Spring Seed Starting Week by Week

On January 23 we started 3 trays of seeds --36 collards, 36 kale, 24 cabbage, 24 spinach, 24 brussels sprouts, 18 lettuce mix, 18 broccoli, 18 onions, 18 chard. 

We are using a new indoor lighting set up that will make starting seeds a lot easier. This powerful light stays on for 18 hours a day which has been enough to keep the seedlings healthy and strong so far. (We put paper bags on top of the trays in the beginning to help keep the seeds moist while germinating.)

The new tray allows for easy watering. Daniel fills it once a week with water, fish emulsion, and compost tea. He uses 5 gallon buckets to fill and drain.

Week 1

Week 2

Week 3 

Started another tray of 6 broccoli, 18 cabbage, 18 red Russian kale, 12 red lettuce, 18 buttercrunch lettuce

Week 4

Week 5

We plan to put these out and get summer seeds started within the next few weeks.

Around here

Finally got our tomato seeds to sprout. We are growing abraham lincoln and matt's wild cherry tomatoes.

Watering with compost tea.

Observing creatures in the garden. All kinds of bugs and reptiles are coming out in the warm weather. We've seen at least 3 of these broad headed skinks living in the rocks.

Fascinated by the huge snail.

Loving Spring in the South. Azaleas, bridal vale bushes, dogwoods, etc.

Proud of all the dianthus flowers and gerbera daisies that came back from last year.

Oh, and we are tiling the playroom floor. We are right in the middle of it which is why I haven't posted much lately. We've ripped up the carpet, prepared the sub-floor and placed half of the tiles. I'll post before and after pictures when we are done.

Transplanting seedlings--Successes and Failures

Last weekend (the one before Easter) we finally got the seedlings that we started back in January (here the link to that post)in the ground.

A lot of those seeds that we started were a great success and we were very pleased with the health of the kale, collards, lettuce and spinach seedlings.

BUT almost a whole tray of summer seedlings that I started turned out to be a disaster. Hardly any of the seeds even germinated. I don't really know what happened but some reasons for the germination failure could be that the soil was not warm enough, not wet enough or maybe too wet since we noticed that the soil mix we created was a little to dense. Here's a picture of the sad tray.

I've got one tomato out of 30 that I started, no peppers, and about half of the basil and eggplants! We've learned that it's all about experimenting and trying things over and over again. So, I've started new trays of these kinds of plants and hopefully I'll correct whatever went wrong.

It felt like spring

We had already planned to get our spring seedlings started last weekend but it was a special treat to have the weather turn perfectly warm for us. Daniel and I had spent several weeks thinking and planning this year's garden and browsing through our favorite seed catalogs. We sat down together to get the final count of our seed inventory and organize our first seed order of the year. We had also searched the web and our library at home for the best seed starting mix recipe. This is the first year we have attempted to make our own soil mix.

We are still harvesting winter crops including bok choi, cabbage, kale, and broccoli. No brussel sprouts yet, but they are still growing.

Here's the greens and cabbage we brought in this week.

Mixing the ingredients for our soil mix which included peat moss, composted manure, lime, kelp, and topsoil.

Taking a break for the water slide. The girls had the idea to pour bottles of water that they got from the rain barrel on the slide. Too bad it's blurry--you can tell they are having a blast.

Here's the final product. Three trays of spring veggies and one of flowers. Each tray has 72 plants. We've stacked them with the plastic tray on top to try to hold in as much moisture as possible. Our first sprouts should be coming any day.

Scarecrow

We are trying to wait a few more weeks before planting our summer veggies. It's hard to hold out for the frost date (April 15) when we have all these wonderfully warm days. We planted lots of flowers this weekend. Some Daniel started from seed and planted around the vegetable garden. They are small now but soon the zinias, marigolds, and daisies will add beauty and attract beneficial bugs to our veggies. I bought some 6 packs of dianthus flowers from Lowe's and we planted them in the front yard.

Ellen had the idea of putting up a scarecrow in the garden. They all worked together and this is our newest addition to the backyard! Look closely and you can see the face Ellen just finished working on.

Happy Spring

Today is the first day of Spring and it has been a gorgeous day. I've been taking pictures throughout the week of some things we are doing in the yard. We have lots of winter stuff coming up in the 3 long rows that we have started. Most of them are transplants that we started from seed in January. We did have to replace a few of our plants with store bought ones. We had a hard freeze for several days after we planted and we lost a few. We were not discouraged and took it as a learning experience. Note: It is a good idea to check the weather and not plant during a week of hard freezes next year!

Here's another picture of the garden from the other side. Our potatoes are starting to sprout (hills on the bottom left of picture). We got these seed potatoes from a neighbor who said he grew up on a farm and that we needed to plant them in February to get the best results. They were just potatoes that sprouted in his cabinet. They are all coming up. We had already bought about 10 lbs of organic seed potatoes. We'll have to find another place for them somewhere else in the yard. Onions (started in Feb.) are in middle bed and garlic (started in Nov.) all the way to right of picture.

Daniel has gotten the water barrels hooked together and hoses attached so that water flows easily from 2 barrels down into the garden. Remember these are the barrels we got for free from the local Pepsi plant. Daniel found hardware and attached old hoses to develop this great water system. Sure will make watering easier this year. Last year we syphoned water with hoses or carried it in watering cans to the beds.


