What to Plant in March

Plant Everything in March! This is the month you've been waiting for! (Here's How to Start Seeds)

If you live in the mountains or "Up North" plant some spinach and Swiss Chard. If you aren't expecting any more snow, plant lettuce, beets, carrots and radishes. If you live in the tropics, plant tomatoes.
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Non-tropics dwellers: plant tomatoes anyway, just do it indoors. It is time to...

Happy March!!

Found a four-leaf clover!

Garden Plan: What To Grow

Procrastination Pays Off! 

Growing compost isn't my idea of time well spent, although psychologists might argue. The food pantry gets a good bit of our crop each season as well, but it's the stuff I keep and never use that lingers in my conscience. So, seed and plant selection is becoming more important as I get older and less willing to grow compost.

Plants and seeds are safe, or getting the boot by these criteria:

1. What do we eat when it's laying around the kitchen?
Or in the "Go Rot" drawer of the fridge?
Lets face it...

What to Plant in February

Yeah, same photo every year!

The inventor of Valentines day was not a gardener. Who would dream up addressing envelopes with the new Spring light streaming through the windows? 

February is a month of potential. Just not the kind where somebody else is going to fulfil your romantic dreams. Only you know your dreams. Buy your own candy and quit expecting other people to read your mind.

Now, for the garden... a great topic for February. 

Seeds. Start them.  
I know you haven't planted your seeds yet. If you had a field full of winter veggies, you wouldn't be reading this.  
Plant them...

Sprout Dead Seeds In The...

Rain is your garden's best friend, best fertilizer, most exhilarating growth producer. Seeds that don't stand a chance of growing, stand a chance in the rain.

Spinach seeds are sprouting on the remains of a dead...

It's a Garden, Not a Grave

It started like this...

The strawberry bed was gone. Even the wooden edging that framed the raised bed could not be distinguished.

But the rain had come.
It rained again.
And again.
And again.

It rained so much, the lettuce was pale and stringy like it had been grown in the dark, because it was. No sun for weeks.

So the strawberry bed must be soft, right?
Oh yes. The strawberry bed was soft. 
Soupy oatmeal, the kind my kids skip breakfast about, with way too much water, is almost...

How to Grow Carrots

Notice all the grass? Carrots don't mind.

Carrots grow easily, when they grow.
They can be finicky though, so if you are having some trouble, it's not you. It's the carrots.

Whole field of carrots!

You know that part in Pirates of the Caribbean when Jack Sparrow cheats in a sword fight against Will? And when Will gets mad, Jack shrugs and says, "Pirate." As if Will should assume that if he has any interaction with a pirate, it's a buyer beware kind of situation?

Yeah. Carrots.

They grow from seed, because they are root crops. Transplanting root crops is supposed to be unsuccessful. Don't believe that either, but start the carrots from seeds anyway. Right where they are going to live forever. Because it might take that long.

Or it might take six weeks. Carrots.

I thought they were dead, so I planted squash in the beautifully prepared bed. I did all that work, right? 

The squash came up. I was about to weed them....carrots. 

Carrot Growing Directions: