I finally started hardening off tomatoes and peppers this week. Last year I decided to start fewer plants inside, and purchase more at the local greenhouse… but I ended up buying seeds anyway. It is just so hard to resist starting plants inside! I already put in all of the cauliflower, broccoli, cabbage, and kohlrabi – and seeded radishes and carrots. The rest of the garden should be seeded within the week, so all that’s left will be tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant.

They look pretty good; if the weather patterns hold most of these should be able to go into the ground next weekend. I do have a row cover and some fabric in case temperatures drop into the 30s later this May.

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The smell of young tomato leaves in mid-April is hard to beat. It’s funny how that smell can be so nauseating in September, yet delicious in spring.

If the weather patterns had mimicked 2010, these cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli, and Brussels sprouts seedlings would be long planted in the garden. But with temperatures barely above freezing, and snow predicted through the end of this week, the garden is doomed to have a late start this year. All I can do now is sit in the spare bedroom, gaze at my young vegetable plants, and dream of sunny days ahead.

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Last year I put up a flimsy wood fence to add some definition to my garden’s border. It barely survived the summer, so I wanted to think of something different (and more permanent).

I have been reading a lot of garden blogs this spring, and saw pictures of some great beds formed from concrete blocks. I decided to give it a try, so this year I am putting in two beds lined with the blocks at the front of my garden.

These will be planted with perennial herbs and flowers (mostly transplanted from other areas in our yard). I am also going to try growing strawberries and basil in the holes.

… Also, this post is coming at you from my WordPress for Blackberry App! I can sit in the garden and blog now – woohoo!

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I’ve been slowly working on ordering seeds for this year.

The envelope is already sealed on my order from Sandhill Preservation Center in Iowa.  I will post what I got when I plant it.  But I am excited to try the sweet potatoes I ordered from them.

I am still looking for a good paste tomato to plant.  I will also be trying out Stupice, which I ordered from Bountiful Gardens last year.  It is an early tomato that is supposed to produce throughout the season.  Most of my tomatoes are going to planted from seed outside.  Thats a blog post for another day…

I have also ordered some trees.  I have hazelnuts, chestnuts and hickories on order from Badgerset.  Jessi has ordered a scary amount of grapes to line our fence out front.  And I am planning on possibly getting a couple Northern Pecans and Oak trees from Oikos as well as some trees from the county conservation district and native plants from Morning Sky Greenery.  There is a lot of work I’d like to do, but there are limits to my time, attention span and cash so a lot of these plans will have to be put off.

There are a few more herbs I’d like to get as well, but other than that I am trying to keep everything down to a manageable size to do limits on my time and money.

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It’s that time of year again!

10 weeks until Minnesota’s average last frost. We like to put stuff out earlier than that if the weather permits. I have a lot of plans for the garden this year – including growing the flowers for our wedding this September! I’ll have to post more about that later. I also ordered 100 grape vines, and Chris ordered some nut trees so I’m sure this summer we will be busy planting.

There is a nice little nursery just down the road, so to save some time I am planning on just purchasing a lot of transplants from them. There are a few varieties that we just can’t pick up locally though: heirloom tomatoes, fancy peppers, funky-colored cauliflower… so I took out the shelves and grow lights and set everything up in our spare bedroom again.

There seems to be a lot of debate on using coconut fiber vs. peat moss as a seed starting medium. I read a few posts on gardening forums, and people have strong opinions about both – on which is the most environmentally friendly, and which performs better. I haven’t made a decision yet, but I did decide to put both to the test this year with our seedlings.

I picked up some Hoffman Seed Starter from Bachman’s. It is made of peat moss, vermiculite, and limestone. I also picked up some Burpee Eco-Friendly Concentrated Seed Starting Mix from Target, which is made of coconut fiber.

Half of the pots are filled with peat moss (the green pots in the picture above), and the other half with coconut fiber (yellow pots above). I prefer the consistency of the coconut fiber, and it seems to be better at both retaining moisture and draining than peat moss. We’ll just have to wait to see which one the plants prefer!

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I got a question on our facebook page from John about planting fruit trees in the Anoka Sand Plain.  My answer got too long so I am putting it here:

John I can tell you what I have done and plan to do.  take it with a grain of salt because we just moved here and just planted fruit trees this year…

compost:  i priced out compost from plaisted and the price was quite a bit higher than the municipal place in coon rapids. that might change if you were ordering larger quantities than i did.  if you go with them i’d ask plaisted if they have tested their compost and can send you the report. i also bought some greensand for micronutrients and water retention and rock phosphate for phosphorus.  I’m pretty sure fruit trees in the rose family like their phosphorus.

fruit trees:  from what i’ve read its not a good idea to get dwarfs in the cold windy sandy area we live in.  we ordered semi-dwarfs.  i had trouble finding the varieties i wanted locally, but getting them from a good local nursery would be ideal (if they have some brand name tag on them i assume they were brought in by the nursery and in that case I’d ask them where they were grown).  make sure to get disease resistant varieties.  our crabapple trees had some nasty apple scab this year.  i got one late ripening keeper and one early variety.

i wanted to get rid of the grass around our fruit trees.  it competes with their roots.   after mowing low around the area for a couple weeks i sheet mulched with compost, leaves, wood chips and cardboard this fall, but ideally this would be done along with planting.  i made sure not to mulch too high trees don’t like that, but keep in mind if sheet mulching it should shrink quite a bit over time.

this year we will plant nutrient accumulators, nitrogen fixing cover crops and beneficial insect attracting herbs and flowers under the fruit trees.  i will not be spraying our trees except for a an oily solution early in the spring (i found the recipe in The New Self-Sufficient Gardener).  the plants in the understory of the trees will be the pest management.  not sure if you have heard of this before it is based on the idea of apple tree guilds.

hope that helps – thanks!

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When I look out my office window, the first thing I see is a 2′ mound of snow, sparking from the fresh flakes that fell yesterday. But the seed catalogs have been coming in (we left for a week over the holidays, and came home to at least 10 new garden catalogs!), so we’ve been spending a lot of time talking about this year’s garden plans.

One of the things I love to do every winter is draw out my garden. You can click here to view the full sheet as a PDF, with some of the varieties I’m thinking about.

I want to expand my perennial herb beds, stretching them across two rows on either side of the arbor. I have catnip, sage, thyme, and chives in them right now. I also planted a lot of daisies in the beds last year, which I am planning to transplant this spring to the ends of each of the rows.

My aunt gave me a butterfly house for Christmas this year, so I am thinking of adding some butterfly-attracting perennials to the center of my garden, on either side of the main path. Or, I may put the house out by the fruit trees, since Chris has plans for adding some native plants to the “apple guild”.

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For Mother’s Day this year, I gave my mom a row in my garden.  She planted zucchini, carrots, turnips, kohlrabi, lima beans, beets … and left space for tomatoes and peppers.

We’ve had non-stop rain since then, so I’m sure her garden will grow!

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Two weeks later we finished spreading the compost and tilling the garden.

Jessi’s half is on the left; Chris’s half is on the right. Let the games begin!

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One long weekend, sunshine, and several shovels full of dirt turned the giant mounds of compost pictured in my last post into this:

We actually expanded the garden a bit this year, so the first step was renting a sod cutter, and removing more grass. Then we spread the compost, amended the dirt with lime, rock phosphate, and green sand … and Chris tilled! This is only half of the garden – there’s still another pile to be dealt with.

We got a second arbor, which I put up this weekend along with some sections of the fence. It’s getting there… I’m hoping to find time to dig out the rows in this half (“my garden”) this week and start planting next weekend. Chris already has one row in “his garden” planted.

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