Weekly Garden Update #9 – Finally Getting Seeds in the Ground

In this week’s garden update, the weather and schedule finally cooperated, and we were able to get our third and fourth garden beds completely tilled. We were also able to put seeds in the ground. If you’ve been following our journey, you’ll know that our weather this spring has been brutal. After a long and harsh winter, spring started out cold. It then rained a lot and only recently began to dry out and be warm enough at night for sowing to be a possibility. Some of our seeds, such as mustard greens, were supposed to have been in the ground in early April, so we’re more than a month behind. However, on Saturday and Sunday, we were able to (mostly) get caught up.

We planted (and by we, I mean both of us on Saturday, but it was all Magz on Sunday) onions, carrots, beets, greens, and some flowers. Something I don’t think either of us expected was the difficulty of planning where everything should go in the garden. You have companion planting to think about to ensure that beneficial plants are placed near each other. We also want to succession plant some veggies like greens, beets, and carrots to ensure a harvest all season. That means not planting too much to start but instead reserving enough space to plant more in the coming weeks.

We also want to plant flowers in our garden beds to help control pests while simultaneously attracting pollinators. The plan is to have these flowers intermittently planted with our vegetables to create a garden that is both productive and beautiful.

Not all of our seeds are planted, nor have our seedlings been transplanted. We’re planning to wrap that all up over the next week. May 15th is typically the last frost date in our area, so the plan is to sow the rest of the seeds and transplant our starts in the days around that date.

What Else Has Been Going On?

In addition to directly sowing some seeds, we were quite busy this past week. We began the process of hardening off our transplants by taking them outside and exposing them to fresh air and sunshine. That will make the process of transplanting our starts much easier, as they’ll be less likely to experience root shock.

We also bought and received the fence that I wrote about in last week’s update. We ended up buying it from Amazon because, once again, none of the stores in our town had it in stock. We could have ordered it and had it shipped, but it would have taken nearly a week to get here. We’ll now need to figure out the style of post or stake we’ll use to attach the fence to the ground. Oh, and between everything else going on, the grass has been growing out of control, and keeping up with the mowing has been a struggle. I love our battery-powered mower, but it definitely has its drawbacks when the grass is really long.