Setting Up Grow Lights

If you want to save money on plants and you want to get a head start on the growing season, setting up grow lights is very simple and you can put them almost anywhere. 

I set mine up in my kitchen in an area that I am not using very much, but you can set them up in a spare room or a garage if you live in a climate that doesn’t freeze. 

I prefer to use metal shelving because it’s sturdy and easy to clean and provides great air circulation. It also has wheels on the bottom so you can move it around easily. The lights that I purchased here have a nice feature where they connect in a series. I also recommend a timer. It made my life so much easier not having to turn them on and off. 

The first year that I started my plants indoors was so much fun. Once they were big enough to start hardening off I transport them to their permanent location and set them up outside for a part of the day and bring them inside at night for a 2 days, then after that they stay out all day and all night out of direct sunlight and kept them well watered. Day 4 or 5 I plant them in their permanent spots in the garden. I know that I could probably extend the process but I get very impatient when it comes to getting things planted outside. 

When delivering them to the garden and transporting them in my vehicle, I use large clear plastic tubs that allow sunlight to shine through and recycle old cardboard boxes to keep them contained. They are also great for keeping them outdoors for those few days which protects them from the wind and other elements. It gets very windy in our climate here and you will see lots of seed pods from the tres that landed in the cups and all over the ground while I was hardening them off that year. 

I do use paper cups sometimes as I feel it allows my plants to get a little bigger and easier to handle than the tiny seed trays, plus when setting them outside to harden off I think they get dried up too quickly in tiny black trays. I like that I can also write on each of the cups as well. Since I live in a tiny apartment I don’t have room for a lot of large containers so the cups work very well for me.

 

A Snow Day with Luna

It is currently early spring and the weather is kind of funny right now. We have had some sunny days and in the 40s and then lots of snow and the temperature drops into the 20s and below. I enjoyed the day with Luna, we played in the snow. She really loves the cold and the snow. It was so cute, I would throw the ball for her, she would run to chase it and get all excited and then she would drop the ball somewhere and try and find it, sniffing it out because she would lose sight of it when falling under the snow. I am really enjoying her and she is teaching me a lot about trust. I have had some bad experiences with dogs when I was a little girl and into my adulthood and trusting large dogs has been a challenge for me. Today she was there for me and sensed that I was having a hard day, showered me with love and dog kisses. It’s amazing how she knew that I needed to relax and calmed me. I don’t think she realizes how big she is though. She likes to try and cuddle with me and puts her huge paws on me and pushes. She needs to be reminded that I need a little personal space and she can sit next to me instead. She is completely adorable and loves the attention.  

Since it has been warm and sunny in some of the previous days my spring bulbs have started to come up and the daffodils are the first ones to pop up. I picked some today and added to a vase since the heavy snowed crushed most of the ones that were blooming. I am hoping that once the sun starts to shine again the next set of bulbs that surface wont be affected by more snow. The snow is hard on them. 

It is such a joy to see these bright and cheerful flowers in the middle of the snow storm. 

Alpine Strawberries

I first became interested in growing strawberries again when my daughter told me how she found wild strawberries on her walks in Germany. I was fascinated that strawberries grow in the wild like that so I began looking up information to learn more about them and found that they are called woodland strawberries. 

Another name for them is the Alpine strawberry and though the varieties here are very different than the type that grow wild, I found that there were seeds that you could purchase and grow at home. 

The seeds that I chose were from Botanical Interests and called Red and Yellow Wonder Blend. I really liked that these did not spread by underground runners and instead were individual plants. Another part that I liked is that the package said that I should get fruit the first year. 

I started the seeds in trays in my kitchen under grow lights in February of 2023 and planted them out in the garden in May. I was happy that the plants produced fruit all summer. The fruit was unlike any other strawberry that I’ve had before. They were very small and sweet and fun picking them as a snack while I was doing other gardening chores. 

I was expecting to get more red ones but all they produced were the yellow ones. I think that I picked maybe one red one the whole summer. I am excited to see what they do this season. Right now we are still at the end of winter with very low temps so they are currently in their dormant state. 

 

Growing Lettuce from Seed

When I first thought of growing lettuce, I was discouraged because it looked complicated. Turns out that it is very easy to grow and hardy too. It did very well in the cooler temperatures. In June of 2023, we had some very weird weather here and it was my first experience around spring thunderstorms and trying to keep my garden from being destroyed.

I decided to make a cover for my lettuces out of some cloth to keep the hail from causing any major damage. 

The first storm, most of the leaves were shredded and I decided to harvest what was there so that hopefully the plant could put its energy back into growing again.

With all the amount of work that I put into seed starting and planning the garden, it broke my heart when I saw most of my initial plants suffer from hail damage. All I could do from here on was to cover some of my crops with whatever cloth I had and make to remove it on the sunny days. Thankfully most everything recovered and did very well. For many of the other plants that suffered from damage I popped a ton of seeds in the ground to make up for what was lost. 

Here is my first harvest, which was just enough to have a nice large salad for dinner. My favorite lettuce turned out to be the Green Salad Bowl. 

