WE’VE MADE IT! The time that all gardeners wait for all year long. Our last frost date has arrived this week. What does that mean for us? Are we able to get everything planted right away and sit back and relax? Not a chance.
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Even though we are past our “last frost date” officially there is still a chance a frost could happen. Last year, it actually did. On May 17th we got a hard frost that killed all the plant we had prematurely put outside. We are waiting a couple extra weeks this year to make sure that doesn’t happen again.
If you’ve been following along you’ll know that has been our plan this year. If you’d like to follow us on our garden adventure that is 2024 please subscribe below. Catch up on everything we’ve done so far this year you can check it out here.
Seed Starting:
Nothing was started this week. In the next week or two we will start sowing our outdoor crops like corn, beans, and any squashes we didn’t start indoors. Until then, nothing new to report.
Updates On Seed Starting:
I do have some updates on some seeds we started last week.
Our Brussel sprouts started a lot faster than I had expected. The seeds themselves are now 3 years old but we had a really good germination rate and it only took about 5 days.
What I thought would germinate really fast is actually taking a little while. I had saved some pumpkin seeds two years ago and they germinated super fast last year. This year after a week, only a few have started to pop through the soil.
A few of our watermelon and cucumbers have also germinated, but nothing on the cantaloupes yet.
Transplanting:
Even though we are not transplanting our summer crops outside during our last frost week, we did do some transplanting.
Our onions we ready, and maybe overdue, to be put outside. As I’ve mentioned before we’ve never had a great onion harvest and this year they have been doing great in the seed starting containers so I hesitated to move them.
I did get them into the ground. All in all, about 100 onions, a mix between red and yellow, were planted. Here’s hoping that they start to grow well soon and we get a good harvest.
Pruning:
Not much pruning was done this week. The usual picking off tomato suckers but nothing else.
Harvesting:
We’ve been eating out of the garden a lot this week. The picture below is what I harvested to use for breakfast one morning. We have asparagus, chives, radishes, sage, dill, spinach, and kale.
I diced all this up and added it all to some diced potatoes to make some really good hashbrowns to go along with our backyard chicken eggs. Everything in the dish was from our property except for the potatoes. We never grow enough potatoes.
Later on in the week we noticed our dill growing in the greenhouse was getting very large. It has been growing better than we’ve ever seen. We harvested a large portion of it to go into our dehydrator to preserve.
Drying herbs is a big goal of ours this year. Since we do so much of our own cooking we use a lot of herbs and spices. They can get pretty pricey especially if you buy them fresh. The current price in our area for fresh herbs is $2.99 for a 28g package. The picture above is about a half a pound (227g) of dill.
There’s even more in our greenhouse but we ran out of room in the dehydrator for today.
Weather:
The weather last week was wonderful. The daily highs were between 14 and 21°C and the coldest it got a night was 5°C. There was also a nice mix of rain and sunny skies so the garden got watered and I was still able to do some work outside.
Upcoming Next Week:
Next week is prep week for when we do finally transplant things like our tomatoes and peppers outside. We have four full garden beds to get ready for planting. We also need to sow some more flower seeds in the new garden bed we built a few weeks ago.
We also have a whole bunch of volunteer sunflowers (from birds and squirrels eating them), growing all over the garden beds that will need to be moved. To move them we need to build a garden bed for them to go into. I feel like something is not going to get done this week. But alas, that’s how she goes sometimes.
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.
