Garden 2012

The gardening season is upon us and I couldn't be more thrilled. Due to the mild weather over the winter, the garden was very easy to clean up- I even started during February vacation! A couple of weeks ago I amended the soil of the existing boxes with some organic fertilizer and this weekend I plan on making 3 new boxes.

Last weekend I started a bunch of seeds and some of them have started sprouting! There was a minor disaster with some sub-par pellets and when I knocked into the grow light, I knocked apart half the tomato pellets- hopefully they will be ok. I ordered the bulk of my seeds early in January from Johnny's Seeds, to make sure that I got all the important ones. I've been picking up other ones here and there and I'll continue to do so as I see interesting varieties.

The grow light is occupying a mostly out of the way spot in our living room for now. I think that next year we'll need 2 for all my seeds. ;)


The Gypsy broccoli seeds sprouted after a mere 4 days!

This year in our boxes, we are planting varieties of: lettuce, spinach, carrots, onions, kohlrabi, beets, peas, beans, broccoli, brussel sprouts, peppers, squash, zucchini, garlic, horseradish, asparagus, maybe corn and definitely TOMATOES! For herbs, I'm going with rosemary, thyme (mine overwintered!), basil, dill, cilantro and lavender. I also ordered strawberry and raspberry plants for the yard. I'm very excited to try all of the varieties that I picked out this season; the peas, beans, carrots and onions will have at least 2 each, and the tomatoes will have many! I can't get enough tomatoes- I picked out a bunch of heirlooms and I keep getting more every time I see them. I think I'm a seed hoarder!

To make sure that everything goes well, I have been relying on two books that I got from the library last winter and liked so much that I bought them (secondhand b/c they are out of print). I flip through them at least once a week and used them to plan my plantings and boxes.

The New England Vegetable Garden is the best gardening book if you live in New England. I can't recommend it highly enough. Don Kerr is a cool guy and his writing style is very easy to read. After discussing general gardening principles, each fruit, vegetable and herb gets an in-depth treatment based on his knowledge of New England.

Crockett's Victory Garden is pretty famous; likely everyone has heard of it. His book is very smartly laid out- with a month by month list of everything that needs to be done for each fruit and vegetable and many flowers.

I write extremely lightly, but here is my tentative plan the for the Garden 2012!