Garden Status for 4th Week of March 2013

Not much has changed in the outdoor garden, but for the grow box we transplanted all the tomatoes into their individual cups. Now since we have more tomato plants than we can use does anyone want to purchase a plant? You’ll have to be in the Seattle area but for $2.50 you get a nice plant. Send me an email at thecoldwetnorthwestgardener@gmail.com before May 2013.

Garden Status for 3rd Week of March, 2013

So with spring finally starting to poke through I decided to look on how the overwintering plants were doing. The first on my stop was the garlic which we received from a friend about a year ago. We were given a multitude of sets in the middle of the growing season so when I tried to carefully plant them, they appeared to all perished in early fall. So it was a pleasant surprise to find them sprouted this year, though they are bunched too close for good bulb development.

Garden Status 2nd Week of March 2013

So this week’s update begins with trouble for the pumpkin plants. Due to the grow box running out of space and pumpkins being mature enough to handle colder weather, I decided to move them out of the box in the garage.

Garden Status 1st Week of March

So the grow box has been up and running for a little over a month now, and the tomatoes and pumpkins are doing well. This coming week I am going to move the pumpkins into the garden and set up a poly tunnel which should store enough thermal energy during the night to prevent them from freezing. With the pumpkins out I will also be able to start some other plants that need to get growing soon, like the peppers.

Keeping a Garden Log

When you have a garden, there are three tools that make your life really easy. First, is a rolling work stool, second is a plastic bucket and third is a garden log. Keeping a garden log is one of the best ways to improve your garden year after year. Since each plot of land is just a little bit different from another, the log of what happened the years previously will guide you in customizing the perfect approach for the coming year. The garden log does not need to be complex; I started out with just writing down the date and what happened in the garden that day.

Separating Tomatoes

Having already posted on thinning seeds by cutting down the weaker ones I wanted to show another way to thin out without killing all those other starts. While planting my starts this year, I made an incorrect assumption on the germination rate of my 4 year old tomato seeds. At 4 years, conventional wisdom says that the germination rate should be pretty low (like 10-20% of all the seeds planted) so of course I planted quite a few in a single spot (between 4 and 10 seeds).

Building Bee Boxes

So when you make your bee boxes you have several options. You can buy preassembled hives. You can purchase the pre-cut pieces to finish them by adding a little glue and nails. Or in our case, we bought the pine boards and cut them to match what you would purchase in the store.