Adventures in Gardening - Planting The Seeds

Summer Food starts in the Winter.

We are so excited for the start of Spring and Summer!!  Grilling, Sunshine, Warmth, maybe our yard will dry out, and that means no more muddy pups. To make this Spring even more exciting, we are starting a garden.  For Christmas, I bought Amy a cool light plant stand to start the seeds and for us to have some fun gardening adventures.

Starting our Garden is Exciting and Fun

There is nothing better than picking a nice juicy Cherokee Purple Tomato, Jalapeños, and fresh Basil.  Then, put them on top of a Bagel with a little cream cheese, salt, and pepper.  This has to be one of the best sandwiches in the world.  It is addictive!  I mean, you'll wake up thinking about this sandwich, especially if you have fresh bagels.  I can't wait!!!!   Yesterday, we took our first steps to starting the garden.  We put together the plant stand and planted the seeds.  It only took about 15 minutes to put the stand together. It's not like we bought it from Ikea!!!!  The directions weren't great, but it was pretty straightforward.  We only had to take the bottom bar off twice.  It's a good thing we didn't open the wine before we put the stand together.

Starting the Seeds

The first thing we needed to do was to open a bottle of wine.  Wine is essential to any great garden!!  Then, we had to figure out how many tomatoes and peppers did we want.   It's almost impossible to get good hot peppers here, and we love spicy food, so we had to start several different pepper plants.

Even though I grew up on a dairy farm, we didn't grow a vegetable garden except for Sweet Corn.  Everything we planted was with big tractors and equipment.  After my Dad sold the dairy farm, my parents moved to a house with 5 acres.  Of course, retirement was not what he really wanted.  He put in a garden that was about 1 ½ Acres, and he still helped others with their framing.  My dad grew a huge variety in his garden of potatoes, corn, tomatoes, cabbage, green beans, peas, and so many other things.  Of course, being the great person he was, he gave all the neighbors big baskets of veggies.  I still don't know how he did so much. There is no way our Garden is going to be anything close to his, but we are going to have fun!  And we will be thinking about him a lot.

Adventures in Gardening

Yes, we bought 10 different hot peppers.  Some we had never heard of before.  We are going to have fun coming up with new recipes to use all the peppers.  Our new adventures in gardening are just another fun way to change our lifestyles.

We also went a little overboard and got six different types of Tomatoes.  Our favorite tomatoes are Cherokee Purple and small cherry tomatoes.

We mixed water into the soil to give it the perfect amount of moisture - not too dry, not too soggy. We want our seeds to grow healthy and strong, so we made sure the soil was damp but not too wet. When it comes to planting, it's important to keep things balanced! To make things even easier, we got biodegradable pots for our plants. This way, when they're ready to be transplanted outside, we can simply pop the whole pot into the ground. It's our little way of helping the environment, too.

We put a couple of seeds in each pot.  There are so many leftover seeds.  Why do you think they put 50 seeds in each package?  As much as we use Habanero peppers, I still can't imagine how many peppers we would have at the end of summer if we planted all of these seeds.  And I'm sure our neighbors would not like Habaneros.   We're just going to figure out how to save the seeds for next year.

Homemade Greenhouse

One of the things we didn't realize when starting seeds is the pots need to be covered to keep the heat in.  The light stand doesn't get used until the plants start to sprout, which takes 7 to 10 days.  This is a picture of Amy listening to the plants growing.  Yes, she had one too many glasses of wine!!!

We decided not to purchase plastic covers for our plants, so we thought of using Saran Wrap to protect them instead. We will observe the plants over the next few days to see if this method works effectively. Amy, I'm sure, will continue to monitor the plants for any changes.

Spring is in the Air

We have never started our garden from seeds before.  Usually, we purchase the plants.  We will still buy some plants like basil and other herbs.  The seeds we purchased will give us plants that we can't find at the local nursery.  Well, except for the Jalapeño and Serrano peppers.  I can't tell you how excited we are about this garden.  The worst part is that it's going to be at least 120 days before the first Tomato, Jalapeño, and basil bagel.  We will keep posting about our garden adventures.  It's going to be fun.  And we are going to have a lot of opportunities to drink wine and garden.  

Let us know in the comments below if you are growing a garden, and share your adventures in gardening.  What other fun adventures are you looking forward to this Spring and Summer?