Starting Seeds This Season?

I keep going back and forth on whether I am going to start seeds inside this year or not. I would rather not but we have such a short growing season, the list of what I can't grow is huge. I am still undecided but that can't last much longer - spring is coming!

If you are planning on starting seeds, there is a good article that contains a simple seed starting plan at Organic Gardening. It also has how to instructions for making your own seed starting mix and newspaper seedling pots.

Garden Time Saving

 
I came upon Organic Gardening's 11 Time Saving Tips and was going to post it here. Then, as I was reading, I realized that most of us have already heard we need to make a plan, pile on mulch and keep tools handy and close to the garden. The idea that was new for me was a good one though. It was wash your harvest in the garden. What a great idea! Saves bringing in all that dirt to the kitchen. They suggest you collect your harvest in an old laundry basket which will act as a strainer in your garden when you hose it down. This is definitely a great garden idea I am going to use. Thank you, Organic Gardening. It is always great to find new ideas I hadn't heard before - especially if they are going to save me time!

The other tip I found interesting was one I first discovered in Ruth Stout's Gardening Without Work. The tip was build soil in place. The idea is that you compost between rows all spring/summer and then dig in after harvest in the fall. Ruth advocated just planting in the between rows next year and build the soil where the vegetable rows were this year, next year. Ruth's garden philosophy, as advertised, was for the Aging, the Busy and the Indolent. I wish I would have met her. Her book is well worth the read and was published when she was 76 years old. She was a wealth of information and I have used many of her methods in my flower gardens. I must confess however, that I do not employ them all because I am rather fussy about the look of things in my flower gardens and no work does mean a bit of a messy looking garden. Beautiful, big, healthy flowers but messy overall with informal composted paths. This year, I plan to use all or most of her methods in my new kitchen garden. In my vegetable patch, paths are not required other than to walk on to weed and what it looks like is secondary to the harvest quality and size it is producing. Ruth and I are going to be great friends this season. I think I will go pull out her book now.

Common Seed Terminology

Click to link through to an article on the Canadian Gardening website. If you are planning on planting seeds this year, there is helpful information on common seed terminology.

February To Do List from Organic Gardening

Click to link through to February "to do" list from Organic Gardening. It is organized by zone.

Technique: How to Repair a Hose

Click to link through to a good "how to" on the Organic Gardening website. If you are like me, there are lots of hoses around to repair. When the weather turns nicer for longer, I may have to make a day of it!

Garden Map - Bird Sanctuary, Fence side of path...

All areas of my garden have gone through big changes this year. Normally, I update my old maps of each area, marking what winter-killed and what was moved in or out. This year I had to draw new maps because marking the old would have made them unreadable and I like to keep the old maps legible so if anything comes up down the road that I don't expect, I can usually figure out what it is by checking what has been planted in that spot over the years. A good example of that is my new poppy in the Sun Garden. It is either 'Chocolate Ruffle' or 'Miss Piggy' because those were the only poppy planted there. However, both were planted there in 2009 and this is the first I am seeing of either. Just waiting for it to bloom now. Today I finshed moving and planting everything I had that was to go in the Bird Sanctuary on the fence side of the path. Once that was done, I turned the sprinkler on it and made a new map (above). This is a shade garden and includes my hosta garden. Although I have hosta strewn throughout the garden, this spot contains the largest part of my collection. I love hosta. Also here are wood violets, spirea 'Snowmound', solomon's seal, columbine in three varieties, phlox, lily-of-the-valley and lamium 'Herman's Pride' that I brought back from Linda's last year. The columbine patch was added today and the ostrich fern patch was moved from Judy's backyard this year as well. I have moved a few hosta around in this area this year and added hosta 'Carol' but the rest of the plants are all returning from last year. I will have to do an overlay for tulips and daffodils if I put any here but there are only one or two spots that get enough sun for them. I may not plant any here. I dug hosta 'Carol', 'Wolverine', bonus dark, 'Dream Weaver', 'Christmas Candy' and purple/yellow columbine to send to Linda today as well. It was a great day for gardening even if it was a little hot at +32!

Gardening by Spreadsheet

Surely Danielle and I are the only gardeners who think that creating a spreadsheet to keep track of our plants is fun.  We're definitely both collectors and organizers, and that seems to be how we garden too.

I fear I may have started it.  When Danielle was coming to visit in July, she sent me a list of all the dahlia tubers she was bringing to me along with the link to Sids Dahlia (sidsdahlias.com).  Now Sid has a great listing on his website and I copied and pasted it into a spreadsheet - complete with tiny thumbnails.  It seemed the easiest way to figure out where I was going to plant my new 27 tubers.

While Danielle was here visiting, we started a list of all the plant divisions she was going to take back home with her.  Since she also needed a lot of info so that she could plan her planting, a spreadsheet seemed in order.  We meticulously updated it every evening with details about zone and size and sun requirements.  It was a bonus for me because, with over a hundred perennials listed, it's a good start on my complete list - a winter project.

Since returning home, Danielle has been updating her spreadsheet with all her plants and also cataloguing her plants by picture files on Flickr.  Sounds like a great idea and I've been waiting for her to get hers done and work out the kinks before I start mine.  It'll be fun to bring my garden alive in the winter while sorting through all the pictures - but maybe it won't wait till winter.