I bought several packets of lettuce seeds to try all pictured at the bottom of this post. All of them from Botanical Interests. The Salad Bowl Blend had a mix of both green and red salad bowl. All of the seeds that I bought were frost tolerant which I think might be very common with lettuce but I am not sure. From what I have read mostly is that they do grow better in the cooler temperatures and that was true for mine as well. 

As soon as the temperatures warmed up, my lettuce began to bolt and I didn’t have any additional seedlings to fill the place, so sadly I had to eventually pulled them out of the ground. Next time I will make sure to sow in 3 week successions for a constant harvest. On the days that I had an over abundance, I gave to neighbors and my friends. 

I started my seeds indoors about 6 weeks before the last frost and planted them out on May 12.

If you are thinking about growing lettuce and have never tried it, I highly recommend it. Not only is it rewarding to be able to eat fresh salad from the garden, but it also provides some beautiful color and interest to the garden. The other lettuce varieties that I chose from botanical interests were the Farmers Market Blend, New Red Fire, Marvel of Four Seasons, and Paris Island Cos Romaine lettuce.

 
The picture posted below was taken on June 29 and you can see just how much the lettuce filled in the space in just one month from planting. 

Meet Luna

We have a new addition to our family and garden. It’s a real blessing that she came into our lives when she did. She is a three year old Alaskan  Malamute that was rescued 2 weeks ago. She is extremely well behaved and gentle. The first week, she dug up one of the garden beds and chewed on one of the drip lines, but Im hoping that once she has a play area of her own with a place to dig that she will calm down. She has been going through some training and been watching her closely when she is outside. After I was finished with work today, I came by the garden and I put up some stakes with some string to block off some of the areas that I don’t want her to step on. So far it has worked out well. 

I also put up some short metal fencing around the spring bulbs as a deterrent to keep her little paws from venturing beyond and stepping on the flowers that are popping up. I cannot wait for the summer to share the garden with her. She has already made us feel so much calmer and happy having her around. 

Carrot Patch

Last summer was my first time growing carrots so I wanted to share a little bit of what I learned about them. I had a lot of questions about them but found there was so much information online that it helped me to be confident in trying them. I learned how to thin them out but this was a vegetable that took a lot of patience because I didn’t see any huge growth right away. The first step was waiting for them germinate after several weeks and then waiting for them to get to at least 3 to 4 inches tall before the thinning could even take place. At first I didn’t think that what I was doing was going to work but with patience they began to get bigger and was rewarded with many healthy looking carrots by the end of August. The location that I chose to grow my carrots was in a 4x4 raised bed which shared a space with beets and also sugar snap peas and some valentine sunflowers. I grew a variety of carrots, which included Danver and also a rainbow blend.  I really loved the dark red and purple variety, so for this spring 2024 garden, I purchased some cosmic purple to try and also more Danver variety because they did so well.

This is the raised garden bed that I chose to grow them in.

 

 

This is after our harvest.

Growing Beans

Deciding on the right type of bean to grow is fairly easy once you know how much space you have to work with. I researched the two different types of beans and decided that the pole bean was the right decision for me. I had so many other low growing veggie plants that I didn’t have room for the bush bean variety, and it was more about being creative and getting the most use out of the space I had to work with. 

I have always loved the idea of vertical gardening so it was an easy decision. I built a small arbor using some old fencing that the previous owners left here and made the arbor connect between two 4x4 garden boxes. At first I wasn’t sure how it was going to come together but I love how it turned out in the end. 

In the beginning I started indoors with some seeds in pots and the first ones that I planted out were eaten up by some kind of pest, so I decided to try again and popped a ton of seeds in the ground at the base of the fencing to make up for what I had lost.  They were very slow to germinate as the shade from the arch was an issue at first but with time they took off and eventually filled in very nicely. 

I grew cantaloupe on the opposite side of the arch which did very well. Both were planted in separate boxes, so they did not share the same soil. Typically if you grow them in the same soil they will help each other.  Since beans add nitrogen to the soil and the cantaloupes thrive on nitrogen rich soil, they make good companion plants, but I did not plan it this way. They were grown in completely separate boxes but sharing the same trellis.

It was fun picking beans overhead and I loved how it created so much privacy from the front of the yard. I also added some small solar fairy lights which added a lot of charm to the garden in the evenings. I will definitely be growing beans again in the same box, but the cantaloupe will have a different home this summer in a location that gets more sun and heat. The beans attracted so many pollinators. There were a lot of hummingbirds, hawk moths and wasps. I was stung one day by a wasp when I was picking beans and that was not a fun experience. Got me right through my gardening gloves and was very painful!

The hummingbirds were very active and fun to watch as they zipped back and forth between the beans to the flowers. They also were fun to observe when they used the arch as a shelter and sat on the vines resting when they needed to. I really enjoy the wildlife that the garden brings and how we can get up close to learn more about these beautiful creatures.

  

The video below shows a hummingbird resting on one of the vines under the arch and he is grooming his feathers.

The beans that I grew in the photos above are Blue Lake Pole Beans from Botanical Interests