This Girl Gardens

Sunday, April 28, 2013

The Unexpected? April 12 Snowstorm

I could say that a Spring snowstorm is unexpected here in New England, but it isn't! Thus, when I had cleaned out and prepared a couple of the raised beds, and then made my garden plan, I expected that I would be planting them in a couple of days! Wrong! On April 12, we received about 1/2" of snow!

Basically, I retreated to the warm, cozy kitchen and with a cup of hot tea, I satisfied my gardening urge by perusing the garden seed catalogs and sorting through the seeds I had already purchased.

It seemed like the only sensible thing to do!

Thursday, April 11, 2013

Planning....

I have always tried to make a garden plan, usually with some graph paper and a pencil. And I'm really comfortable doing it that way, but this year I decided to try something different.

One of my favorite seed companies, Territorial Seed Company in Cottage Grove, Oregon, has an online garden planner available. There are a series of tutorial videos to help one learn to create a garden plan, and one can be just about as detailed as one wishes. Other gardeners from around the world have uploaded their garden plans! One can peruse those plans and get some inspiration for a garden.

I am not going to spend a lot of time explaining how to use the garden planner program, as the excellent video tutorials do a great job of that. I do want to mention a few features that really make the program valuable. To get started, I entered my zip code into the garden planner, and it automatically calculated the last frost date in the spring and first frost date in the fall for my location. After outlining the garden beds, I could click on the vegetables I intend to plant and "drag" them (with my mouse) over to the garden bed where I then planted them. "Grabbing" the corners, with the mouse, I could enlarge one plant to an entire row. I could even enter vegetable variety names. The program automatically calculates how many of each plant will fill that row. Opening up the "supplies" list reveals a list of all the vegetables that I have "planted" in my plan. On the right side of the list is a graph that shows when vegetable seeds should be planted indoors, when to plant outdoors and when the harvest will start! Pretty cool!

Here is my first plan. After I created this one, I went back into the program and refined it by adding vegetable variety names. I also added more crops in different months.

The garden planner is free for 30 days. It can be found here www.territorialseed.com . Just don't forget to save your plan so that you can refer back to it. Also you can upload it to the web, so that others can see your garden plan and become inspired!

Wednesday, April 10, 2013

Is It Spring.... YET???

Never mind the groundhog... we have had a few sunny days and that always starts to wake up the gardening urge that may have been dormant for the winter... and it does feel like Spring! It is hard to believe that we had seven inches of snow fall two weeks ago!

Then, March went out like a lion. We have had quite a bit of wind and some rain showers, so the grass is starting to green up. However, the soggy ground has made it difficult to actually work in the garden.

A brief survey of the garden shows there is a lot of clean up to be done in the garden beds.

A few tulips are coming up!

At least a few of the strawberry plants that I put in last Spring survived the winter!

I definitely have my work cut out for me!

Starting the Garden - 2013

Dear Friends,

I have been lagging behind in starting my garden blog and a number of you have inquired about it! I am so humbled by your request! I had no idea that you were enjoying it as much as I was. I am posting this to initiate the 2013 year. It is not much of a blog post, but will be followed shortly with more content!

Thank you so much,

Stephanie