Welcome to gardening season! April may seem a bit early to start gardening, but if you’re planting cold weather crops, then you will want to get the areas for those crops ready and get them in the ground. With all of the different types of vegetables we wanted to plant, we needed to get working the soil as soon as possible since we were dealing with new dirt and not pretty garden soil. In our zone (5b maybe 5a but according to the Natural Resources website we are considered a 6a zone), the last frost date for Spring is usually around the end of April/beginning of May. The ground is thawed before then though so we were able to rent a rear-tine tiller and get to working the soil during the Easter weekend (April 16) this year. Fun fact: we were able to rent the tiller and the van from Home Depot for 4 hours, but were able to pick it up at 6 pm on the Thursday and return it before 9 am on the Saturday of the Easter weekend. So we were able to use it for just over a day and only pay for 4 hours! That was an awesome little hack that Josh knew about, but I never knew about. We made a vlog about that and showed what we used to amend our soil to hopefully give the plants a nice home to lay their roots and a good start nutritionally.
We had actually started our massive venture into gardening last Fall. With Covid, inflation, and me becoming a Stay-at-Home Mom and not going to work anymore, we wanted a way to save some money on the expenses of the house. A great way to do that is to grow our own food! We do not use the yard beside our house so that is where we planned the garden. The garden is about 70 feet by 20 feet. First, we took all of the grass off of the lawn beside the house, which you can see here. Then, Josh had this amazing idea……. He wanted to save the grass from the lawn and move it over to the hill that leads down to the creek. I want to really ensure you are noting my sarcasm here! His idea wasn’t entirely terrible since there was no grass on the hill, however he didn’t have a lot of time to do it, so essentially his idea turned into me doing a lot of the work, which you can see here. Joseph was a great help giving me motivation during this very time consuming, and mentally draining task. I did not want to do it at all, but knew Josh really wanted to do it. Tt became a mental battle the entire time to do something you don’t want to do with every fiber of your being, but you know it will make your husband really happy. I also knew his back would be wrecked if he tried to do this on his own and when he tweaks his back, he is on the couch for days and since my only problem was laziness, I did the task for him. He didn’t get off entirely scot-free though. He was in charge of laying the sod on the hill. Then I started to hand till the area in the garden where we wanted to plant the garlic. We are huge garlic lovers in this family and I am probably the most excited about growing this! It is so much fun to grow and so easy! That was all we did last fall and the next steps came in 2022 when we started seeds. I did not vlog this part at all until we had plants growing, but next year we will do a series following certain vegetables from start to finish.
April has been a very exciting and productive month! This is what the garden looked like before we started any work this spring. We planted onions outside this month. We started 2 varieties inside in January and we also planted onion sets I bought from the Superstore in case my onions didn’t do well. Well we also started leeks with the onions, but I definitely did not label them, so the onions that went outside that we started ourselves are either onions or leeks. So if they survive and grow, it will be a surprise as to whether they are onions or leeks!
We started putting up a fence around the garden to keep the kids and pests out, however the squirrels keep getting in and digging up my onion sets. They take them out and put them back in upside down! I am losing my mind! The outer fence is only about 3 feet high and I stitched the 5 foot panels together to create 25 foot sections. This involved smacking in t-posts every 5 feet and using wire to attach the 25 foot sections. The time consuming part was stitching the panels together, but now that the hard part is done, if we decide to take the fencing down each winter, it will be easier to put back up in the spring.
All the plants we are growing, we started from seed ourselves except for the potatoes and most of the onions. We are doing a slight experiment with the potatoes we plan to use as seed potatoes. Josh purchased non-organic potatoes from the store that we are sprouting ourselves and seeing if we get a good yield from them. You’re supposed to use organic potatoes if you’re going to use store potatoes. So we will see how these potatoes do. Next year I plan to purchase seed potatoes on time before the seed companies I use are sold out and that way we can start to save our own seed potatoes from these varieties.
I also accidentally planted beans way too early! I had just received a shipment of seeds I ordered from Rainbow Seeds. I got a little gung-ho when planting the peppers I received in the shipment and just planted a whole plug tray of all the seeds I received, which included beans! Once they grew too big for the plant stand, I decided to started a bean experiment outside to see if we could make them survive some cold weather.
We are trying to create a garden that is inexpensive and will only cost us money once. In order to do this, we plan to save the seeds from all of our crops this year and use them to plant next year’s vegetables. That way the expense of purchasing all the seeds only occurs once. In saying that, this first year is also our year to decide which varieties of vegetables we prefer, so if we don’t like certain varieties, we will purchase new ones until we find the ones we want to keep growing. Another expense I wanted to save was purchasing the 1020 trays to put under the seedling plug trays. I quickly learned that some things are worth the expense as you will see here. We also used red solo cups to transplant our seedlings into when they outgrew the plug trays. We plan to keep and reuse our plug trays and 1020 trays until the plug trays fall apart and we will replace any 1020 trays that have holes in them or start to split apart, which is only one so far. Perhaps in the future we will invest in some good 4 inch pots that we will use for transplants, but for now, the red solo cups are doing the trick and they are in great condition so we can still use them next year!
The way we were able to afford our massive garden and the expense of going with a big garden right away was utilizing a promotional offer on our Home Depot credit card. We had an offer for 0% financing for 18 months on our purchase for the garden. We did need to purchase everything all at once so it did take some planning. Now we will do what we can to pay that off as quickly as possible. I have noted in other blogs about finances that we really despise debt, but this is one way that you can utilize credit to your advantage. This garden was kind of a last minute decision and we had not completely thought through all of the expenses involved aside from the indoor equipment such as seeds, trays, and plant stands. This offer really came at an amazing time because we didn’t have a lot of time to start storing funds away to fund the outdoor equipment. So, since we did utilize credit to fund the outdoor equipment, trust me when I say we will have that card paid off before the 18 months are up. We could have used less expensive equipment, but that would involve spending more money later to purchase the equipment we wanted to use permanently and this is why we decided to buy the equipment we wanted to use outside. Use your money in a smart way and even though that could be more expensive up front, it can cost less in the long run, right! So far this garden has cost us about $4,000, and most of that cost was in t-posts, fencing, mulch, and seeds. We hope that in the future, we will not have to put money out for this garden if we can help it. You will have to stay along for the long-haul journey to see if we can succeed in this goal though!
That is everything that has happened in the garden up until May. We were very busy outside and this was also a great way for the kids to get lots of fresh air. I am also so glad that they are learning where their food comes from and I hope to teach them how to grow their own food year after year. I have heard many backyard gardeners say that home grown vegetables just taste much better and I have noticed that with the tomatoes and peppers I have planted in previous years. So, stay tuned to see what is going on in the garden next month during our busy planting month!
I also wanted to note where we purchased our seeds from. Most of our seeds came from Veseys and West Coast Seeds. As mentioned earlier, I purchased a few seeds from Rainbow Seeds. I also purchased my onion sets from the Superstore and they were from McKenzie. We also had a few seed packages from previous years for lettuce, beets, and zucchini. When purchasing garlic, onion sets, or seed potatoes online, you need to be on the ball because some companies sell out fast and may not get more until the next year which is what happened to me with all three of these. I did luck out with Veseys getting a second shipment of garlic so I was able to plant them last fall!
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