Garden Update

Happy Good Friday everyone!

It's always nice to have a day off work - though I did still work at home half the day, but it's still way nicer than being stuck in the office.

It was absolutely beautiful here today, so we got some much needed yard work done. At one point I actually wished I had a pool again so that I could jump in - it totally felt like summer. This is where I am obligated to mention that when I woke up yesterday it was snowing. Eveerrrything was covered in snow. It didn't last for more than a couple of hours, but still! Snowing to sun-tanning weather the next day.. what is going on? I'm pretty sure it wasn't like this last year. I'm not really complaining, it's just hard to know what kind of weather to expect, and that's not usually what it's like here.

I'll get to what we accomplished outside in just a sec, but first a much needed update on my little seedlings.


Don't mind the lop-sided light. My onions and pansies are a lot taller than everything else because they were started so much earlier, so I had to be creative. Next year I'll make sure I have two light set-ups and can move the tall stuff to a different area. But it still seems to work like this anyways, even if it looks silly.





Here's my onions. As I mentioned in the previous post, I messed them up and I have no idea now which ones are green onions and which ones are regular onions, other than the 3 of them that have the label right in them (I had them in rows before, and messed up my rows). They're doing really well and are ready to go out into the garden! I just need to harden them off so they get used to the weather outside and they'll go in the ground probably on Monday.




That's my tomato plant on the left, and then a bunch of pansies beside it. We went to Costco today and browsed through the garden centre - it's really difficult to see their tomatoes already like 2 ft high and huge, but I have to remind myself they start them in heated green houses in probably November - maybe earlier? I'm not sure. It's hard to want to continue doing it myself though when I see these big plants that are already ready to go and I could just buy and it would be so much easier.. aggh!! But less fun! And way less rewarding. We'll see how long it takes my tomato plant to get to that size once it's outside - probably not long at all.




Everything else is doing really well. I had a couple more broccoli plants that didn't sprout, and I'm still waiting for my rosemary to sprout - I'm pretty sure it's not going to. I definitely had some crappers in the bunch. It's a good learning experience though because I know to start triple the amount next year.




Look at these roots! The pansies are totally ready to go in the ground.. only a tiny bit longer!




In other news - this is what we are left with after the above-ground pool phase I went through last year. The areas where you can't see any grass sprouting, are as hard as concrete. And we're definitely not going to have another pool until we can spring for the in-ground type, so we need to fix this.








Danny worked on it all afternoon - raking and fertilizing and seeding and putting extra top soil down.  I kept saying we needed to get stakes and ribbon and make a little fence around the circle so that the dogs didn't get into it and try to eat the seed. He was sure they wouldn't. What did they do immediately after we let them out? Ran to the circle and started eating the seed and the dirt. I'm always right.. when will he learn??






Here's my actual garden area. The right hand side will be for vegetables because it gets great sun in the summer. The irrigation also goes right to the edge of it already (to the right of the picture), so I can connect to it with some soaker hoses. The other side doesn't have any irrigation - don't ask me why they didn't carry it over there. I tried to grow zucchini and cucumbers up in the back corner by the fence last year, but their success relied on me actually watering them manually. And I'm lazy. Enough said.
I'm not sure if I'll do anything with that side this year - we'll see.






I got my cool-weather veggies planted today as well. These are all the ones that say they can safely be planted outside 4 weeks before the last frost. I'm really excited for the peas. And the area above the carrots is where my cute little onion plants will go in on Monday. I only planted 4 lettuce because the back of the seed pack had a really handy hint that you can plant them every couple of weeks so that you have lettuce throughout the whole summer instead of all at once. Awesome!

I hope you all have a great weekend, doing whatever it is that you normally do on Easter! There's no kids here, so we won't be having any easter eggs hunts. And we aren't the church-going type, so all it means for us is a big yummy dinner on Sunday!

Gardening Parts 2 & 3: Schedule and Planting!

I feel like almost all of my blog posts are starting to have an excuse at the beginning as to why I've gone MIA. Life is busy right now - I won't make excuses for myself, but I'm sorry I took so long to get this up. Hopefully people are still going to garden this year!!!


Step 2: Schedule

Now that you've got your seeds its time to make a schedule!
This is important and you need to be a little organized here otherwise your seed starting will be chaos.

Begin by seperating your seeds into direct-sow seeds (seeds that will go directly into the garden in the spring) and early start seeds that you'll be starting inside under grow lights.

Your seed packets should say on the back whether they should be direct sow or early start, as well as the amount of weeks before the last frost they should be started.

In order to make up a schedule you need to know the frost free date (date of the last frost) in your area. You can do this by checking out almanac.com here, but the best way is just to ask someone around you who gardens. A gardener in your area will definitely know when it's safe to put plants out - I find moms and grandmas are the best for this. But if they don't garden, ask a neighbour or someone at a local garden centre. In my area, any time after the May long weekend (may 21-22) is safe.

