Starting my garden is always something I get super excited for and plan for months. If you would like to see my last post about what I planned to do in the garden this year, you can check it out here. I have only made a few alterations at this point, so that post is still mostly accurate. I’ve also gone through and made a calendar of when to start seeds, when to plant things outside, and when to pull plants for the next crop to come in. I live in zone 6A, so March is about as early as I can start planting.
I guess the first thing I’ll do is go through my timeline a bit. The first thing I did this year was start growing a sweet potato. I bought an organic sweet potato at the store about three weeks ago, covered it half way with water and now have is half submerged on the top of a mason jar. Within about 10 days, roots began to grow, and now at about 20 days, I’m beginning to get my first sprout off the top. I would like to get at least 6 slips, but I’d be even happier with 9 to 10. Sweet potatoes get planted after all my chance of frost is gone, so I still have until early June for more growth.
Next, I started some broccoli seeds. I kept them moist, and within 2 days, most of my seeds had sprouted. I started my broccoli seeds about 2 weeks ago, and they should be ready to transplant out the first weekend of April. These seedlings are now about 1 inch tall and are starting to form their fist set of true leaves.
This weekend was very busy. Friday we bought four 2″ by 10″ by 8′ to make another raised bed. With that we bought six 2″ by 2″ by 8′ boards to make two trellis, six bags of Black Kow Manure, and one 3 cubic foot bag of peat moss. Saturday morning we assembled the raised bed, and went to get 7 full wheelbarrow loads of dirt. We filled the bed half way with dirt before we dug a trench to bury hay down the length of the bed. We then covered the hay, added a bit more dirt, then added half the manure and peat moss and mixed the top layer all together leaving the hay untouched.
The hay we pulled from the covering the garlic and is used as a way to help regulate moisture in the bed and hopefully help keep it from drying out too much. Once the bed was filled and mixed, we added the remaining manure and peat moss to the remaining dirt. We also had some chicken waste and bedding, so we mixed it all together in the bed of a truck before filling the wheelbarrow and then filling the fabric pots. That was the last thing we did in the garden on Saturday.
Sunday, I planted some daffodils in the garden along the garage, and I added some mulch to the tulips I planted near my old raised beds. I’m glad to see they were coming up. I planted a horseradish crown in the fabric pot by itself, and I checked my garlic. I was very very happy to see that all my garlic did come up and that two cloves even split so I should be getting about 37 cloves of garlic this summer! After that, I checked my potatoes, and I planted 4 rows of peas. I then made two trellis out of 2″ by 2″ boards and attached them to the bed between each set of pea plants.
What’s left for March? Still lots! Today I will be going out to add some spinach in between the peas and soon to be broccoli. Next weekend, I should get to plant my potatoes. I have 13 potatoes that should be good enough to plant, so I will be planting them between 3 fabric pots. At that time, I will also be able to start my peppers and tomato plants. I also only have about a week to figure out how I’m going to make the trellis roping. I’m going to be looking for some 100% cotton string/yarn, then I need to decide between nails, brad nails, screws, staples, etc. for attaching the string.
Overall my plans haven’t changed too much. We decided to place the new bed to be towards the front of the peach tree, and we decided on only one bed instead of two. The larger beds are a bit harder to work around, but I also didn’t want to have to play with spacing two beds and limiting lumber use is also important to me. Also, we decided to do only one fabric pot of sweet potatoes and three for normal potatoes. I wasn’t expecting so many potatoes to be good to plant, but we eat them enough that we found it justified to plant as many potatoes as we have. We’ll also try planting some sweet potatoes in the ground and see how that goes. Finally, I also managed to get my hands on a good large chunk of horseradish root I found on Etsy from Daylilynursery.
For those wondering, that means I now have three types of garlic: Chesnok Red-Purple Stripe, Amish Rocamble, and Inchelium Red (softneck). I started eighteen Waltham 29 broccoli seeds. I planted a bareroot horseradish root. I planted thirty-four Golden Sweet Pea seeds. And today, I’ll be planting 1-2 rows of American spinach.
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