Springing Up Veggies

Hello friends!  I can't believe it's almost May...which means it's almost time for the big planting again. Nothing like a weekend of non stop planting.  My kind of marathon :)  Anyways, we're not quite there yet.  Actually, there is a frost warning here the next two nights so my dad and I are going to be in full action later this afternoon bringing flower pots in and tarping some of the seeds already planted in the ground that are not frost hardy.  We started hardening our tomatoes and a few other veggies about a week ago, so those were the first to come in.  Our sunroom is now another plant room.  Story of our lives.  They have taken over the basement, now they are creeping into the rest of the house.  But hey, they are our little friends.

What is plant hardening and why is it necessary?  When you start seeds indoors, those plants grow accustomed to the lighting they are under.  Even if you get high-powered heat lights, nothing comes close to the power of the sun or the other elements for that matter.  If you don't gently break your seedlings into the outdoors before planting them they may break from the wind or shrivel up under the power of the sun.  Basically, plants can get sunburn!  In my last post I talked about how I lost a bunch of little kale seedlings because I took them directly from our grow room to planting outside.  They shriveled up within a day!  Don't make that mistake.

Let's move on to other gardening news.  Basically, it is springing up veggies over here.  We have kale, chard, spinach, onions, and collards sprouting currently.  I just put sunflowers, beans, and my first batch of squash in the ground yesterday so in another week or so there should be more little sprouts! My chives are out of control.  I swear I blink my eye and they have grown an inch.  I've been enjoying cooking with them and adding them raw to salads, however it doesn't look like I've made a dent in them.  Love it!

Here are some of the flower boxes I planted last week.  Let's see...there are snapdragons, morning glories, dehlias, cosomos, wildflowers, forget-me-nots, petunias, and purple and yellow beans.  I had the genius idea this year to plant the colored beans and morning glories on the edge of the boxes so they will drape over the edge and grown up the side of the deck.  That should be pretty cool.  

Of course the entire time we are gardening, these girls are watching us.  The suburban hen gang. Gotta love fresh eggs (and quality chicken poop fertilizer for the garden:).  

Our drainage system we dug for the main garden has been working great.  No more epic floods...yet. My squash patch, on the other hand, has been sitting under water for days.  We neglected to trench this for awhile, and the other day I decided it was necessary.  Our high-tech drainage system involves a hand-dug trench that we took under the fence and connected it to the main ditch in the big garden using a hoe and a few shovels. Crazy complicated, right?!  Look, you don't need to pay a ton of money or use top of the line materials to solve problems.  A little common sense and usually a shovel will do.  Hopefully this patch dries out over the next two weeks so I can get my squash in the ground.

From left to right:

1.  Super tripod for a sprinkler.  This year I refuesed to spend hours watering by hand.  After we extended the garden by over double last year, it was getting a bit ridiciulus to hand water everything. With this high sprinkler stand, we can area water in two or three shifts.  Do you know how many hours of my day I'm going to get back with this thing?! At first I called my dad a nerd for getting a sprinkler stand, however now I'm thinking he's a genius.

2.  Garden lining of beans (sugarsnap, purple string beans, and yellow string beans) and sunflowers (mammoth and pikes peak variety).  I'm pretty excited about this.  Instead of dropping fences in the garden to grow our beans, we decided to let them grown up the 4 ft fence lining the garden and we are going to drop in 7 ft bamboo poles every so often for them to grow up.  (I have a pretty good story about how we got the bamboo, but I'll save that for later).  This will save room in the garden while adding to the ascetics.  Win-win!  I planted a row of enormous sunflowers along the back, guardians of the garden.

3.  BABY SWISS CHARD!  Love me some greens.

MORE GREENS! This time in the form of kale.  I love my kale patch so, so much.  Eat more kale! Also, I believe there is a restraunt opening up in NYC called FuckKale.  Pardon my language, but that's the name.  I dig it, and am totally going to have to eat there!

Quick glance at our onion, scallion, spinach, and beet patch because I didn't want to slop in the garden and get my shoes all muddy.  My gardening boots currently look like a giant clump of dirt.  I don't want my regular shoes to met the same fate.

Annddd here we have our garden menace.  Pickles is our plant-eating, flower-box laying, the-garden-is-my-litterbox, cat who is always getting into trouble.  Sometimes I feel like we are doing more to try and keep her out of the garden than the deer and squirrels.

Last but not least, I wanted to share my obsession with seeds.  Seriously, I'm like a kid in a candy store when I walk into the seed section of Home Depot.  The seeds have been buy one get one free for the past week or so, which is basically like giving an addict drugs and saying don't use them. Obviously I have bought, oh, probably 20 packets or so.  As if we needed MORE things to plant. But I needed the red and gold sunflowers.  And romane lettuce (the green leaf and butterbush isn't enough).  And how could I pass up on growing a 200 lb pumpkin!?  I'm excited and terrified at the same time.  However, I know bigger is always better, so bring it super-sized pumpkin!

That's all the news from here, hope you're enjoying your Spring and starting your garden!

~Margaret