to buy very much.

While walking around the garden I noticed that the garlic is starting to just poke through the straw in a couple places.  This is very exciting as garlic has become perhaps my special favorite to grow.  There was also the leftover evidence from the rabbits that ate all of my winter kale.  The good part is that there is some fresh manure for my plants, the bad is that there are rabbits wandering the neighborhood.  This is the first time I have had problems with rabbits and am hoping that the farm cat that wanders over frequently will keep them away, if not I will have to trap it and quite possible eat it.  I have always wondered what rabbit tastes like. If not just let it go elsewhere.

Carrots Harvested

So earlier in the year I had the idea of leaving the carrots in the boxes over the winter, covered with bags of leaves so that they wouldn’t freeze and then harvest them whenever I needed some.  The problem I ran into was that there was a layer of air between the carrots and the leaves as well as air below the boxes.  

 

 What happened was is that the air would allow the dirt to freeze and made it very difficult to dig the carrots up, because the top inch of ground was frozen.  What I ended up doing was waiting for a warm enough day and then dug everything out of the ground and stored it in dirt in the basement.  If the carrots had been planted in the ground instead of boxes the idea would have worked.

Pea Box

Took advantage of the nice weather we have been having this week and emptied out the pea box.  All of the dirt was placed in the top bed to raise it a little more.  The box was placed there in the summer to cover up the sinkhole in the yard as well as a place to test out growing asparagus peas.  The peas grew pretty well and lasted well into November until we had a couple really heavy frosts.  There really isn’t that much left that I can do out in the garden, so now just going to be cleaning stuff up.  The sink hole is going to be filled with sand from last winter as well as ashes all winter long and in the spring if it still isn’t filled, we will have to collapse it completely and fill it in.

Pea Cleanup

I tore out all of the peas from the middle bed this afternoon and then worked up that soil.  I was going to leave them there but the trellis started to collapse a little bit so I decided to just tear it out.  I also emptied out the pepper box so it can go inside for storage this winter.  Because of the varathane and pain on it I want to keep it as nice as possible which means the less the elements hit it the better.

 

More Leaves

I headed back into the cottage for a couple of hours this afternoon to get more leaves.  Between my father and me we ended up gathering 3 barrels and 14 full bags of leaves.  So far all the leaves have come from the front lawn, there is still part of the front lawn left and all of the back  which I would estimate to be 30 bags.