With the price of food going so high ......................

[Amishway Homesteaders]

So seeing things are NOT looking good this year for 'fresh' vegetables are you going to be putting in a garden this year?

Or making the one you got bigger?

 

The Old Farmers Amanac website has just what you need to get started:

http://www.almanac.com/gardening

 

Here’s advice on starting your garden from preparing your soil to planting your seeds to growing your vegetables.

• Planting Dates for Seeds
• Ordering Garden Seeds
• Starting Seeds Indoors
• Transplanting Your Seedlings
• Preparing Soil for Planting
• Beginner's Vegetable Garden

They also have a ton of charts and garden advice for those of us that have been at it for years!

Here you can find out what zone you live in (we are zone 6) and what days to start plants inside or when it is safe to plant outside.

 

IF you plant by the moon (like I do) here is all the dates you need for that as well.

 

ENJOY!

 

 

[Leanna1017]

We have expanded our veggie garden to the front yard this year. I can't seem to grow peppers in the back garden so maybe the new location will be better. We planted many more tomatoes than in past years and we are adding some medicinal herbs in pots.

 

If you live in the Phoenix/Valley of the Sun area here is a planting calendar chart specific to the low desert - http://www.urbanfarm.org/Planting_Calendar.pdf

[Stephanie]

WEll, we're going to try try again. I'm telling myself that this will be the year that we have great success and all our mistakes and failures will pay off in lessons learned.

[Daylily]

We just expanded our garden a lot last year so we won't be expanding this year. I am planning to put in a thornless blackberry patch this spring if at all possible. A friend is giving me the plants.

[CrabGrassAcres]

Hoping to get moved soon, but waiting on the Lord to sell this place. I'll start on the garden asap once we've moved. First I'll get the orchard in.

[zophiel]

As I just moved into this place, most of this season will be spent putting in the dwarf orchard and other perennials, and then things like tomatoes and peppers. That said, my initial plans for perennials has grown. Although I know they won't be ready to bear for a couple of years, getting them started now means they'll fruit that much earlier, and as I don't see things getting much better very quickly, I know I'll be glad for them.

[out_of_the_ordinary]

We're planning on a slightly bigger garden. Last year was our first real garden and was quite the learning experience!

 

Definitely planting more oregano than last year. I recently ran out of what I had from last year's garden. Both McCormick and Tones (spice companies) import their oregano from Turkey and Mexico. I'd rather get it from my own back yard!

 

New additions this year: beets and lima beans.

[themartianchick]

I love growing herbs. I use them fresh from the garden all summer long. This year, I'll be bringing a few more potted herb plants indoors for the winter. Our gardening efforts will be stepped up this year, too. We bought a portable greenhouse and are hoping to expand our growing season. We will be starting all of our own seedlings and I might even sell a few plants in the neighborhood. The plants that are not used in the garden will be kept in pots, so we'll end up with a container garden.

 

I have a lot of seeds, so there was really no need for me to buy any more. However, I did order quite a few from various (cheap) sources. I currently have a standard sized tote bin filled with seeds, but if my latest order goes through for really cheap seeds, then I'll have another 300 packets of mostly veggie seeds. I like to grow flowers to keep the bees around for pollination, too.

 

I plan to make one more purchase for the garden this year and that is for some really good organic fertillizer to mix with the stuff that I have in my compost pile. I just want to stack the deck in my favor. I might get lucky, though and get it for free from somewhere.

 

Each year, I fill plastic window boxes with various types of lettuce and spinach for use in salad. This year, I plan to double or tripple the amount because we go through a lot of salad in the summer and I love throwing fresh spinach in everything to boost the nutritional value.

 

I plan to plant more peas this year...I have never figured out how to plant "enough". There are never any to preserve for the pantry. I'm not sure that I will be nearly the amount of canning, that I should. Time is something that I don't have a lot of. I may just plan for us to eat as much fresh food in order to avoid using the stuff in the pantry. This would reduce our summer grocery costs and free up a little extra money to stock up on the store-bought stuff that we cannot produce. Then I could can whatever we didn't eat or trade it with a gardening friend for something better or different. This would give us some variety because I cannot possibly grow everything.

 

I did decide that I am going to grow some sort of melon instead of zucchini this year. I still had quite a bit of zucchini in the freezer from last year and I mostly use it for zucchini bread.

[Jori]

Has anyone tried using a vertical garden? I'm thinking about trying one this year since yard space is so limited and at a premium with kids. I'm thinking even if I only use if for my herbs or maybe strawberries for eating, I could use the garden space for other produce.

