I Find This Hard to Believe

I placed my eggplant, pepper and tomato seed orders, and I stuck to the plan! I followed the list and plan that I laid out last year. I didn't make any changes. That has NEVER happened before!



You see, I'm a planner. I plan right down to how many pots I have for starting seeds. I have grow lights and heat mats for three flats. I have three flats of pots carefully collected and matched up from previous purchases. These flats are carefully washed, disinfected, and stored each year.



Eggplants and Peppers go in one flat because they are shorter than the tomatoes. They get started 2 weeks earlier too, which is the second week of March. Here is my seedling potting plan.

Some of these seedlings will go to my mother and father for their gardens. There are also a couple of extras for unplanned disasters. I have bad luck with seedlings for black varieties, so there are extra extra of those.

I actually stuck to this list. I went to Gardeners.com and used their bed planning tool to double check my numbers. But, we'll save my planting plan for another day.

Also, I am eating asparagus from the fancy grocery produce department. Somewhere in the world, it is spring!

Winter ~ Dreaming of Gardening

With seed starting still almost a month away, I have finally allowed myself to think about gardening.... just for a minute. I went through my old seed packets, cleaned house, consulted my garden layout, and made a list of things to order. Next I sourced some of my favorite hard to find items such as White Pearl Cucumbers, and Ichiban Eggplants. Thank you Google! Next week I will begin ordering.

In the meantime, my husband and I have had gardening in the back of our minds. I am looking forward to putting in raised beds. My husband, prone to flights of fancy, has (as usual) deviated from "things important to me", and created his own project. He has been watching too much Living With Ed and has decided my garden should be completely off the grid. He has obtained a free 500 gallon tank, and has scrubbed it to within an inch of it's life, and is now planning to bury it next to the garden shed and route all the downspouts into it to collect water for watering the garden. He was also planning to put in a solar panel and batteries, so he doesn't have to dig an electric line out there. Thankfully, it was cost prohibitive. Estimated to be around $2000, and since I'm in the garden shed after dark, well, NEVER, that ought to have paid itself off in about 40 years. I will probably regret this when we get chickens again, and want the heat and lights on timers to increase egg production, but for right now, I'm glad he has given up the solar idea. Now if I can only get him out of the garage and focused on actually building the raised beds.....