Spring Garden Record - 2013

It is time to start some plants growing indoors. If you live in the south, you may be able to sow cold crops now, but here in the north, we still have snow on the ground, and several inches of snow in the forecast. But the icy grip of winter is steadily loosening, and there is a hint of spring with day time temps above freezing, and some of the early spring flower heads poking through the snow.

March 1, 2013 - The glory of spring is coming.

To properly prepare, the gardener will be ready to plant some cold crops indoors, and be ready to transplant these outside in a month or so. For our area, the last frost date is mid May, and I watch the forecast, and sometimes sneak out a few days early. Sometimes we get a surprise frost, but a night cover will keep the plants alive if the frost is not hard.

Now is the time to decide what you will plant where in your garden this year. Make up a garden plot plan, and remember rotations if you are able to get two or three cycles of growth into your season.

March 8, 2013 - 5 flats of early starter plants. Some are 3" tall. I put a fan on them some this afternoon to strengthen their stems.

April 19, 2013 - Our indoor tomatoes and pepper plants are getting big even for the gallon containers they have been transplanted into! We are close to flowering stage on the tomatoes, and we are seeing some lower leaf wilt and death. This seems different than we have seen before, and is most pronounced in the carbon black tomatoes. Perhaps just a weakness of the heirloom variety, and the challenges of growing under lights and house temps. We had some snow fly today, but it did not stick. Lows predicted down to 31 degrees for the next two nights. Spring will come, but it is taking its time this year!

In our area we are now about 4 to 5 weeks till our last frost date, and this next week I plan to start tomatoes, peppers, egg plant and beans.

Note our Fava Beans have seemed slow to come up, but today they are poking their bean leaves above the soil!

Also a side note, we expect honey bee packages to arrive May 7, to enlarge our honey bee hives. Lots of rain the past few days, and our water catchment tank is almost full.

April 22, 2013 - We planted into the field 10 bundles of onion plants. This averages to 500 onion plants, in 3 rows. Since we bought the local stores out, we may plant another two rows later. I wish we could find a lower cost per bundle. These cost around $3.50 per bundle.

May 9, 2013 - Planted 50# in 5 rows of small Yukon Gold potatoes (1 foot apart, rows 90 feet long), and planted 50# in 2 rows of large Red potatoes. We did not cut the red potatoes this year. Actually our getting red's was a mistake. We found the YG to be a much better keeper than the Red potatoes. It started to rain as we were covering the potatoes, and it was nice to get all wet out in the rain.

Plants are growing well in the greenhouse. It does get quite hot in there when sunny. I will keep you posted how that goes. We may need to use some shade cloth.

Chitting some seeds this evening for planting tomorrow. Purchased 12 new pullets. (We have lost several laying chickens to a local fox, who has been visiting and collecting rather regularly. More on that soon, as we have to figure out how to make the run as secure as the coup.)

May 22, 2013 - Planted 8 hills of watermelon from among the fruit trees. This area of the garden is heavily mulched, so we pulled back the mulch and made a hill for the two plants each hill. Planted 90 ft of sweet potatoes under 3' wide black plastic. We obtained two varieties of sweet potatoes: 50 slips of Beauregard, and 50 of O'Henry, and planted them about 10" apart along the row. Packages of honey bees arrive tomorrow.