Gardening In March

Well, you know how I finally got all my seeds planted and were starting...

Well some LOVELY creature, I'm sure, went into my garden area and destroyed all those that I was trying to germinate...so back to the drawing board. I might have to buy more seeds even. ARGH!!!

Note to Self: Try your best to save money for a green house!

Gardening in March

Okay my tomato seeds are doing well. I have little seedlings that are about 1 -2 inches tall. How exciting! As you can see they are leaning. They were facing the window so I turned them around now so that they will stand back up straight. They're looking for sunlight. Here is what they look like:

Gardening in March

Well I have officially gotten all my cold weather seeds started.

Broccoli

Red & Green Cabbage

Cauliflower

Yellow & Red Onions

Leaf Lettuce

Sweet Peas

Spinach

Swiss Chard

Beets

Carrots

Turnips

Radishes

All Started! YEAH! 

I actually have leaf lettuce seedlings about 2-3 inches tall in the ground, too.

Gardening in March

I have now started my tomato seeds. I pray that they will work. They are inside my house, actually on my counter in the kitchen. I'm hoping they will germinate soon so I can see all my little tomato plants. 

I've also started some lettuce and spinach inside. I'm waiting for them all to germinate then I will be placing them outside.

Sunny weather is in store for us this week so sounds like a good week to garden.  Hope you all have sunny weather and put out some great cool weather plants. Plants good to plant now are:

Broccoli

Cauliflower

Cabbage

Beets

Spinach

Sweet Peas

Carrots (depending on your zone)

and any other cool weather plants you can think of. :)

Don't forget though to start your tomato seeds!

Gardening in March

If you recall my last post for Gardening in March I posted these five things to do:

* Get a sandy garden bed ready to plant carrots, beets, radishes etc....

* Start more broccoli, red cabbage, green cabbage, cauliflower, along with swiss chard, leaf lettuce, beets, carrots, radishes, and spinach. Completed  3/12/2011

* Transplant my asparagus plants to another location. Completed 3/12/2011 (Looks promising for some fresh asparagus this year!)

* Build a tall planting bed for an elderly lady Completed 3/12/2011 (Thanks to my husband for completing this one. He used the big buckets leftover from the cows mineral licks. Pretty smart husband! I'm not partial. Ha Ha!)

* Plant Potatoes from Seed Savers Exchange

Gardening in March

Okay yesterday was my one and only post for February gardening...even though it was actually March 1st... but lets don't go there. My line up for March...(praying)

* Get a sandy garden bed ready to plant carrots, beets, radishes etc....

* Start more broccoli, red cabbage, green cabbage, cauliflower, along with swiss chard, leaf lettuce, beets, carrots, radishes, and spinach.

* Transplant my asparagus plants to another location.

* Build a tall planting bed for an elderly lady

* Plant Potatoes from Seed Savers Exchange

Okay that's 5 things...surely in 30 days I can get those 5 things done, right? We shall see.

Update on Garden...

Well I'm sad to say the garden isn't doing very well. Out of 16 plants, 6 or 7 of them are living. (Note to self: Don't plant anything at least till March!) :) Yes I do talk to myself and apparently type to myself too. LOL! So I guess I'll wait a week or two and then plant some more broccoli, cabbage, and cauliflower. I also have my onions in the ground, which seem to be doing okay. I had to give them a little more dirt because we had a gusher of a rain the other day and moved all the fresh dirt (packed it down, rather).

So for now I'm waiting on starting more seeds. I'm also going to try to get some nice loose, sandy soil beds ready for my carrots, potatoes, etc to be planted in. I have a plan on blocking my view of my butane tank so I'll have to work on that one as well.

Till next time...keep on gardening, or at least planning. :)

Our Cherry Trees...I Can't WAIT!!!!

Wow! What a buy!

While out on the town with a good looking man (don't worry it was my husband) we stopped buy a store and found two blueberry plants...they look to be like 4 year old plants....for $15.00 a piece. So needless to say we bought them up quick! So now we have a total of 4 blueberry plants so I'm praying for at least a little "mess" of blueberries this year.

Plus we love cherries around this house. Definitely in our oatmeal. So we also purchased two cherry trees. Although as we were planting one of them it felt as though the roots had died, so please pray that it will live.

I'm so glad that we purchased these plants. So today we did planting. We planted our cherry trees, blueberries, broccoli, red cabbage, green cabbage, cauliflower, and 32 sets of red onions. No yellow onions yet because I had to get cleaned up to get dinner on the table. :) Next time though, maybe tomorrow.

Well my small lonely plants are about 2-3 inches tall and probably need to transplanted into something bigger or the ground outside. I would like to plant them outside but we still have snow on the ground outside and are suppose to get 6-12 inches more tomorrow.

