Tuesday, April 3, 2012

A new gardening season - 2012!!

A new year for experimenting with vegetable/flower seeds, new ways and places to plant them, new ways to evade the pesky deer/bunnies etc., I'm all ready for the gardening season of 2012!!

This year I received a very nice present from Daphne from Daphne's Dandelions - seeds!!  Thank you Daphne for Cherokee Purple tomato, Cilantro and Red Sails lettuce seeds. 
Seeds from Daphne!

I'm super excited to grow Cherokee Purple.  I've heard great things about this variety of tomato, but never seen them available locally in zone 4.  Both Red Sails and Cherokee Purple were planted a couple minutes ago:)

A new thing for this year is 3 brand new raised beds!  12 feet by 3.5 feet each!!  For the past few years, I was using a spot (minus sod), but the grass is always creeping into the garden and it was time consuming to shovel out the grass roots every couple months.  Hopefully, raised beds will keep the grass out of the garden.  I plan to mulch around it, once it is filled with dirt....
                     
3 new raised beds!!

So far most of the seeds are planted indoors by the window - tomatoes, peppers, eggplants etc., Red onions were first seeded in early March, two weeks later the rest of the veggies were seeded.  Some of them are sprouted already!! 
Seeds soaking in the sun

A view of the plum trees blossoming already!!  I don't think we have seen the last of the frost yet, so sadly, we won't have any plums later on.....




6 comments:

  1. welcome back The raised bed looks amazing Keep posting

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  2. How I wish I could have one too. Daphne sure is generous. I also have a Cherokee Purple on our rooftop. Well, rumor has it that the name Cherokee Purple was derived from Cherokee Indians 100 years ago. And in horticultural literature, if I'm not mistaken, a pink tomato is often referred to as purple.

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  3. Thanks Anonymous!

    Thanks Jamie for the information on Cherokee Purple! I've seen pictures of Cherokee Purple, they do look purplish :) Will know for sure, when I harvest them -yum!!

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  4. Cherokee Purple is high on the gardener's list this year. I started 4 from seed. Their looking good so far.

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  5. How’s the garden now? I hope it’s still in progress, and, hey, in a few months, it’ll be a year since you’ve planted them! That’s a great achievement for gardeners, considering how many problems can come by in a span of 12 months. Congrats! :D How about caging your tomato plants? It wouldn’t affect their growth, as they’re naturally small, but it can give them a lot of protection.

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  6. The raised beds do look amazing and it is indeed a good choice to keep the weeds from growing over them. How did the garden turn out? I am so happy to see the progress on the growth of those plum trees and I can only imagine that they’d look more amazing once fully grown.
    Darrell Gardner

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