It's almost time!

I've moved the seed starting setup inside the house now. It was just too cold in the garage. It took a while for me to do it as it seemed so final to change my daughter's room. And with one change after another it's time to move on.

So before we are even close to seed starting time-indoors at least, more on that later, it's onward and upward time!

Happy gardening,

Tessa

Accidental potato

Found this while moving a compost bed around-couldn't have grown better if I'd planned it!

Happy gardening,

Tessa

Winter harvesting

Just a quick update on what's going on in between family emergencies!

More yummy salad- this is just this week.

Happy New Year and happy harvesting!

Tessa

An Interesting Visitor

 

 

This little guy crawled on my daughter’s back while sitting on the couch- freaked her out, but not too much that she forgot to get a shot of him!

His tail is truly an electric blue. He is a type of lizard called a Skink- isn’t he cute?

 

Happy gardening,

Tessa

Busy, busy, busy!

 

 

So much to do, so little time. We all try to get as much done in a day as possible- often times it’s less than we’d like. It all takes time to establish a new yard and getting a foothold is a challenge. But little by little it’s all coming together.

The weather has finally started warming up- late this year (thanks a lot La Nina) and it just happened to be my first year growing anything. It is time to start moving the cool weather crops out and moving the warm ones in. Since I had an unexpected absence recently, I was a bit behind with sowing warm weather lettuce. I did get some sown as soon as I returned only to find that something had found them quite tasty in the nursery- which is, at present, in the garage.

 

These were sown in a 200 cell plug flat. Instead of tossing them I set the survivors in a bed far away from my crop area and hoped for the best- just in case the offenders were hiding in the soil, I didn’t want them finding everything else. So far there are some that are doing okay. So, back to the drawing board for the lettuce.

On the warm weather crop front I’ve sown some melon (2 kinds), squash (2 kinds), more chard and some other things like sunflowers, etc. I’ve purchased some lemon cukes to try this year and I’ll be sowing my green beans in long paper pots (or what I like to call my version of root trainers). I’ve decided to grow bush varieties of beans with all the wind we’ve had this year and I don’t expect that to change (thanks again La Nina). I didn’t really feel the need to have to run out there and save my trellis from being blown away- there has been quite enough of that with tunnel plastic and shade cloth!

A few of my tomatoes have buds on them- very surprising considering they were horribly neglected in my absence. They have really bounced back nicely. I gave them some extra TLC as they had purple leaf undersides- a phosphorus deficiency, no doubt. Now they look great. I’ve planted one out in the greenhouse bed. The labels were messed up too- but luckily I have 3 positive ids and 2 of them were the bigger tomatoes, so I could choose which ones should go in the greenhouse ground beds.

    

This tomato was given to me by my neighbor.              This is one I started from seed.

 

Peas are doing nicely-

 

Compost bin #1 is built, but not finished. I have to do the front and add some hardware cloth on the sides.

I worked on adding some more small in ground greenhouse beds-

   

The new grass area is looking very nice- Here is a before shot.

And after…

I really love what we’ve done so far…

 

Spring crops are continuing and starting to finish up- I’ll have a gap as I lost some replacements, but It’ll all work out.

I hope your days have been sunny and your harvests yummy!

 

Happy gardening,

Tessa