At least all the kids will have fun in such a deep snow. It sounds like a good 4-wheeler day in the snow. HA HA

Prune or Not to Prune....

That is the question. Yesterday we experienced some majorly different weather here in the southern plains. Almost three days away from the end of January and it was almost 70 degrees F! What is up with this weather?

What is even funnier is the weather man says we might be getting into some winter weather later this week. ARGH!!! This is one of the things that drives me crazy. WEATHER in the southern plains.

But on a happy note. :) We had beautiful weather to get out and prune our muscadines, grapes, blackberries, apple trees, etc.. Plus my wonderful husband conjured up a contraption for a portable chicken coop. I'm SO excited as are my kids. I can't wait for my first fresh egg from OUR chickens. But I guess it would help too if we had chickens. HA HA Closer to spring we will get some.

So far we have started:
4 Red Cabbage, 4 Green Cabbage, 4 Broccoli, and 4 Cauliflower.
(NOTE: not all of them might make it to the big garden....little hands....need I say more.)
But what we do have left :) we will probably have to set out soon because they are getting so tall that they are just starting to fall over. But I'm not to scared about putting them out I've been saving my gallon milk jugs and cutting the bottoms out of them so we can use them to cover our plants in case of frost. We will see how well they work when we put the plants out.

So sorry for the long post...what was your weather like this weekend?

It is Done...

Well yesterday I started my cauliflower, broccoli, green cabbage, and red cabbage. We are only planting 4 plants of each right now and going to put each plant in one square foot. Then we will start more from seed and so on. A continuous crop...that's what I'm hoping for right now.

January Gardening

For January I can start my seeds of Broccoli, Cabbage, and Cauliflower. (This is of course based on my average last frost date, which may not be the same as yours). So for January I could have started on the 7th and started Broccoli and Cabbage but I didn't have my seeds yet but what is great is I've planned for a continuous crop so I can start my seeds again on the 21st which is tomorrow. So for future reference:

12 weeks before last frost:
Start: Broccoli and Cabbage seeds (January 7, 2011)

10 weeks before last frost:
Start: Broccoli, Cabbage, & Cauliflower (January 21, 2011)

Also January is a good time to prune fruit trees, grapes, blueberries, roses, etc... But do it later in the month.

Ready to Plant

Wow! I'm so excited my seeds just arrived in the mail. Don't they look beautiful? (Okay I'm a nerd about seeds. I admit it proudly!)

I'm thinking tomorrow I'll start my first seeds indoors...

Since right now as I write we're experiencing...SNOW!

Seeds for the Garden

Well it is now 2011. Wow 2010 went by fast. I've now gotten my list of seeds together for 2011 garden. I'm so excited. I told my husband I feel like I'm at a candy store (except without the sugar LOL).  I'm trying something new this year with my seeds. We're using only heirloom seeds. I'm excited about trying all the many different varieties. We made our order from Seed Savers Exchange.org. I'm also using for the first time for me the square foot gardening idea so we will see.

I hope you all have a great year and come back to see the progress of our garden. (...praying...)

Building our Beds

 Today we started building our vegetable beds so that they can sit throughout winter. First we tilled up the dirt and added some cow manure. Then tilled the dirt again. We are making 4x8 beds and hopefully anywhere from 5 to 8 of them. We found a great price on 6x8(s) for $2.24 a piece.

One bed made now I guess will try again tomorrow? :) It's starting to get cold.

Homemade Jelly

Well I did it. I've been putting it off but I did it. You see a while back I tried to make some Muscadine Jelly without using SureJell and instead blending up the muscadine hulls and using it as natural pectin. Well needless to say it didn't work. So I reopened my cans added the SureJell and volia! Muscadine Jelly. I'll try and add a picture of it and the pears I've recently canned. They are simply beautiful. If I do say so myself. :) Hopefully my next book to look into will be...

Also, the book, The Backyard Homestead, is an absolutely awesome book. It has everything you would possibly even need to know about what vegetable to plant, what herbs, fruit tree, nut trees, berries, etc... It explains how to keep all kinds of livestocks. It is truly an amazing book. A great buy!

Homestead Garden

Yes that's right. I want to make my yard a garden that I could homestead off of. Right now I feel so excited to start the planning process of where things are going to go and what it all would look like together. Cost, though, is what keeps running up in my mind. How much is all this going to cost? Well I've decided that no matter what the cost in the long run I believe it will be worth it. Just imagine teaching the next generation how this country was able to stay alive so long ago.

Some of the books that I'm looking into are














I'm hopefully going to look into one or all of these closer.