Garden Update, April 10th

It's been a couple weeks since the last update. The weather here has been all over the place, so we've not been doing tons out there. Our frost date is this Friday, so it's we'll be hitting things pretty hard soon!

As you can see there are quite a few blooms:

I got the herbs in the pots today... at least 2/3rds! For the second year and a row, I haven't found any flat leaf parsley yet. I'll try again tomorrow. We've got Greek Oregano and Cilantro in there now.  The broccoli has also started coming to life. Still not very big though.

Our sugar snap peas have found their way out of the ground (yum!). The strawberries we planted this year seem to be duds, but our strawberries from last year (that we thought wouldn't produce much this year) have flowers all over them. So hopefully we'll have strawberries soon.  We've also gotten tons of asparagus... probably more than 30 spears, which is much more than last year.

We, with the rest of the world, went to Lowe's after church and got jalapeno, bell pepper, and zucchini plants. Hopefully we'll get our tomatoes and cucumbers started soon too!

Signs of Spring

Here are a few quick ways to tell spring is getting close in our house. Jeff is itching to get things in the ground. Sadly, our frost date is still a month and a half away, but there are a few things we can do in the meantime and a few plants that we can get in the ground earlier.

We've started broccoli, cauliflower, and cabbage seeds in cups. We never have much luck sprouting the spring veggies, but we always try.  We love starting seeds in party cups from Dollar Tree.

We also start them in the peat pellets in a mini-greenhouse with a heating pad underneath. I lose half of my kitchen this time of year.

And when that doesn't work, we go out and buy the plants. Only trouble with this is they all mature at the same time! It's pretty tough to eat 70 lbs of cabbage in a week, but we'll talk about preserving food later. Above is romaine lettuce, cabbage, broccoli, and cauliflower.