Scored some MG garden soil 2 cu ft. for 1.50 today. How’s that for a 2021 start?
My gardening dreams always start with how to heat the future greenhouse without breaking the bank. Then i go back to sleep.
Surprisingly,. my garden has made a reappearance from our almost 4 feet of snow. The warm temperatures and rain we got over Christmas has done away with the majority of it.
Have almost all of my seeds. Bought more steel rods to construct 10 trellises in all. They work like a dream for peas, beans cucumbers. I throw a net over it so everything can cling. They save a lot of space.
Am going to try a trellis for a kind of winter squash called Honeynut. These are small butternut type...serves 1 or 2. Even sweeter than butternut.
In a couple months, the daffodils will begin to emerge. Excited!! First time we planted them in our little community garden.
The Garden/workshop/storage Shed now has 4 walls and a floor on top of the basement/root cellar. Next week the roof, sub-floor, and maybe doors and windows.
Several seed catalogs are here. We bought so many extra last year, that we will not need near as many this year.
We here in the Seattle area have still not had a hard frost.
My sweet peas are still blossoming although since I tried to get them I. Very late I only got a few peas off them before the nights got down to the low 30s.
I get flowers but they bear no fruit.
I am refusing to whack em down since these are the only flowers going right now...hahah.
If we don’t get a hard frost soon I think my camelia bush will start blossoming in about a month only to see then frozen off at the stem when the hard frost does come.
That’s right! Outside: I noticed that some of the Dutch Iris bulbs I planted in late November are sending up green shoots already. Still have a few more to plant, as well as a few daffy bulbs. Indoors: Sowed lettuce seeds and planted a few more Dutch Iris bulbs. Ordered seeds from Botanical Interests. I’m ready for warmer weather so I can really get started! Happy New Year to all in the group.
So true... Yesterday - I thought ‘Hey, it’s January - my gardening vacation is almost over - time to get busy with the 2021 vegetable plan.”
Seed companies are still being hit hard. Baker Creek shut down their website temporarily. They said between the high order volume, and the staff shortages due to people being quarantined, they just couldn’t keep up.
Normally, I spend weeks going through the catalogs, making a list of everything I’ve marked, checking variety names to see which catalog has the best price for each variety, culling the list until it fits my budget, etc, until I finally order around February. This time around, I’ve been ordering a little recklessly. When Adaptive Seeds unlocked their page and started accepting orders, I got my order in immediately. Same with Cultivariable back in the fall. I’ve been watching certain varieties at Baker Creek, but those were still showing “out of stock”.
I’m in the process of setting up my Seedwise seller account. I’ll probably only have a couple things listed, but one of them will be the Bigger Better Butternut squash. I don’t know exactly how much seed I have yet, because we’re still eating them. Roughly half the crop is left, and shows no signs of deterioration yet. Those are excellent keepers! I’m curious to see how many manage to last the full year that Carol Deppe described, and how sweet they are by that point.
Some exciting projects for this coming year. A plant breeder on the Permies.com forum has promised to send me some landrace breadseed poppy seeds. He has a patch that self-sows, and is aggressive enough to compete with the weeds. He pretty much just harvests the ripe pods, and the plants do everything else on their own. I’m hoping they’ll do the same here.
On the same forum, a bunch of people are brainstorming ideas for an automated biochar-maker that works with crop debris. I have 10 acres (part tillable and part soon-to-be orchard) that I’d like to amend with biochar. But, that’s a LOT of biochar, and I don’t have a lot of wood. What I do have is a ton of crop waste, like chaff and empty bean shells. I’ve been making tiny amounts of biochar from that, but an automated burner would be so much easier!
Stay tuned :)
I feel the NEED for SEED!