Transplants and seeds in the Lower Garden

 The 11th of April, 2015, was a super busy day outside. We started transplanting our seedlings outside. There are plants that can handle the cold better than others and so we have started with those. These plants are cauliflower or broccoli, they are just waiting for us to put them in the ground.

Here you can see the first of the head lettuce that will give us yummy salads this year.

More broccoli and cauliflower waiting to be transplanted. We are hoping to freeze a good majority of this to use during the coming year. We eat lots of broccoli and cauliflower, but our own fresh frozen sounds absolutely divine, much better than store bought.

 This may look like just a picture of dirt, but there are carrots in here. Each square has a "seed tape" of different kinds of carrots. If all of the carrots grow we will have over 1,000 carrots to peel, wash, and bottle!

 Head lettuce gets planted four to a square. We will stagger our planting so we don't have a billion heads of lettuce go bad before we can eat them ;) .

 The first cauliflower is ready to start growing and making creamy white heads for us to enjoy.

 Here is a whole box of either broccoli or cauliflower, I can't remember which is which in the photo. They each get one plant per square, they usually get pretty large.

 An entire row of broccoli and cauliflower, YUMMY!

 These are all carrots in the lower garden, we have many more boxes in the upper garden.

To conserve water, and not have weeds in the walkways, we hand water our garden (until we can afford to put in a drip system). It takes a little bit of time, but it is so worth avoiding the hours of extra weeding that would come from using a sprinkler.

Lower garden

Brian is really working hard to get the lower garden area ready. We bought this Mantis tiller so it would be easier to move around with it. He loves it! Brian says that this has made the difference in being able to do this lower area or not. This is not a plug for Mantis or anything, but just letting everyone know that it is a great value and it really does work like it says on tv.

Here is a good view of the boxes that are already in place. We have more to put in, but these are the ones that we need right now. You can also see the fence we have put around the lower garden to hopefully keep the horses out. We hope it discourages the other critters from staying out as well.







I can't believe how much work Brian is putting in this year. It is a labor of love for sure.

April 7th was carrot and pea day!

On April 7th we planted our upper boxes with carrots and peas.

Here you can see Brian scraping the soil away so we can put the "seed tape" down.

 Next, you place your "seed tape" in the spot you want to plant it.

Then you cover it with dirt. Process done. (Of course you spread the dirt out and cover the "seed tape" completely.)

In square foot gardening you plant 9 peas per square. Here you can see the boards Brian made to help with the spacing of seeds. We have different boards for different numbers of seeds per square foot.

We always plant two seeds per hole. If two plants show up then we will snip one of them out after they are a little bit bigger. It is better to have to snip one out than not have any grow.

First seeds go in the ground!

On April 2, 2015 our first seeds got planted in the ground. It is an exciting day at our house. We planted green onion, leaf lettuce, and spinach. The green onion and spinach were planted using our "seed tape" we made a little while ago.

Brian is planting the green onion seed tape in this picture. You just bury it at the usual recommended depth for each plant. Can't wait to see if it will work!


 We also planted some of our regular onion bulbs on this day. We like to use a variety of onions so we planted some red, yellow, and white ones. We bought these onion sets at Home Depot. They come 100 to a box and we also bought some more at our local plant store, Anderson Seed & Garden. We are really hoping to be able to store many onions for use all winter. We will have to make sure we dry them out really good for storage.

Soil Testing

On March 20, 2015, we did some soil testing of our garden plots. We found that our upper garden (older one) was pretty healthy. It did need a little bit of nitrogen in some of the boxes because we hadn't really been rotating our crops like you are supposed to. However, the lower garden was very, very poor in nutrients and super high in pH (this combination will lead to no growth or very poor growth). So, with this in mind we have added the amendments to the soil and hope that it will be ready for this season of growth; if not it will be ready for next year. Remember, this year is a year of trial and error with our lower garden; anything that comes out of it is great!

Getting ready to test the soil from our garden.

Tomatoes and Peppers, OH MY!

On March 14, 2015 we planted a total of 50 pepper Plants! Holy Cow! We have jalapenos, carnival bell, long sweet, pepperoncini, Anaheim, and regular bell. There are a hot ones and mild ones. We love peppers at this house, especially in salsa and spaghetti sauce.

We also planted 48 tomato plants! We have Beefsteak and Super Sauce tomato varieties. The Super Sauce are Roma tomatoes that are supposed to grow up to 1-2 POUNDS a piece! We will have to wait and see about that.
The plants are taking over the house!

Picture of Baby Chickens

Ok, so that was totally dumb, that the picture wouldn't post with the previous post. Maybe this will give you a small idea of our small fluff balls.

Chicks

These are our new chicks.




We got them March 11, 2015. There were originally 4 Buff Orpingtons, 4 Red Rocks, and 4 Silver-Laced  Wyndottes. We had to replace a few from death and we finally decided on just having 11. Last year we culled our entire flock because they were old and were no longer laying eggs. They are obviously much larger now and we have moved them outside to the big coop. I have a corner of it fenced off for a couple more weeks and then they will have free run of the coop. Once it is warm, and they have all their feathers they will be able to go back and forth to the outside coop and run. That will be great!

We can't wait to have fresh eggs again in a couple more months. Yummy!!!