This week had a little bit of everything going on. At 6 weeks to our last frost (Week Ending March 31st) we had some seeds to start, some transplanting to do, and some garden beds to get ready.
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If this is your first time here, this is our fifth year gardening and we are going to journal our experience this year. This is for us, to help keep a record of what we do so we can reflect on it during next year’s journey, but we hope it’s also an enjoyable journey for you to read and follow.
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Seed Starting:
Lots of seed starting this week. We started forty tomato plants in soil blocks to go into two 12×4 foot garden beds.
I ran into an issue when I took my seeds out to start planting. Last year we saved tomato seeds from the varieties that we liked and somehow I labelled two of the seeds as the same thing. So here’s hoping I guessed right and started the right kind of seeds.
We also started twenty broccoli plants and four cabbage. We have harvested a bit of broccoli in the past but we’ve never had a good cabbage that hasn’t gotten eaten by bugs before we could harvest.
This year we are planning building a hoop house over our brassicas garden beds to help protect them from those pesky bugs. I plan on writing and article and going into detail on how we do this.
The biggest project of this week was getting our spring wheat planted. This garden space was neglected after we harvested last year, and looked like this:
To get ready for planting this garden needed to be weeded and tilled. We’re also trying a new strategy for planting our wheat this year. Last year our row spaces were only 6 inches apart. This year we are separating them by 12-18 inches.
If you’re wondering a typical mass production farm will plant their wheat in rows about 18 inches apart.
In-between our rows of wheat we’re putting down some mulch. This will act a weed barrier, somewhere for us to walk, and keep moisture in the garden bed.
The best part about growing wheat is that it only takes a couple of hours, depending on the state of your garden, to get everything planted. Then another couple of hours in the summer to harvest. In-between it is basically maintenance free.
Updates On Started Seeds:
We have some more bad news to share this week. Two weeks ago we started pepper seeds indoors. Everything has started except for our jalapeno peppers. These were seeds that we had saved last year. Not a single one germinated.
Although this sucks, we have been extremely successful overall in our seed saving to date. There is still plenty of time in this growing season and we have already planted more seeds that were store bought last year.
Not something we’ve mentioned before on this journal, but our Garlic and pushed up through the mulch in our garden beds. This is only our second year attempting to grow garlic. We made a grave mistake the first year (planted way too early in the fall) and nothing came to fruition.
Transplanting:
We did a little bit of transplanting this week. We put five tomato plants into our greenhouse along with three kale that we started indoors.
We are able to put our tomatoes into our greenhouse already because the temperature gets up to 30°C during the day and we use a Greenhouse Heater to keep the temperature warm enough over night.
This little greenhouse heater that we’ve had for a few years now work great for us. It costs us less than a dollar a day to heat the greenhouse but it allowed us last year to harvest tomatoes at the beginning of June. The same time we were planting our tomatoes into our outdoor garden beds.
On a side note, the greenhouse heater is so dirty because we had a box elder bug infestation last year like most of southern Ontario and they made a mess!
Pruning:
Our tomato plants needed a quick prune before they were transplanted. Plant tomato plants as deep as possible when transplanting to develop more roots.
When doing this it is best to remove the lowest set of leaves to make sure none of the leave are touching the soil.
Weather:
After a cold week two weeks ago we were back to having some nice weather which allowed us to get some stuff done outdoors. Most of the week the daily highs were between 7°C and 14°C which is fairly normal for the last week of March.
We had a little bit of rain and a very small amount of snow one night. It was a good balance for our garden beds to warm up and still have a good bit of moisture in the soil.
It doesn’t seem to be that dry to us but the municipality close by put on a complete burn ban. There is no burning allowed whatsoever. This is normal in the summer months but I don’t remember this happening this early in the year.
Upcoming Next Week:
Next week will be even busier than this one as next weekend we are having a family get together so we will need to do even more in less time.
We’ll be direct sowing seeds outdoors for the first time this year. This could have been done in March but we push it a few weeks because we have the same items growing in our greenhouse. We will be starting Beets, Carrots, Radishes, Potatoes, Peas, Spinach, and Kale.
We would normally skip this week for starting seeds indoors but we have yet to procure some fresh ginger and turmeric for our medicinal journey. So if we can get our hands on some this week we will be starting them indoors.
We’ll have some transplanting to do as well. Our basil seedlings are ready to be put into the greenhouse. These initial basil plants we use to propagate more basil that we plant outside with our tomatoes later on.
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.