 

But the garden is expanding again and there will be a few additional raised beds. The blueberries bushes are getting moved to the front planting beds and I'm planning on pear trees to replace them. DH wants to raise beets again this year but I want to use the space for something that everyone will eat and not just one person. His theory is they are easy to grow and if times are tough enough, you'll eat them. Mine is garden what you'll eat and eat what you'll garden. It's space that could be going towards more carrots or potatoes or onions or something, we'll all enjoy.

[wheezie]

We're planning on a bigger garden this year. Last year was our first year gardening, and we had decent success. (mostly thanks in part to my wonderful FIL who could grow anything!). So we're going to step it up a bit-more corn, potatoes, tomatoes, melons, beans, and this year I added carrots and blueberry bushes. (though I know we won't get much from the blueberries this year). So fingers crossed that we all get a good harvest!

[Girl Next Door]

We are renting a little house now, so, we will be starting our first garden.

[Amishway Homesteaders]

Hoping to get moved soon, but waiting on the Lord to sell this place. I'll start on the garden asap once we've moved. First I'll get the orchard in.

 

 

Don't know how far you are moving but if not far you could start some plants in containers here and move them with you so at least you could have some vegetables to help save money. Don't know about tomatoes but things like lettuce, peppers, beans, radishes, etc should be OK. Then when you have a garden going just move them into the ground or leave them in the pots?

[Kelly]

This year I'm trying to grow herbs in pots. I also bought the $20 green house from Freds and I'm trying my hand at starting plants, so far I have zucchini, yellow squash, tomatoes and some of my herbs have come up. Now if the sun will stay out to keep them going. This year I already have onions (for green onions), leaf lettuce and radishes up in the garden so by the time I'm ready to put out tomatoes and etc, I should be able to pick the other stuff.

[misskimmie]

We are expanding the garden a bit so I can add a few new vegetables parsnips, kohlrabi and a few more tomatoes and beans. We just built a cold frame so we can get some food growing earlier. I'm also planning to tuck some pole beans and maybe some squash in the flower bed. I am expanding a herb bed near the kitchen. We will add another bee hive and maybe try our hand at raising chickens ---all in our 3/4 acre village lot.

 

kim

 

 

my Blog

http://misskimmie-thebarefootgardener.blogspot.com/

[Kelly]

I ordered a bigger green house. Its 8'long x 6'wide x 7'tall. Not huge but it will work good. I'm going to try to grow some things like lettuce this next winter. The seeds I started in the little green house turned out great so next summer I'll be able to do more!

[Centexan]

I'm planning to have a garden again this year (have always had some kind of edible plants growing the last 50 years) but am running into a real challenge. A couple of years ago I decided that I was no longer able to dig the garden, so put in three raised beds - kind of lasagna gardening. I have fought "Johnson Grass" and "Nut Grass" and thought I had a way to get past the weeding by starting the raised beds with about 8 or 10 inches of newspaper on bottom. Well, after two years, here I am again fighting the nut grass. You would think that nothing would grow through a thick layer of that. We are shovel digging the nut grass and I am going through it handful by handful to remove it. How much fun do you think that is?!?! BUT --- those whopper-sized tomatoes and peppers and green beans and squash are worth it. I was able to can A LOT from the garden last year and hope to do the same this year as I am very worried about the economy and the availability of food.

[mishbloom]

I had spring fever so badly that on a recent Friday when the temperature rose into the 60s for the whole afternoon, the Manlings and I went out back On A Mission! I put our snap peas in and reseeded the lettuce, parsley, and spinach. We found a rhubarb root at Lowe's (prolly the first one they sold--it wasn't even in the computer system yet! LOL) and planted that in a container. We yanked the cover off the cold-frame (which had been buried for the better part of the last two months) and found all the parsnips, turnips, and carrots I'd planted going crazy. I danced around like an idiot!

 

On another trip to Lowe's last week, I found early tomatoes...hybrid yes, but I'm so desperate for green growing things that I got two and potted them. It'll get me through till the "real" tomatoes come in. I realized when I got home that I had no row cover...but then my wonderful ingenious hubby found the burlap sacks that we get mushroom soil in...and voila, my "tomatoes" are weather-protected. A week later and they are just flourishing.

 

We're planning on being more conscientious about planting this year. Going up instead of out. Multiple plantings of things. Better pest control and more consistent watering. Due to job issues and life I've been lax on that the last couple of years, and it's showed. Not that we didn't get a lot...but it could have been better.

 

I'm also planning on being better about using my local resources as well. Pick your owns and all our wonderful Mennonite family market stands. They do better with some things than I ever will, so why waste my (tiny insignificant) plot of land to keep trying things I can get around the corner when I can plant another bumper crop of green (and purple and yellow) beans that my Manlings all run out of by spring.

