Spring IS Coming--Right?

Whew! I just got back from a two week trip to visit family in Virginia. Spring is starting to peek its' little head out there already.  As my kids and my nephews and I walked through the woods with my Dad, I could see sprigs of green starting to grow out of the dead, dead ground. Here where I live, it's still dead, dead and snow covered, but today was pretty and 50 degrees. I can see Spring coming soon -- after a few more rounds of snow.

So, Spring is on my mind. I've bought some seeds, and have a desire to buy  more, but am pretty sure I have enough already. Probably too many. I bought a mini greenhouse this past weekend, and can't wait to set it up, but my house needs to get back in shape first. I'm saying that I can't set up the greenhouse until the house is picked up.

The garage is full of stuff to take to the local thrift store. It needs to be sorted and boxed and loaded up and unloaded. yee ha!

I just bought a circular saw on Amazon. It should be here soon, and then I have more Square Foot Garden Boxes to make and with any luck a sandbox for the kids.

I'd REALLY like to fence some of the back yard so I can let the kids go outside while I stay INSIDE getting stuff done in peace. It's a foreign concept, but one that I'd like to try. Or, so that I could concentrate on my garden stuff for 10 minutes without constantly looking up to see if the toddler has run away.

I want to find a few sources of compost that are free. There are enough places around here with livestock that they should have compost I can get. Crossing my fingers!!  The new SFG boxes are going to need to be filled with Mel's Mix, and I really don't want to have to buy the compost but my own compost isn't ready yet, that I know of. I have NEVER flipped it. Ooh, but that's another thing I am going to do.

I need to build a pallet compost bin system and move all my current compost into it. The new location is going to be about 50 feet from the old location. Doesn't that sound fun?

My front yard is, well, um, ugly. The house has very very little curb appeal. I want to create a flower bed in this dead zone of deadness up near the house. Shady and no natural rainfall (gutters divert it).

The other option for the deadzone is to plant a mass of pumpkins there. It would be green and leafy for the summer and the pumpkins would make nice decorations for fall. Tempting and easy, but not a long-term solution to the ugliness.  The pumpkins have to grow somewhere though, so maybe the side of my house that no one plays in and I like to ignore?  Wait, too near a sidewalk. Kids might steal the pumpkins. They worked well last year, but I'm putting the new compost bin system where I had them  last year.

Right now I'm going to go put away a ton of laundry. If that's done fast enough I'm going to work on a spreadsheet to figure out when I need to plant my seeds in my greenhouse. It's gotta be soon? right? According to a really cool website that lets you search for frost dates by zipcode, I'm going to use May 22 as my last frost date, and my frost-free growing season is supposedly 141 days.  I really thought it was more like 90. Interesting!




Of course, I painted the wooden section of  my house last fall, but half of it only got one coat of paint, so I need to do ALL of it again. yippy skippy.

Belated Earth Day post, Recycled seed starting cups

Happy Belated Earth Day. Sorry, I was obsessed with sewing and cleaning yesterday and failed to blog this.


Many years ago, around 8th grade maybe, I volunteered at a traveling daycamp as a Cadette Girl Scout. One of the camp projects was something like this:

So, I've thought for years that egg shells would be great for starting seeds. As a "square foot gardener" I also wanted to try growing seeds in vermiculite.

Here's how I have started my plants for now:

First, rather than buying those special seed starting mini greenhouses, I used the plastic clam shells that baked goods come in from the grocery store. I filled them with vermiculite and spread seeds around. Then I watered and closed the clam shell, gave it a week or two, depending on the seeds and: 

The  nice thing about these clam shells is that you can divide them with paper, and draw a line over the top of the whole thing with magic marker, and label the sections

While those were growing, I prepared my "planters." This winter I saved a few dozen egg shells. I prepared them by poking holes in the bottoms with a pin:

I did this to a lot of them:

Then I filled them with potting soil and transplanted the seedlings from the vermiculite to the egg shells:

Now, to put them in the ground, I'll just squeeze the shell and put in a hole.

In the picture above, you'll see that some of the eggs are topped off with vermiculite. The eggs are growing tomatoes and I want good roots. Knowing that tomato plants put out roots from the stem if buried, I covered them up as high as I could with vermiculite, and am seeing if it makes a difference in plant growth.

Another thing you can see above is that in the back, there's a cardboard egg carton with more seedlings, but not in shells. This is another experiment, also doing the vermiculite top-off experiment.

Before some science teacher comments that there are too many variables to call it an experiment, well, I know. There's no true control group. Luckily, this isn't a science project, it's a kitchen project for my garden, so I'm ok with it not being done "correctly."

The tomato varieties are Bloody Butcher, Yellow Pear, and some sort of hybrid cherry tomato that's supposed to grow so many it looks like bunches of grapes.