Building a cold frame

Laurie came up with the excellent idea of building a cold frame out of rigid insulation to serve as a place to harden off our seedlings.

Max and Dan admiring the new cold frame.. from inside it

Loading it up

Loading it up... more!

All closed up

Gardens, flowers, seedlings, EVERYTHING.

Massive picture dump to update what we're up to.

Seedlings going strong - Kale is crazy leggy

Tomato seedlings - looking good

Pepper seedlings - small, but not bad

Flower seedlings for our wedding

Mulched berry patch

Mulched strawberry patch

New low-bush and mid-bush blueberries

Mulched raspberry patch

The big vegetable garden

Laurie's Scotch Elm

Pear tree in bloom

New basswood budding out

Pretty bluets

Lupine

Honeybee working dandelion

Green manure, Kale, and Blueberries

We're planning on seeding most of the expanded garden with cover crops/green manure this year to help prepare it for our rotation plans. To that end we bought alfalfa, red clover, and dutch white clover seeds. Very exciting, well, to us it is. :)

I also took a few minutes to get some Redbor and Winterbor Kale started.

Green manure seeds waiting to be planted

Newly started kale

Blueberries waiting to be mulched

Another seedling update...

Just another seedling update. :)

Tomato seedlings

Pepper seedlings

Gardening!

Laurie got the rest of the raspberries planted today and I did some work in the raised beds getting them ready for the cranberries and the rest of the strawberries.

The well-documented seedlings

New high-bush blueberries

New strawberry plant

New raspberries

View of the coop from the compost pile

First true leaves on the tomatoes!

We noticed tonight that we had our first true leaves on the tomato seedlings! Yay!

Seedling and garden update

Just a quick update on the seedlings and to record some progress clearing out last years tomato plants from the vegetable garden.

Seedlings are growing well, the new setup seems to be working!

We pulled the old tomato plants out of the garden

Seedling update

This morning when Laurie turned on the lights, we lost another bulb (a total of three for the season). We decided to try florescents instead since the incandescents seem to be drying the soil out too quickly and are more expensive to run. I picked up some fixtures and aquarium/plant bulbs at Home Depot, rigged them up to the shelf, and lowered the shelf to get more light directly on the seedlings. Hope these last longer!

Third incandescent bulb to blow this season

Take that - these should last!

Tomato seedlings still looking good

First seedling thinning

Thinning out all the tomato seedlings that are way too close together...

Changes to the seed starting setup

When we were visiting with Laurie's dad yesterday she noticed a metal rack in front of his barn that she thought would radically improve our seed starting setup. It's an old metal seed rack from her dad's feed store and it really does work a lot better than our old beat up saw horse! Not to mention it gets the lights up off the soil a bit more, hopefully helping reduce our problem with the soil drying out so quickly.

Thanks to Max for the new rack!

New setup!

Update on the pepper seedlings

First pepper seedling!

First pepper up, a Jalapeno even!

Seed starting update

This is what the seed starting setup looks like today, an old sawhorse and three reflector lights with full-spectrum incandescent bulbs. With the bulbs at this height the seedlings are getting plenty of heat and light, but the soil is drying out faster than is practical to deal with. We're having to mist the seedlings once or twice an hour to keep the surface soil from drying out. The tomatoes are loving the heat and we're hoping the peppers make an appearance soon!

The current seed starting setup

Tomato seedlings going strong!

Tomatoes popping up everywhere

The tomatoes are really starting to pop up, nothing from the peppers yet.

Tomato seedlings popping up everywhere!

First tomato seedling!

The first seedling of spring is always exciting!

First tomato seedling!

Starting seeds

We started our tomatoes and peppers today! Yay for the start of the gardening season! The plan is to try to have them out by the beginning of June this year to try to be able to harvest more of the tomatoes before the first frost. We've also cut back to 30 tomatoes instead of the 60 the we planted last year.

We've planted:

• 12 Rose (organic/indeterminate)
• 12 Roma VF (determinate)
• 8 Oregon Spring (organic/determinate)
• 16 Ace Hybrid Bell Peppers
• 8 Early Jalapeno (organic)
• 4 Joe's Long Cayenne