Thanks, greeneyes. I’m pretty excited about that parsley and the other little green babies!
Are you really going to hold out til May to plant???
I thought about lettuce, but after my disasters last year, I just can’t bring myself to try them again yet. I have purchased several different varieties of seed that supposedly are more heat tolerant, but I’m already getting a pretty full dance card! Just curious, would lettuce be a shady kind of plant?
Great idea about hitting up a restaurant for coffee grounds. Bet you can get some of those! I haven’t committed to working on an experimental compost heap yet, but I’m working my way toward it! It would be so simple to once a week get a few of them to put on a pile.
I usually plant my lettuce in late September and then cover it and harvest it during the winter when we get an occasional nice day. Then I don't even have to plant spring lettuce. I have the plants thinned out from winter harvest, and they grow so much slower that crowding is not an issue.
By the time normal planting comes around, the lettuce already has a head start, and good roots, so the spring cold and variable temps don't bother it. It lasts till about mid June.
So I plant some lettuce Mid May where it will get afternoon shade, and have lettuce during the rest of the summer and fall from that.
Yes, lettuce will appreciate the shade when the full heat of summer hits, so I guess you could call it shady.
Our extension service advises May to 1st week of June for many of our “summer veggies”. I have found that starting tomatoes in April with an eye to transplanting in May or 1st week in June works pretty well.
Last year May was more like April and a lot of my summer stuff failed due to the damp, wet, and cool weather. I had to replant the stuff at the end of May and up until June 15.
I don't like double planting/failure.
So this year I am going to make sure the warm weather is really here before I put out all that effort. So far, April is feeling more like the first week of normal March or maybe even the end of February.
Indoors is it for a while I'm afraid. Even temp of around 70 degrees, regular watering at much less effort. When the weather is nice, I'd rather just plant in the ground, but it's just not nice.
It's really simple to put stuff in a milk jug or coffee can under the sink, and dump it once a week onto a compost heap too. The main thing is to have lots of air for the heap.
I bought one of those composters that looks like a tall trash can for 100 bucks. It has lots of air spaces every 3 inches. It's about 4 feet tall. Has a door on the side at the bottom that you can pull up to get the finished compost from the bottom.
So once a week or more often if the mood strikes, I dump the compost and throw a bunch of leaves or shredded paper on top of it. Dump a pot of dirt in there now and then too.
It never really smells, because of the air circulation. When you close up a container, that's when you get nasty smells, due to anaerobic bacteria.
Now you could take an old five gallon bucket and drill plenty of air holes in it and use that for a composter. When it's full, Put the lid on securely. Let it be in the sun and lay it down and let the kids roll it around a bit to keep it churned.
Lots of containers can be used for compost. And there's lots of ways to do composting that I have tried.
In the fall, I sometimes just dig a hole at one end of the garden, and dump the milk jug of stuff in it throw in a handful of leaves, and put the dirt back on top. Then just work my way up to the other end of the bed that way. It'll finish up before my composter does that's for sure.
We have several areas where we just made a big round circle of chicken wire and threw in all the leaves, and some small twigs, remainder of plants that been harvested, and pulled up for a followup second crop, and stuff for yard compost.
Those we locate in a space where we'd like to have a garden. When the yard waste is fully composted, then we get it ready to plant and that's how we expand our garden plots. Eventually, I guess we'll run out of room for that, but then we'll just let each garden plot take a turn at being the yard compost pile.