Big, fluffy snowflakes fell yesterday and it felt as though Mother Nature was trying to remind me that it is not yet Spring and not yet planting season. Being in Ohio, our garden doesn’t even get planted until May and this is February, after all.
But tomatoes and peppers and eggplant and such need to be started now if we’re to have nice, healthy plants to transplant come May. And so it begins. The start of the 2013 gardening season. The soil and seeds and trays were brought up from the basement and seeds were planted with love before being gently tucked away with a heat mat and a grow light.
With that chore out of the way I took some time to write a bit in the garden journal. Nothing fancy, just plans and ideas for this year’s garden along with the varieties I started and the varieties I’ve ordered. I’d eventually like to get into the habit of tracking how well plants grow/produce, how many pounds we’ve harvested in a season, pictures, and more. For now I’m content with just some quick little notes.
The map of the garden is drawn up for this year, too. Last year we decided to get a little more serious with how we organized it and set it up in a way that we could do crop rotation. The garden is divided into four quadrants, with 3 ‘beds’ in each. Last year the tomatoes were planted in quadrant #1, so this year they shift to quadrant 2 in a clockwise fashion. Peppers were planted in quadrant 3, so they’ll move to quadrant 4.
I have a feeling the way we have it set up means a lot of ‘wasted’ space – we left a decent amount of room between the ‘beds’ to allow for walkways for us to get in and be able to get to the harvests. I often wish I could spend a week with someone wiser than myself at this gardening thing so I could spend as much time as I can helping with their garden and, subsequently, learning how I should be doing things. Anyone out there willing to take a struggling gardener under your wing in exchange for an extra set of hands to help around the garden?
