Articles about Spring | The Cheap Vegetable Gardener

Archive for the ‘spring’ Category

Successive Pea Planting

Mar 21, 2010 outdoor seed starting, peas, spring

Last year by 5 year old learned she likes to pick and eat fresh pea pods and was very diligent on harvesting new peas as she found them. Unfortunately this meant less peas for me. This year I am using successive planting to ensure I get my fill this year but also do not get overwhelmed with one big harvest all at once.

I started the process about a month ago by soaking my sugar snap peas in water overnight…then forgetting about them and ended up planting them by flashlight in the rain the following day. I couple weeks later I did the same for my snow peas in a separate part of my garden.

If everything goes as planned I should get some early snap peas and followed by some snow peas 2-3 weeks later. Even if my plants do not cooperate and I get overwhelmed with too many peas I can always leave a few on the plants and harvest the pea seeds for next year.

Tags: cheap, garden seeds, outdoor plants, vegetables

Planning garden using GrowVeg (Year #2)

Feb 6, 2010 garden planning, spring, sprouting

Though GrowVeg worked great for planning my garden last year, this year it became even more useful. By creating a garden plan using my template from my previous year not only did it save time but also showed where I should not plant certain vegetables because I planted the same family of plants in that area last year. Here is my plan for my larger plot:

I am growing much of the same as I have in past years with the addition of broccoli and Swiss chard.

For my longer fence plot here is what I am going with the following:

New in this area I am going to plan on growing some dry beans for storage as well as some green beans along with our regular cucumbers, tomatoes, and sunflowers.

I also have an area I am planning on growing herbs, though for that I am just going to wing it.

In the end it took me about 3-4 minutes to create this plan thanks to GrowVeg which I can print out and keep by the garden so I don’t have to wonder, “Now where did I plant that spinach again.”

They do have a free 30 day trial if you want to try it out this year.

Tags: cheap, herb garden, outdoor plants, tomato plants, vegetables

Average last frost dates are only right half of the time

Mar 28, 2008 indoor growbox, indoor seed starting, spring, tomato

Our last frost date in my area should have been March 24th but given the frosty mornings this past week and the fact we had snow coming down most of today it looks like this year our last frost date will fall on the other side of the bell curve. Unfortunately, I was optimistic with some of the great weather we were having earlier and planted my tomoato seeds for a much earlier move outside. The poor tomatoes are still growing in my PC grow box but starting to not look so good. As you can see from the picture below my tomato plants are in some dire need of some non-artificial light. I am afraid I might end up buying my tomato plants at my local nursery (yet again) this year. Vegetable gardening is definitely one of those hobbies which it does not pay to be a too optimistic.