Monday Garden Update - First of the Year!!

Disclaimer:  When I mention "we" in the post below, I really mean my husband.  I must give credit where credit is due.  I've been a little preoccupied and haven't been able to take an active roll of late...

A week and a half ago we started our seedlings. We planted broccoli, cauliflower, squash (but a more reasonable number this time!), tomatoes (a bunch MORE this time), eggplant, peppers, and herbs.  Below is a picture taken 7 days after planting of one of the flats.  The peppers and eggplant haven't germinated yet so I'm a bit concerned there.  They took at least 14-21 days to germinate last time.  If they don't take we'll consider this an experiment.  Last year I planted them inside our house.  I was hoping they would do well under the house with some heat mats I bought on Amazon at an extreme discount.

We've been blessed with temps in the high 60's for the past few days.   The local co-op was packed with people this weekend getting seeds and miscellaneous garden items.  It's definitely time to get cracking in the ole garden.

Nick finally bit the bullet and bought a tiller yesterday.  No more borrowing the neighbor's!

We tilled the lower portion of the garden and planted a long row of peas.  We also did a little experiment and transplanted some onion and garlic plants that poked up since last year from one portion of the garden to another location.  We also planted some more arugula for a late spring harvest. 

Onion and garlic transplants.

 Unfortunately, a good portion of strawberries we planted last year were crowded out by weeds when I was incapacitated and couldn't garden.  We had planted 50 strawberries last spring and we have about 5 or 6 plants that are thriving.  Yeah, bummer. 

Needless to say, we learned a lesson.  Doing anything in the garden is a bit ambitious with all we have on our plate this year so we are going to retry them again this year and do it right.  We went back and properly mounded the beds.  We weeded where the strawberries managed to survive and we will place filter fabric around the base of the plants to keep the weeds at bay.  We also created several new rows and will be planting another 50 or so plants for next year.  We aren't completely done with this but we are working on it.

One of last year's strawberry plants as it looks today.

Strawberry planting in progress.

Below is a pic of our salad greens.  They overwintered just fine here with row covers.  This will definitely be something we do every year.  Yay for yummy winter eats!

This coming week, we'll need to finish the strawberry plantings as well as plant some carrots, and some specialty potatoes.  I don't think we'll plant any brussel sprouts as they didn't really pan out last year.  By contrast, our potatoes did great last year despite the japanese beetles almost killing them..  This year we are going to change things up and plant them in containers or trash cans and drape insect fabric over them.  I'd like to keep the potatoes out of the garden for space reasons as well as to keep the diseases they are associated with out too.  We'd like to plant adirondack blues and reds (if we can find them... they were already out of the adirondack reds at the co-op) and some fancy russian fingerlings. 

I can hardly wait.