Early Spring Back to Eden Garden Update

March 6, 2013

I’ve been planning and planning my garden. All of a sudden, I feel behind as many things need to be planted already! How did that happen?!

We’re starting March out running!

Planted who knows how many potatoes.

Should have just put cardboard down, potatoes, composted chicken manure, and then 8” of mulch but we do not always have the motivation to do that much work at once so when we had the motivation to do cardboard & mulch but I didn’t have any manure and it wasn’t time to plant potatoes yet, we just went ahead and did it. Which means when it came time to plant the potatoes we had to dig through 8” of mulch to plant potatoes. Ah, well. It’s done.

I also read that planting garlic at the base of your peach trees protects it from some type of fungus. You can also plant garlic by tomatoes and a host of other plants but most of the garlic that was given to me to plant was rotten so I only had enough for one peach tree.

Of course, AFTER I planted the garlic, I remembered the plan was to let the chickens loose on the peach tree because it is not fungus that kills the fruit every year, but some type of worm. Not sure how I’m going to work that out. I may just let the chickens ‘clean out’ under the other peach tree and see if it makes a difference and then next year I’ll plant garlic elsewhere so the chickens can take care of this peach tree.

I read recently about using milk jugs as a greenhouse and as my seedlings were looking quite spindly, I decided to give that a try. I planted bell peppers, roma tomatoes, amish paste tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, broccoli, and romaine lettuce. I am excited about this method! I have heard that trying to sew indoors does not work well for people with efficient windows as it blocks some of the heat and light. Next up is some kale and flowers for the girls (and bees and other beneficial insects).

The next day, we got a call at 5:45am from the post office telling us our chicks were in!

(Making sure everyone got a drink of pedialite after a long trip)

We had not bought a heat lamp yet so we used one of my husband’s photography lamps and I boiled a bunch of water & heated the box that way until he was able to get the heat lamp on his way back from work. Once we had the heat lamp, there was no need for the jars of water so I took them out. It was so cute to see the chicks all huddled with one of the jars of water! Just like it was their mama 🙂

I still have on my list for this week:
1. Plant more seeds in my ‘greenhouses’
2. Plant peas and carrots in the garden
3. Put a mulch walkway from our brick walkway to the driveway as with all of the rain we’ve been having it has been getting really muddy
4.I am hardening off some transplants daily.

We’re off! If only I could stay organized enough to keep this up…and remember what I did next year 🙂 Something else to put on the list – make some kind of binder so I can make informed decisions next year…

Some more of the chicks because who doesn’t love to see pics of cute chicks?! 🙂

I am submitting this to Simple Lives Thursday. Our life is FAR from simple right now but that is what we are working towards 🙂