Monday, March 2, 2009

Starting our garden, ever so slowly

Spring is this month! How's that for a wake-up call?

I'm ready. Maybe not physically, but mentally, I can't wait for the 50-degree forecast for Thursday, particularly after it being a whopping 14 degrees on my way to the office today.

It's officially March, and despite my intentions of being motivated to buy additional seeds and the blueberry bushes for my yard, the catalog is still on the counter. Yes, despite my job description, at the end of the day, I'm a paper girl.

The good news is I'm slowly getting ready. Last night, we trucked off to Lowe's to get part one of our supplies for our garden this year - mostly lots of peat for our Indiana clay, but also a seed-starting tray with peat pellets for those few seeds that you should start indoors six to eight weeks prior to planting. And when they say here to plant around Mother's Day, that means we need to get going on this!

So this week, when it's mommy-kid time, we'll watch in amazement how those little peat pellets grow in water (because everything is amazing when you're three) and start those carrots and whatever else from my packets already on hand. The trick will be to protect these plants from an overenthusiastic gardener, her brown-thumb mommy and her pulling-up, grabbing-everything brother. Any brilliant ideas?

2 comments:

Carol Michel said...

I'm not sure how to protect the seedlings but I do suggest that you wait and direct sow the carrots in the garden once it warms up. I'd start some flowers or tomatoes or something like that inside this week.

Anonymous said...

We started our seeds in one of those peat pellet things almost 3 weeks ago. Within a few days, we had a few sprouts, and now some of our plants are over 3" tall! Not bad for a first time seed grower! Our only mishap came when the dog thought the plants (mostly herbs) smelled good & plucked one out from on top of the kitchen table. Luckily we caught him. The tray is now in the middle of the table, which is as dog-proof as possible in our house.

We're not supposed to plant anything here until April 15, which was re-enforced when we got an un-Memphian 8 inches of snow over the weekend, which still hasn't melted away. This isn't supposed to happen in the south!