What a year
The last time I posted here, the world had not completely gone to the dogs yet.
This year, I decided to grow everything in my garden from seed. The new thing for me was growing flowers from seed.
Another thing I decided was to start all my seeds outside. Years ago, I started my seeds indoors under grow lights and on top of heat pads. It was a complete success but it took a lot of space inside the house. So this year, I went with Winter Sowing where you put your seeds inside an empty milk jug out in the middle of the Winter and wait for the temperature outside to warm up in the Spring for your seeds to sprout. The main advantage of doing this is that your plants will be cold hardened as a matter of course.
It all worked like a charm.
That is until my new puppy managed to get in the cage and destroyed half my seedlings and pulled EVERY tag from the remaining ones so I had no idea what was what. Fine. Puppies will be puppies and I should have done a better job of securing the cage.
Stoically I went on. Then, the starlings descended like a plague of locusts and devoured most of my seedlings. It was like a scene from the movie The Birds. They particularly loved my pepper seedlings.
At the end, I managed to rescue a dozen tomato plants and half that many pepper plants. I grew a few onions halfway (they only got so big) and managed to get a few black beans plants to come up. The peas were a success because they came up before the wild life was active.
Not everything was a bust. I did managed to grow Zinnias from seed.
I grew some sunflowers and a couple of Milkweeds that are still growing. Somehow I managed to grow some other flowers:
For sure my whole take on growing plants has changed. For health reasons I switched to a plant-based diet back in early May. Right away I realized that one cannot live on salads alone. I needed calories: potatoes, legumes, rice etc.
Coincidentally, I have .36 acres of backyard and I love growing veggies. I planted some potatoes in containers:
The picture above is the harvest from one container. I have decided that either I need to plant 20 containers every year or grow the potatoes in the ground in a section of the yard. The point is, I need more potatoes so I can eat potatoes for as long as I can during the year. In that vein, my goal is to be able to grow all the potatoes, carrots, legumes, and rice that I will need. It's all planned in my mind. Including a root cellar somewhere.
Last, for my birthday, I got a green house. That is, it was ordered on my birthday. As it is, COVID has delayed production of them and now it has been back ordered and it will get here when it gets here. Hopefully I'll have it to put together before next Spring. I will try to post more often now and next year, things will get wild.
Thank you for stopping by.
This year, I decided to grow everything in my garden from seed. The new thing for me was growing flowers from seed.
Another thing I decided was to start all my seeds outside. Years ago, I started my seeds indoors under grow lights and on top of heat pads. It was a complete success but it took a lot of space inside the house. So this year, I went with Winter Sowing where you put your seeds inside an empty milk jug out in the middle of the Winter and wait for the temperature outside to warm up in the Spring for your seeds to sprout. The main advantage of doing this is that your plants will be cold hardened as a matter of course.
It all worked like a charm.
That is until my new puppy managed to get in the cage and destroyed half my seedlings and pulled EVERY tag from the remaining ones so I had no idea what was what. Fine. Puppies will be puppies and I should have done a better job of securing the cage.
Stoically I went on. Then, the starlings descended like a plague of locusts and devoured most of my seedlings. It was like a scene from the movie The Birds. They particularly loved my pepper seedlings.
At the end, I managed to rescue a dozen tomato plants and half that many pepper plants. I grew a few onions halfway (they only got so big) and managed to get a few black beans plants to come up. The peas were a success because they came up before the wild life was active.
Not everything was a bust. I did managed to grow Zinnias from seed.
I grew some sunflowers and a couple of Milkweeds that are still growing. Somehow I managed to grow some other flowers:
For sure my whole take on growing plants has changed. For health reasons I switched to a plant-based diet back in early May. Right away I realized that one cannot live on salads alone. I needed calories: potatoes, legumes, rice etc.
Coincidentally, I have .36 acres of backyard and I love growing veggies. I planted some potatoes in containers:
Last, for my birthday, I got a green house. That is, it was ordered on my birthday. As it is, COVID has delayed production of them and now it has been back ordered and it will get here when it gets here. Hopefully I'll have it to put together before next Spring. I will try to post more often now and next year, things will get wild.
Thank you for stopping by.
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