Spring Garden Taking Off

Hi there,

Let me take a moment to introduce myself. My name is Elaine and I live on Murdock Rd. I am a stay at home mother of my 7 month old daughter and 5 and 7 year old boys who attend Rodgers Forge Elementary during the day. My husband and I have lived in the Forge for almost 1 1/2 years and I am always looking for ways to cut back, reduce, reuse, and recycle.

Trying to become more sustainable at home it was an obvious move to grow my own food. In addition to joining One Straw Farm CSA, I am blessed with beautiful southern exposure sun making plants and veggies thrive. As you all know space can be limited in our yards (or sun exposure) so I am also experimenting with container gardening.

This year, for the first time, I have started my plants indoors from seeds. I found an incredible see company that has a FREE catalog you can order seeds from all year long called Southern Exposure Seed Exchange. They sell every kind of vegetable, herb you can think of including flowers and cotton. My seed experiment ended up being extremely successful! Maybe too successful (and me being overzealous to get into Spring) because I was left with too many seedlings and vegetables growing too quickly that they probably could not be transplanted just yet outside due to the night time dropping temperatures.I started romaine lettuce, pickling and slicing cucumbers, 3 varieties of tomatoes (Purple Ball, Tropic, and Mortgage Lifter) and lastly shelling peas. All of these sprouted between 3 and 7 days!

One of the more successful and fast growing plant in the window was the pickling cucumbers and the Ashley slicing cucumber (a variety of cucumber that is said to do well in our region) that eventually started to flower inside. I thought they would either die on the sill or die outside trying. I decided to harden them off best I could and give them to the world fingers crossed.

So far I am lucky! They took well and the super warm days we have been having has helped tremendously. Nights are not to bad and if they are colder, I could cover them up (although I am always too lazy to do that..ha! )

Anyhow I am posting a few pictures of what we have going on so far and I will blog more about little projects in the garden as well as a few DIY stuff I find incredibly useful and time saving (not to mention $$$$ saving!!)  Wish me luck and I have never ever written for a blog before so I hope I can make it interesting, somewhat funny, and enjoyable!