Excited Gardening This Year
Return to DiscussionsIt is now 2022. Time to start the next season's plants. No squash this year. I have had really bad luck with squash, only a fruit or two from 8 or so plants. Not a good return on my investment. Will try plum tomatoes, green beans, swiss chard, and peppers. Hope the herbs produce too.
Several months away from that yet. My spaghetti squash got bores and died, the buttercup and acorn squash went crazy despite the hot dry summer. The zucciny also went nuts. Tomatoes and peppers did well also.
YAY! My first tomato is out of the seed starting medium! And it's a new variety for us called Independence Day. So it begins again....and I'm very hopeful for better luck than last year's lackluster attempts at gardening. It was a year of experimentation and nearly everything flopped. I'm tightening up my technique and playing it safer, spending a little more on better equipment and being more attentive. Will it make a difference? Only time will tell, and it's all with no clothes on, so it's still good times, regardless of the veggies and herbs we'll eventually eat (or not).
Stay tuned, and let's hear it from the rest of the nudies in the dirty! There are lots of fun ways to get dirty in the garden - don't read too much into that, but a little reading is also fun, no?
Lots more seedlings out of the flat in the barn now, the second round came up in about three days, yikes! Dahlias and collards and cabbage, oh my ~ where are all these plants going to go! Planning the next phase with our second double dug garden getting going in the next week or so. A little under the weather so not as chipper about putting the shovel in our junky soil as of today, so maybe in a few days I can begin the relentless battle to improve soil that's pretty close to terrible. Grey clay....got about $200 worth of additions piled up near the frame that'll take about five years to recoup in veggies. There's (almost) nothing better than harvesting your own in the nude! How's everyone else coming along?
Oh my goodness the seeds I planted in a second flat exploded out of the medium this past week and I've been a madman trying to re-pot everything from the first flat and fit it all under the one, four foot double florescent light we've got burning in the barn 16 out of 24 hours a day. I had some reflective mylar from another project (anyone care to make a guess what that project was?) that I re-purposed by draping it down the sides of the space around the lights and that seems to be helping in keeping the plants from getting stretching toward the light. A gardener's work never ends! But all the greenery coming up is making me giddy for getting the garden prepped and I should be putting the lettuce and other early vegetable seeds out there in the next couple of days. We've got nothing but sixty and seventy daytime high temps for the next two weeks so here we go ~ what's happening in your green life?