We bought some giant pots this year, so we felt comfortable planting a few things a little early. So far we’ve planted 8 pots:
2 x Eggplant
2 x Jalapeno
2 x Habanero
2 x Poblano
Hopefully the pots are big enough that the roots won’t run out of room to grow before we have a chance to plant them in the spring.
I’m still hoping we can find some Cayenne Pepper seeds. I’m surprised we haven’t seen any. Also we still need seeds for dry beans (black beans, pinto beans, etc.) and the fat eggplants. We may need to special-order some of those. Giant Pots
We’re not messing around this year. I got so upset with the tiny seed starting sets we had last year that I refused to buy them this year. In fact, I super-sized just about everything. I’m hoping it gives the starts enough room to grow roots unencumbered this year. I guess we’ll soon find out.
The garden supplies are just starting to show up in the stores, but we’ve already been to IFA and Smith’s to see what we could find. This is what we have so far:
And if that’s not enough to convince you that we’re not messing around. It’s still February and I planted a few seeds today! Maybe that just means I’m crazy, or a little too excited for the upcoming season… or maybe I just have too much time on my hands. No matter which one it is, I think it’s going to be a great year.
We had some top soil delivered this week. We just put it down on top of the existing weeds. It looks good now, but the fact that we didn’t kill or remove the weeds first may come back to bite us later. In the mean-time, we planted the rest of the starts, a bunch of squash seeds, and some new decorative plants we picked up at a local nursery. This year’s crop is entirely planted now!
We had great success with some pole beans we planted a few years ago, even though we didn’t get around to planting until very late in the season. This year I wanted to plant those same beans again, but the bag of beans is really old. I didn’t want to plant them and not know if they were going to grow, so I decided to sprout them inside before planting them.
This is an experiment. I don’t know how well it will work.
When it was snowing outside, I soaked some bean seeds for about 8 hours (while I slept). In the morning, I drained the water and put a paper towel in the bowl below the beans. I covered the bowl with plastic wrap, poked a few holes, and waited for the beans to sprout. They did sprout, but they also got pretty stinky along the way. Maybe my beans were too old, maybe I kept them too wet or too dry. I don’t know, but I do know that about half of them sprouted, and I planted them. None of them have emerged from the ground yet, so this may still be a total failure. In case that happens, Charmaine planted a few rows of beans seeds for planting this year, and not sprouted inside. They are the control group.
I hope they all work, but even if they don’t, it’s been a fun experiment.
It’s May 19th. The main area of the garden is done. It’s amazing. Charmaine worked outside most the day and got all the rest of the beds planted. I took a few minutes to build what I call a “climbing gym” for the cucumbers. Garden View
Obviously, we’re not done with planting yet. In fact, despite having more than 70 pepper plants in the ground, we’re not even half way through the peppers… and that’s after discarding almost half the starts earlier this year. I think it’s safe to say we’ve over done it.
