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I grew up in the garden – literally!  When I was young, I had a section of the garden that was mine at my grandma’s house.  I mostly made mud pies, but also pretended to hoe and “plant” whatever I found.  When I got older, I joined 4-H and had my first garden of my very own, a small flower bed around our flag pole.  I continued to take gardening projects, including house plants, various flower garden projects, and even a tree/landscaping project. It wasn’t until I was in my 20’s that I first planted vegetables.  I started with peas and potatoes, and have addedRead More →

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I have many posts to write about the things I’ve been working on around the house, but something happened tonight that I just have to write about.  I was going to write a tweet to Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Company, and realized that what I wanted to say wouldn’t fit in a tweet. A little background story first, in my new house, there is a family that lives next door who has several children (four or five? I’m not sure).  Based on what I know, let’s just say, they don’t have a very stable home life.  They spend a fair amount of time in theirRead More →

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Between the seedlings inside, the plants popping up outside, and babies popping up all over, I think it is safe to say spring has sprung.  And finally the weather agrees, with two lovely 60 degree days! The plants in the basement are growing and growing.  I can’t wait to put them outside soon, but it needs to warm up a bit more. Daffodils have popped up and should be blooming soon in the backyard. Even the sedum mom dug up to save from our building project last year has begun to show green leaves.  I think the fact that it has been in the greenRead More →

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I’m not feeling very good today, I thought yesterday that my kidney stone had passed, but now I think it just decided not to move yesterday.  But… …look what happened to sprout up today – Broccoli!  Just one, I’m hoping the other is close behind! I also repotted tomatoes after writing yesterday’s blog post.  They have their first true leaves coming in and have roots on the edge of their pellets too.  I did them the same way I did the cabbage and kale. I planted two different varieties of tomato, one Sweet 100 and one Amana Orange.  I’m not a huge tomato fan, howeverRead More →

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I’m finally starting to feel a bit better, I had the influenza and then a kidney stone – both of which left me miserable.  But while I was out of commission, my little plants grew and grew! My cabbage and kale (the first things planted) especially grew.  As I mentioned in a past blog post, they grew quite tall and lanky. They were starting to show their roots on the outside of the coir pellets too – so it was time to replate them! I gathered all my supplies.  I decided to pot them up a bit into recycled paper pots and to give themRead More →

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This is my comment in response to Dee Nash’s post Which flowers are easy to grow from seed? Here are several I like it ended up being long so I decided to make a post of my own, I want to go find pictures, but I’m sick, so pictures might come later.. My favorite easy-to-grow flowers are Cosmos and Bachelor Buttons.  Cosmos grow all over my mom’s garden – I had some of my senior pictures taken in the garden with the cosmos.  She has the ones that are primarily pink but occasionally throw purple or white (incomplete dominance at work).  We didn’t get CosmosRead More →

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Well, the weather outside might not agree, but spring is coming and it is time to plant seeds so I can have happy, healthy seedlings to put out.  My goal is to grow a majority, if not all, of my plants from seeds this year, rather than buying plants, so I’ve been carefully studying charts and weather/climate ratings for my area to find the best time to plant.  I’ve also been using Smart Gardener to get a basic garden layout so I have an idea of how many seeds to plant so I don’t have extra or I’m not short.  Though I’m using Smart GardenerRead More →

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I mentioned before that I planted two pellets with parsley nearly three weeks ago.  Parsley has a germination period of 7 to 14 days, and the first pellet came up after 13 days, showing two little seedlings. The other didn’t come up within the germination period.  I decided to give it a little more time because I’ve heard that parsley can be especially difficult to germinate.  After more than three weeks of nothing growing, I finally gave up and when I was starting other seeds, I put some new parsley seeds into the pellet. The very next day, I was checking the water level andRead More →

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Look how big my little cabbage sprouts are getting! They are getting so tall they are nearly at the top of the greenhouse.  I ordered a 25 cell greenhouse and some more coir pellets from Burpee and I hope they get here soon because the cabbage is going to outgrow the height of this greenhouse soon!   The kale is growing nicely too, I probably didn’t need to put three seeds in each one, three came up in one and two in the other.  I know I’ll have to pull three of them, which seems a shame.  I hate pulling the innocent little plants.  IRead More →

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  I spent some time today organizing my seeds.  My goal is to figure out what I have and what I need so I don’t buy what I already have – like last year…and the year before.  I have way too many packages of cucumber and sunflowers!  I found that a medium size index card sorter that I had works nicely for seeds.  Though it won’t work for long if I get too many more, it is pretty full as it is! I also found some bulbs from last year that I’m pretty sure are narcissus.  They somehow lost dirt or pushed themselves out ofRead More →