Here's the summer stuff we started in early March.
We are excited about our strawberry bed. Last year they really spread out and were doing great. We did not put them in a fence so the dog has been walking right through them. We discovered a few flowers this week. Daniel cleaned out the bed a little and put a small fence on one side to keep Blue from trampling the young plants. Can't wait to see how these turn out. I love that strawberries are perennial.


We planted some sweet peas between potato beds and the fence. We lost some peas in that hard frost I wrote about before. These we started in early March and are coming up quickly.

This is our little herb garden. There is a big holly tree that shades this area for part of the day. We had these rosemary, sage, thyme, mint, lemon balm, and oregano in the front of the house and moved it here over the winter.
Happy gardening everyone. I hope you are enjoying this beautiful spring weather.

Back to life and working in the garden

We had a nasty fever virus run it's course through our family for the past 2 weeks. Daniel had it first, then Arianna. Ellen and I were only sick for about a day but the whole family has dealt with cough, congestion and fever at some point. YUCK! We are finally done and have had a wonderfully productive Saturday.

Daniel spent the day putting up a chicken wire fence around the entire garden bed. Our new dog Blue has had a hard time staying out of the area and has been caught digging in the onions and potatoes. With the fence around the garden and fruit trees we can leave Blue in the yard without a worry. Daniel also borrowed a tiller from our neighbor. He used it for several hours to mix and shred all the leaves and manure we've been adding all winter.

Daniel also transplanted some of our broccoli, spinach, and other greens that we started about a month ago. He is organizing the garden a little different this year. We will mostly have long rows to plant instead of rectangular beds. In this shadier part of the bed he planted the winter greens. It is so nice to see green growing in the garden again!

While he was out there, I planted lettuce seed in with the garlic and a few rows of spinach seed. I also started trays of summer veggies--16 plants each of eggplant, tomato, cucumber, yellow squash, zucchini squash, butternut squash, basil, sweet peppers, and southern cow peas. We will be keeping those indoors and bringing them out on sunny days and back in at night.

So if you are wanting to know what to plant in your area right now, check your local cooperative extension office. You can plant spinach, kale, broccoli, cabbage, onions, potatoes, and more now while it's cold or as soon as the soil is workable. You'll want to start summer veggies 4-8 weeks before your last frost date. You can find that date through the cooperative extension office as well.

You can see in this picture hills of potatoes that have not sprouted yet (Daniel planted those last weekend.) There is also a bed of onion sets not yet sprouted. There is also a bed of garlic sprouts. I planted the lettuce seeds in between the green shoots. A small bed of spinach is also pictured (not sprouted yet) next to the garlic. You can see the chicken wire fencing here too.

Here's a great picture of Blue waiting outside the fence. I don't think he understands why he can't walk around in there. It's interesting that our old dog Jay was never a problem.


Here are the trays of seeds we have started. Four were done today of the summer veggies. The green plants you see are the other winter veggies we started a few weeks back. We usually bring them out daily and leave them on the rail of the deck or in one of the closer vegetable beds in the yard.
The trays you see in the picture above were acquired over the years. We either bought plants in them or gathered them for free from local nurseries. There are 2 plant trays that you see with plants actually growing. Those are called winstrip trays and were given to us by Daniel's dad. They are very sturdy plastic and hold 72 plants each.

Collecting seeds

We had an awesome crop of lettuce this spring. We ate green leaf, red leaf, romaine, spinach, kale and chard for several months without buying any from the store. That says a lot for this family. We each usually eat at least one salad a day plus put it in our sandwiches and in other cooked dishes. Now that it is too hot and all of the greens have flowered and gone to seed we are trying to save some of them for this fall's planting. It was hard to leave the plants in the ground long enough for this to happen. They were taking up valuable summertime space and as they go to seed they get tall and start to look a little messy. I wanted to just pull them up and put in a tomato plant or something. Well, anyway, we are hoping that our patience will pay off as we have finally pulled up all the greens and are collecting some of the seeds. I am posting some pictures of the process.
In back of this picture you can see some of the lettuce that has flowered . This is some of what we pulled up and brought inside.

Each lettuce plant had tons, I'm guessing (but I may be way off) 100+ flowers and in each flower I counted about 8-10 or so seeds. At first we thought it was going to be a tedious process. I spent an hour one night pulling the flowers off and pinching groups of seeds out of each flower head. I thought it was kind of fun:) But then Daniel discovered a more efficient way by just tapping or pounding the flowers. Soon the girls joined in on the fun! So, here Arianna and Ellen are first tapping then squeezing the flowers. The seeds just fall out.


You can see how tiny these lettuce seeds are compared to the letters of the comic strip we were using to catch the seeds.

Here they dumped the seeds into the bowl.

Then we dumped the seeds into a labeled envelope that we'll save for the fall. I put the potato harvest from this morning behind it. Daniel pulled out about 5 plants. We still have lots more in the ground.

I took some pictures of the girls with the zinnia flowers we planted. They are such a beautiful bright red. E and A loved getting to cut and bring them inside. Girls just love fresh flowers!