 

Preserving all this is the other area I plan to be more diligent and ordered about. Last year was especially bad for me. We had too much of stupid stuff and not enough of some essentials. I've been kicking myself in the butt about that for months now.

[themartianchick]

I was so excited to see so many of the seeds that I planted in the greenhouse are now sprouting! I have 5 or six kinds of salad greens with just a couple of leaves on each plant and the tomatoes have been sprouting for the past couple of days. No peppers yet, but I know that they'll start growing soon...Today, I noticed thatmy first pea began to sprout!!! I can't wait... I love fresh peas!!

 

I also was happy to find some free garden journals online. I'm using the first one but the others are nice too:

 

http://www.arbico-organics.com/category/garden-journal

 

http://www.blueboardwalk.com/eat-your-yard/free-garden-journal.pdf

 

http://www.gardening-quick-n-easy.com/Garden_Journal.html

 

http://issuu.com/terroirseeds/docs/gardenjournalweb?mode=embed&layout=http%3A%2F%2Fskin.issuu.com%2Fv%2Fcolor%2Flayout.xml&backgroundColor=F2ECD2&showFlipBtn=true

[TurtleMama]

Since we are renting now, we are container gardening now. We have herbs and vegetables in various pots, buckets, and even a children's plastic swimming pool that we drilled holes into the bottom of and planted zucchini in! We will be moving within a month to a month and a half, but we'll be able to carry our garden with us. Hooray!

[Daylily]

We have our thornless blackberry plants waiting to be planted as soon as the rain stops and we can dig in the dirt. I planted 29 strawberry plants (Ozark Beauty) and have 4 more kinds to plant.

 

DD and I want to grow more herbs too. We already grow and dry basil. We want to get more perennial herbs. We have two oregano plants but they don't have much fragrance, and a lovage plant.

 

We are trying to think of what foods we use and figure out if we can grow it or grow a substitute for it because I know the time will come when we can't buy the things we buy now.

[Kathleeen]

I am trying to focus on what gets eaten here.. and that is TOMATOES. I have 300 Roma seedlings in cups who survived their first transplant, my bedroom and enclosed front porch have been turned into greenhouses for them, and I built a fairly large ( 6 ft x 4.5 feet at the peak x4 feet) cold frame using old windows that I have anchored permanently in my garden. Now, lets pray we are done getting 60+ MPH winds up here, and oh yeah, those pesky tornadoes for a while! I also have about 100 broccoli seedlings going, about 50 butternut squash ones as well. Will be working on pot grown herbs, our soil is clay and not hospitable to many herbs. It's been so wet and cold here that I probably won't get anything real in the garden till the end of may. I do have about 200 feet of greens planted and a 2 x 20 patch of snowpeas, but they just don't grow much, due to the weather.

[Herbwifemama]

I'm aiming to grow all our produce eventually. Right now, I've got lettuce and radishes coming up, and we're supporting the peas today. I've got flowers on my strawberries, and the carrots, beets, and spinach aren't up yet. I have another bed (see lead thread) that I want to plant, and I've asked dh to build three more beds. I'm not sure when he'll get to that- we moved last year, and there's so much to be done everywhere.

[themartianchick]

I got a lot of things replanted today. For some reason, I neglected to plant radishes earlier so I am correcting that now. The grocery prices are so high that I really need a good garden this year to free up money to pay for other things. There are several organizational things that we need to purchase this year in an effort to help our household run more smoothly and then there is the roof that needs to be replaced...

[HazelStone]

I am still trying to amend/improve the soil in our yard...bought the place not that long ago and the soil is crappy clay. Roto-tilling the existing flower beds and adding a new garden bed. Our lot is tiny (under 1/5 acre) so there's no way we can grow ALL our produce but I do intend to make a big dent...the SALE price for cukes and green peppers is $1 each! To heck with that!!

[Amishway Homesteaders]

I am still trying to amend/improve the soil in our yard...bought the place not that long ago and the soil is crappy clay. Roto-tilling the existing flower beds and adding a new garden bed. Our lot is tiny (under 1/5 acre) so there's no way we can grow ALL our produce but I do intend to make a big dent...the SALE price for cukes and green peppers is $1 each! To heck with that!!

 

Years ago when I Lived in the big city alll we had was one flower bed..................

So I plants a pepper plant, two tomato plants in the back row and a row of string beans amoung the flowers. Even had leaf lettuce growing as a border. People would stop and ask what kind of flower was THAT tall.................. to find out it was my Tomato plants. LOL

 

GROW WHAT YOU CAN WHERE YOU CAN!