Spring planting

When we first put in our garden we put raised beds on the south side of our house, which happens to be the side yard. We found that we wanted more planting space, and the best place to do that turned out to be the north side of the house. With a bit of research I found that it would work for certain crops-maybe not everything though.  So, we added three additional raised beds to the North side last year. I’ve found that most cool weather crops don’t need quite as much light, making them great for this spot! That includes: cabbage, carrots, lettuce, spinach, kale, beets, etc. Green beans are a warmer weather crop, but they still do pretty well in this spot as well.

When determining light for an area I take photos every 2 hours for a day in the middle of the growing season-then I can really tell how many hours of light each area will get. Ideally-do this the year before you plan to put in a garden so you can plan locations well.

Anyway, one of our many projects today was to plant the cool weather crops. We put in: Kale (it’s actually on the South side, but is still a cool weather crop!), lettuce, carrots, beets, and cabbage. I usually try to get these crops in a bit sooner than I did this year, but life happened. 😝 I think they’ll still be just fine.

I even found seed tape which was pretty exciting! It made planting the carrots and beets so much faster and easier!

The quest for peas

Story time:

I have never had a grand success with growing peas. I plant them every. single. year. But they never work very well! This has probably been happening for 4 years now. I’ve even tried peas in a container! Well, I’m trying again, and hoping for the best! I planted seeds yesterday when Goombah 1 was at preschool, Goombah 2 was riding his trike, drawing with chalk, digging with me, and getting in to other various forms of mischief :P, and Goombah 3 was sleeping in the stroller (yay!).

Anyway-back to the story. Peas just don’t like me. I ordered a new variety of Strawberry plants to try this year, and we’re going to be putting them in a new place, so I pulled the old strawberries up from the long skinny raised bed, and put the peas there. While I was there I also decided to plant a row of spinach. It did well for us last year, so here’s hoping for a repeat performance!

I plan to put some pepper plants and basil in this bed after the spinach and peas are done, which I think will work well. Peppers grow relatively slowly, and don’t get huge. And-now everyone knows I need to weed. Hah. 😉

Things I changed about the peas: I spaced out the seeds. I saw an idea online where they planted three closely spaced rows (about 1 1/2-2 inches apart) with the individual seeds in the rows about that far apart as well. We’ll give it a try! I hope it works. If not-we’ll do something different next year. Hahahahaha.    ha. 😛

Part 2

Part 3