Woohoo!

Guess what came in the mail today???

My seeds!!

She points out the tomatoes and says "They're yucky!" Sooo...something to work on.

I'm oddly excited about that spinach

The wee tot is underwhelmed

I am not a patient woman

So I told Ry that I needed some seedling trays for the garden this year.  

He got me lots!  Like I said earlier, I've been getting antsy for spring, so we started some last week.  I also started some more this week (Hey, I need something to entertain the toddler early in the morning on Saturdays when her daddy is still asleep...)

I have to admit, I've been a little obsessive about checking them.  Actually, I feel a bit like the little kid anxiously waiting for the cookies to come out of the oven, watching through the little window on the oven door (or was I the only kid who did that??).  That first day, I swear I checked on them 10 times an hour. "Why has nothing happened yet?" I kept wondering.  Of course, this might be a sign of how bad my attention span is and possibly a sign of what the effects of an instant gratification sort of culture...but anyway.

 Patience (HA!) paid off in the end.  These were taken on Wednesday.  We have little seedlings, ladies and gentlemen!  The first thing up was a spinach.  Actually, it looks like that's the only spinach seed to have germinated to date.  Bah.

"So she stares like this for EVER and stops paying attention to me"

The first seedling tray sort of traveled around the house looking for the warmest spot, since we didn't have the sun lamp set up for it yet.  Here, Sally demonstrates what I do around newly planted seeds.

"You're ridiculous, Mom."

 

 So Ry actually found the best spot in the house for the seed trays.  This is a north facing window, but it's sunny and better protected from drafts than the southern windows in the house (due to plastic on the window).  And, it's even near an outlet, which are a hot commodity in our house.

Reeeach for the light, my little ones!  REACH!!!

Black Krim tomatoes are the bottom row, followed by three rows of basil

Checking in on the seeds planted yesterday.  They totally should have started sprouting by now.

Some pictures from last year's garden

 So I wanted to post some pictures from last year's first attempt at gardening in this new space.  Before we bought our house, it was apparently, used as a rental and the yard suffered from a giant amount of neglect.  With a wee tot in tow, plus both of us working full time, there's really only so much we can do in a weekend, so things are going slowly, slowly.
You can see the yard is kindy junky, but also here's one shot of the square foot garden Mom and her SO built for us and installed.  We've got a trellis up on it to help save space when it comes to growing things like tomatoes, cucumbers and peas.  By the end of the season last year, ONE tomato plant had taken over that entire 6 ft x 4 ft trellis.

Peas.  The wee tot liked picking them straight off the vine so often, we frequently had a pea shortage.

Better shot of the square foot garden

 So this is the corner of the back yard. Apparently the previous owners used the patio as an extra parking space.  Wheee.  It's also where we get the strongest and longest sunlight, so I'm planning on making the most of it and doing a lot of container gardening on it this year.  We grew one brandywine tomato in a big pot here last year (you can see it in the background) and that worked fairly well, however, during giant storms, the pot had a tendancy to fall over.  And we needed to water nearly daily when it wasn't raining, as the tomato took a TON of water. The plans this year include adding at least two more tomato pots for the patio.  And I have plans for a dwarf variety of pea.

 This is mostly weeds, walking onions and mint.  It's been the transplant bed for the past two summers, but we're turning it into vegetable garden.  I have to admit, I'll be sad to see the walking onions go, but I'm hoping I can save some and move them elsewhere.  They're just so very useful and require no work.  As for the tranplants that are in here...the first job as soon as we can dig in the soil is to find new places for them around the yard.

Our yard is narrow, but deep...

Oh yes

It's winter.  We've just had a fairly large snowstorm.  In fact, it shut down the University of Minnesota, which never happens.  And I'm feeling antsy about starting my garden.  The problem is that at least according to the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum website, I should be holding off on planting even tomato seeds until mid-late April.

Well, I've never been good about following rules when I don't see the reasoning behind it. I understand that here in Minnesota we have the potential for frost until Memorial Day weekend and gardens should be planned accordingly.  However, in recent years, particularly here in the city, we haven't seen frost past, oh say, the beginning of May (at least that's what I'm telling myself, don't spoil my delusions right now, this winter has been long.) Which is why on Friday night, I started a tray of seeds.  I really only wanted to start 4 tomato seeds, telling myself that I was really only trying to see if they're still viable (they were purchased last spring), but well, I have a curious and extremely persuasive 2 year old. And one thing led to another and, it was either plant a tray of 20 seeds, or forfeit the little soil disks to my daughter's toy box.
So now, I've started 12 basil, 4 spinach, and 4 tomatoes.  I know it's early for the spinach and basil, but I was having trouble with the spinach seeds germinating last year, so I want to see how good the seed still is, and the basil...well, I have a lot of basil seed and I never seem to grow enough.  We'll see if we can't get a head start on that.
Pictures coming as soon as I figure out how to download pictures from our nifty new camera