Now that you have your planting date it's time to make your schedule. All you want to do is count backwards from your frost free date to when you should start your seeds. If you'll be keeping them in a fairly cool place like a basement or a cool bedroom add 1 week to all the starting dates (so you'll start them 1 week earlier), and if you're going to have them in quite a warm room subtract a week (start them 1 week later). I just used a calendar template in Excel and added notes to all of the important dates. Do whatever works for you.


Here's a peak at my schedule. It's nothing fancy, but get's the job done.



One last thing you will need to go along with your schedule is somewhere to enter notes along the way. It will make it really handy for future years to look back and see how long it took something to germinate, when the 2nd set of leaves came and other details like that. Don't depend on your memory for information like this, be safe and write it down.



When I made my schedule I used Saturday as the weekly increment since thats when I have time to plant and thats usually the same for most people.

Step 3: Planting



Theres many different ways to start your seeds - you can save yogurt containers and various other containers over the winter, toilet paper rolls (they bio-degrade in the soil!), or you can buy a pre-made kit. I'm a little lazy when it comes to this and I always use the kits - I really like the jiffy peat pellets. They're basically fool proof. All you need to do is add a bit of warm water to the tray and they expand to the perfect size.

If you decide to go the other route, you don't want to start your seeds in regular potting soil. Look for a special seed-starting mix. It will be mainly peat.

As I'm using the peat pellets, thats obviously what I'm going to show you. But basically everything is the same whether you start the seeds in these or in a container with seed starting mix, so don't worry!

Jiffy peat pellets

Always consult your seed package for directions when planting your seeds - some plants need the seeds to be set on top of the dirt, and some need to be planted deeper with dirt covering them. If your package isn't helpful at all and doesn't have any information on it then I suggest to consult Lord Google. I'm sure you'll be able to find the right way. When in doubt, just dig a very shallow hole and cover the seed. So far in my planting experiences I haven't found any that did need to be just placed on top.
I've also heard that a good rule of thumb is to plant the seed down double the height of the actual seed. I'm not sure how accurate that is, but it really isn't rocket science. 98% of seed packets will say what to do anyways.
Also very important - label in some way or another what you've planted in each container! All the little seedlings will look pretty much exactly the same for a while, and it can be really annoying if things get messed up. I don't recommend what I did below, because I got my onions messed up when I moved them. I changed all of my labelling to a toothpick in every single plant. So learn from my mistake and do it right the first time.

Once you have your seeds planted, it's very important to cover up the container you have them in until they germinate and poke through the dirt. This is to keep the humidity and moisture in. You won't have to water your seedlings again as long as they are covered up - they'll stay nice and moist. The jiffy greenhouse I bought has a handy little lid that you keep on, but you could also just cover your container with saran wrap.

Once some of your seedlings have sprouted, you need to lift the lid - they're going to need some air!
I usually remove them and place them in their own container with no lid on it, so that the rest of the seedlings that haven't sprouted can stay in the nice moist conditions that they need to grow.
For your sprouted plants, you want to keep your lights about 2" above the plant. Any higher and your plants will "reach" for the light, causing them to be long and leggy (you don't want that - it sucks, and makes for a crappy plant).
Seedlings need about 16 hrs of light a day - the best way to handle this is to get a timer that you plug your light into and then you don't even have to think about it. I have mine set to come on at 8 am and off at 11 pm.

My light setup was copied from You Grow Girl - I have the same kind of shelving as she does and we already had the light balast from our halloween parties (they're usually housing black lights). Hanging the lights from chains makes it really easy to raise the lights as the seedlings grow.

Light set-up

 

yay! a sprout!

There's not a lot more to say - just give your plants lots of love! Water them from the bottom so that they grow nice strong roots - but don't let them sit in excess water. Remove whatever water is left after 10 minutes. Occaisonally give them a little spritz on top, but if the top gets too wet it will get moldy. If this does happen to you, just hold off on the water for a bit and it should go away.

Once they have their second set of leaves (the real ones), give them a bit of fertilizer once a week. I mixed a bunch up in a bottle and I just use a little syringe I already had on hand (to be honest, it was to give the dogs medicine with hah) to squirt out a bit onto each plant.
That's pretty much it until it's time for them to go outside. We'll need to do something called 'hardening off' when it's time for that - which is basically just taking the plants outside for a bit of time each day so that they get used to being outside, as ooposed to being in a protected room with no wind and a constant temperature. I'll talk about that a bit more when it gets closer to that time.

Stay tuned for an update on all of my seedlings. I started my pansies on Feb 26th, so they're getting nice and big. I also have onions, and almost all of my veggies sprouted now. This weekend coming up is 'get the garden ready for cool season crops' on the schedule - very exciting!!