I enter spring with both excitement and apprehension. I have tons of seeds, both from purchases and trades, and while I'm excited about getting the garden going this year, I'm also apprehensive about seed sprouting. I planted a lot of peas and in the past I've had great luck with them, but this year it seems that many of the peas I planted aren't sprouting. I've planted a few more and I'm watching them closely, hoping that the issue was the weather and not the seeds.
Today I planted three kinds of swiss chard in the bed besides the house: Bright Lights (red and white stemmed), Oriole (orange/gold stemmed), and Fordhook Giant (white stemmed). I love chard so I'm really hoping that most of them grow, although last year I didn't have great success. Only two of the chard plants I planted grew to maturity, which has me wondering what I did wrong. Others say that swiss chard is easy to grow so I'm going to hope that I just planted at the wrong time last year, and if the chard I planted today doesn't sprout I'll replant those squares. I have plenty of seeds, so I can experiment without having to spend more on seeds.
We're planning to expand the garden a fair bit this year but that involves a pretty sizeable investment in the soil, so I'm not sure the garden will expand quite as much as we've planned. Once things are finalized I'll talk more about the new beds we put in.
I've been contemplating seed starting inside but my very small experiment with herb seeds shows that they get very leggy, so I'm thinking that this year I'll just start the seeds outside. My brother was going to send me some lights he had for his salt water aquarium so that I could start some seeds inside with lights, but he didn't send the lights so I'm not going to have a set up that includes lights, which makes indoor seed starting seem impractical. Unfortunately I bought some seeds planning to start them inside, so we'll see if I get a harvest from those if they're put in the ground instead of being started inside. I'm going to plant some herbs in the coldframe today since they shouldn't get leggy if they're grown in natural light, hopefully they'll be successful.
Last of all, my cold frame wasn't very successful this year. There's a gentleman on the SFG forum who did some testing this winter and he recommends buying soil heaters instead of using coldframes alone, so I'm thinking about getting soil heaters for a couple of the new beds we're putting in.
Happy Spring!
