The third week of April has passed us and it held true to the old saying, “April showers bring May flowers”. We’ve gotten lots of rain in the last week or so, and with three weeks until our last frost date, the rain has helped turned everything from brown to green.
This post may contain affiliate links. If you use these links to buy something we may earn a commission. Thanks.
Things seem to be moving faster every week around here. We’ve got things growing in six of our ten raised garden beds already. The last four will be filled with tomatoes, peppers, and squash in a few short weeks.
This week was spent catching up on things we are behind on, and getting behind on things we were supposed to get done this week. If you’ve been following along you’ll notice this is becoming a pattern for us. Catch up on our adventure here.
If you’d like to follow along and see if one day we get caught up and achieve the perpetual, “next week everything will calm down”, subscribe below.
Seeds Starting:
We caught up and fell behind on some seed starting this week. Potatoes are finally in the ground. Kind of. We are using old feed bags to plant our potatoes this year.
Doing this frees up an extra garden bed that we are using to grow carrots, and harvest carrot seeds. We left carrots in the ground to overwinter that will go to seed this year.
In total we have 13 bags of potatoes growing. I put two to three seed potatoes in each bag and plan to add soil/mulch to them all summer until the bags are full. This type of potato planting encourages growth of the tubers. As you see green tops, you add more soil, and more and more until full.
Each of these feed bags held 25kg of chicken feed so they are quite large.
We were supposed to get some flowers planted this week but we have yet to get our new garden bed built for them. It is on the list to get done next week.
Update On Seeds Started:
Our peppers are growing well in the greenhouse. I thinned them down so only one pepper plant is growing in each soil block. In the next week or two these will be potted up into a 4 inch container.
Transplanting:
This week we transplanted some raspberries. We bought a raspberry plant from a nursery a couple years ago and it has been growing really well. I dug up a couple of the off shoots from the main plant and transplanted them into a new area with more space.
Pruning:
The only pruning we did this week, just like last week, was to remove the suckers from our indeterminate tomato plants in the greenhouse. This will be an ongoing weekly garden chore from now on.
Harvesting:
A new category in this weeks entry. Our first harvest of the season. We were making some buffalo chicken wraps so I grabbed some radishes, spinach, and romaine lettuce from the greenhouse.
All three of these are growing extremely well in the greenhouse right now. We should be able to harvest these three for another month or so.
Soon it will get too hot in there and they will bolt. We planted some in our outdoor garden already. By they time the greenhouse ones bolt, the outdoor ones will be ready to harvest.
Weather:
It rained almost every day this week. Which was perfect for us since we sowed our outdoor gardens last week. We didn’t have to go out and water everything every day.
The weather was pretty consistent for April with a few double digit highs and nothing below freezing for the week.
Next week is calling for rain three out of seven days. A fair amount of sun in the forecast too which will be great because our garden should be sprouting.
Upcoming Next Week:
We are really getting into the warm weather crops this week. It’s time to start pumpkins, watermelon, cucumbers, brussel sprouts, zucchini, and cantaloupe. These don’t really need to be started indoors but we like to give them a four week head start.
We got our first watermelon last year. It was so good we are planted two varieties this year. I’ve also seen the idea of grafting watermelon onto pumpkin stems for a better root system. I’m going to give it a try.
We also need to build our new flower garden bed. This didn’t get done this week because I needed to build an extension onto our compost pile. Once done we will have a lot of flowers to plant.
Conclusion:
This concludes this entry into our gardening this week series. We hope you enjoyed it and we hope you will subscribe and follow along with us on our journey. Also, be sure to check out our other blog entries where we have growing guides, seed saving guides, and recipes. If you have any questions or comments please leave them below.
