Sprouting Up

After browsing my heirloom seed catalog all winter, I finally made some choices and two weeks ago I planted my first vegetable seeds in little peat moss pots. They are like my little babies, I rotate them between different rooms of my house, trying to give them the most heat and light at different times of the day & night. It's crazy, I know, but the thought of harvesting these black cherry tomatoes, yellow pear tomatoes, brandywine tomatoes, Italian red peppers and Taiwanese eggplant all summer just motivates me to do whatever I can to help these little seeds grow.

I'm pretty excited that I have at least two sprouts coming up from each "crop" that I started. The tomatoes have been the fastest to take off, but the peppers and eggplant are moving along too. I have many more seeds to start, but I think the rest can be sown right into the ground in a couple more weeks, when our soil warms up.

But in the meantime, we are busy getting our garden boxes into place. In the fall I started an experimental Square Foot Garden box. I'd been reading about the Square Foot gardening method, and was interested in seeing if it would really work for me, so I tried a 2x4 box. And despite the fact that I put it in a horrible location that received almost no sunlight all fall & winter, it still worked! I'd recommend anyone who wants to get started gardening to check out this method. It makes good use of space, requires little weeding and makes the whole process seem a lot less intimidating.


Anyway, here are the four garden boxes my husband (& son!) built last weekend. I'm expanding from just one 2x4 box, to two 2x4 sq. ft. boxes, and two 4x3 ones. That makes a total of 40 square feet! I hope I'm not being too ambitious, but so far I'm having fun planning and dreaming of summer veggies...