And we are back! A bit of an unintentional hiatus for the last month, but it unfortunately sometimes happens when one has too many hobbies and not nearly enough time in a day. Not much has changed in the last month with being out in the shop and enjoying my woodworking hobby.

Thanks to a weird winter, we had spring like conditions recently and I thought I better get some of our plants started. I remembered that last year I did do some planting in mid-February, so it was time to pull the indoor greenhouses out of storage and get some seeds started. You know that super nerdy spreadsheet that I keep each year, where I write down when we started seeds, when they germinated, etc? Well I really should have referred to that. Instead, I just got over-excited and planted a ton of our garden veggies that need to be started early. Maybe a little too early.

Last year, I did plant some seeds in mid-February. But it was onions, which need quite a bit of time before going out to the garden. It wasn’t until early March that I planted our tomatoes, peppers, cabbage, herbs, etc. In my excitement and lack of using a very helpful spreadsheet tool, I have now planted a lot of items, quite early. We have started the following plants:

• 4 Broccoli (will do another 4 in another week or so)
• 8 Green cabbage
• 8 Red cabbage
• 4 Cauliflower (will do another 4 in another week or so)
• 8 Celery
• 8 Kale (never grown this and the package said start early)
• 8 Leeks
• 6 Pak choi
• 4 Cayenne peppers
• 16 California bell peppers
• 17 Romas tomatoes
• 11 Big beef tomatoes
• 5 Sweetie tomatoes
• 4 Ground cherries
• 32 Basil
• 16 Thyme

I know, some of those amounts seem crazy, but we have friends and co-workers that would like some plants, so the popular items we started a lot of seeds with the intention of sharing.

The other plants that we will start in the house, likely in mid-April are:

• Cucumber
• Watermelon
• Butternut squash
• Pumpkin
• Cantaloupe

Usually we plant all of those right in the ground in May, but we thought we would do a little experiment with starting some of the plants in the house to see how they transplant and if it has any effect on when they start producing vegetables and fruit. There is a good chance that they won’t transplant nicely, or that they will stunt temporarily due to the disruption and then start growing around the same time as the ones we put directly into the ground, so there will be no benefit to starting them early…and so on. But we won’t know unless we try, so we are going to give it a whirl and see what happens.

Last year, we also struggled with starting our seeds. A number of factors played into that, which we have changed up for this year. We had terrible potting soil where seeds when to die. I don’t know what was up with it, but when we changed the soil, and started seeds again, we were super successful. We also had some dud packets of seeds, which was disappointing because we had been using this brand in the years prior and loved the results. But even with the really good potting soil, they just didn’t really produce. And lastly, we tried some degradable potting cups, which just got moldy and slimy and were not worth ever using again.

This year, we went to a local nursery and purchased our potting soil from them. Wowza! This stuff is amazing. Our plants started quickly and are extremely happy to the point that the plants are out of control…which mixed with the super early start, has me a tad worried. Usually, I don’t have to put a fan on my plants in the first week that they have popped up, but these plants are growing so very fast that they are getting a wee bit leggy. Luckily, the fan has been working at getting them to focus on root development and thickening up the stem. I may have to do some transplanting though, which I have never had to do yet. Especially the smaller container tomatoes that we started for others, anticipating giving them away before they had to be transplanted. Now, we may need to up-size the containers before sending them off to their new homes.

Other tasks that I need to work on in the coming month in preparation for the garden is building a second herb planter. The one that I made last year is awesome and has provided so many delicious herbs. Plus it looks really nice along our raised cement seating area. I’d like to do another that allows me to put more variety in, and perhaps a bit more of the herbs we use a lot of like thyme, rosemary and basil.

We also need to do a walk around to decide where everything is going this year. We are going to be switching a lot up so that the soil has a chance to re-generate nutrients. We plan on adding a few inches of new composted soil to all the beds, but it’s time to make a big switcheroo of all the plants again.

We know there are a few things we aren’t going to bother with again this year. We aren’t going to bother with corn. It takes up a large area, and we don’t really love the corn we have been growing. There are so many corn producers around us that we can get really delicious local corn anytime, so freeing that space up allows us to put in more plants that we will use more. We won’t be doing cucamelons again. Although unique little things, they weren’t really worth the space that they took up. We would rather use it for something else. We are also giving up on the Asparagus. It just doesn’t like our garden, or we aren’t doing the right things for the bed, so again, we will use that space for something that we consume more of.

We are also going to make a few changes to how we grow a few of our plants. We are going to try growing the cucumbers along the ground again. Our most successful years were when they weren’t working so hard to climb a ladder. With the landscaping fabric down, the cucumbers should still grow nicely directly on the ground. We are going to find a new bed for the carrots so that we can do a much larger patch. The potatoes will also need to go somewhere else so that they are not encroaching on the surrounding plants. We may use to upper bed on the shop side so that it is just potatoes in that bed. We are trying out some fall-planted onions to see if we get an earlier harvest of onions. Our celery will not be planted in the shade of the cucumbers, but rather in their own area. Lastly, our peppers are going into their own area and are not going to be at the front side of the tomato bed.

In the space we have made we are going to add peas back into the mix. We will also be adding lettuce and kale to the garden this year. We are going to try pak choi (like bok choi) as a new addition. We also have peanuts and watermelon that we are going to add in. The peanuts are definitely an impulse buy, but why not try them? They say they are good in our zone, and I think it will be fun to try growing them, and tasty if we are successful!

Fingers crossed for an early, warm spring, so that we can get these plants into the garden before they completely take over our living room.