Monday, February 29, 2016

Learning To Grow Vegetables

I decided this was going to be the first year I grew my vegetables from seeds. I've always just gone to Mendards and gotten the ones I wanted and planted them directly into my garden. Easy peasy!

For years, since I started my first garden at our house in Minnesota, I wanted to start my veggies from scratch. How hard could it be?

Welllll, let me tell you...

I naively thought I just bought the seeds, plopped them into one of those fan dangled starter kits, around 8 weeks later planted them in the garden, and voila, veggies!

Apparently that's NOT how this works. That's not how any of this works.

I have to know the day of the last frost. When do my neighbors sow their seeds? How long does it take the seed to germinate. Um, what have I gotten myself into?

Keeping a journal is a great way to do this I guess, and yea, because I'm so consistent as to keep a journal. For the love of all things green, why can't is just STICK the seeds in some dirt, and be done with it?


The hubs captured me Saturday morning trying to figure out the last frost date for this year.

The first site I'm reading has my head spinning. Learning how much I truly don't know about gardening. Thank you to all of those people who start seeds for me to buy at the store "ready to plant"! The site also says that 70° is the magical number. If it's below that in my house, start a week earlier. If it's above that in my house, start a week later. Ugh, some days it's 69° some days it's 71°! Someone take me to the loony bin right now!


We headed to the hardware store, and getting there I still wasn't sure what to get. There was seed starting soils. One was organic, one has seed food along with the soil, if I just get the basic soil, I have to get the plant food, too. Oh, but I don't start using the plant food/fertilizer until they've been germinated for a few weeks. The little seedlings are supposed to spend time in a south facing window. I have no idea what direction any of the windows in our house face.

One of the kids might have to share their bedroom with my wee little baby plants.


If they make it through the seedling stage, maybe I'll get them planted. Of course, for that to happen, I need to have my backyard ready for them. Being in a new house, in a new stated where I have grown veggies before, on land that is constantly saturated because we live next to the Bay, this could prove very interesting. I may need to bring in some soil so that I can actually have a garden. If that doesn't work I'll have to do raised beds. Not thrilled with that direction, but I'm determined to get back to gardening again.

Good times ahead!

Do you have any tips for a newbie?

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Woven by Words by Mimi B is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.