Starting the Garden

Our 2015 Garden is underway and I'm excited for what we're going to be growing!

The fiance and I are super excited for this years garden! This is my first time being in a house where I can do more than what I was limited to in my container garden.

Technically, last year I was already in my house by April and did try a limited garden but I wasn't fully acclimated with the layout of the backyard and ended up planting it in the middle of a very shady spot. Oops! Needless to say, things didn't grow that well.

So, that's why I'm excited for this years garden! The fiance brings years of organic gardening experience to our relationship and I bring a new-found love of canning and preserving vegetables & fruits as well as making yummy jams and pie filling. With our combined knowledge we're planning an awesome garden for the year and pumped to get started!

As a type-A personality, I love spreadsheets. Most of the women in my family love spreadsheets. My older sister is the QUEEN of spreadsheets (no joke) and even though I'm slightly terrible at following a spreadsheet, I still love making one. Which is why I love the website SmartGardener so much. It's a super easy website that helps you categorize the seeds in your garden. You can even filter it by your region which is what I like to do.

From there, it gives you hints and tips as to what you need to do in your garden in a daily, weekly, and monthly format. For instance, it tells you when to plant inside, transplant, and harvest your plants based off of what you added to your garden. For each plant it lays out information on what type of sunlight each plant needs, watering, and any other requirements. If you want to browse plants, it provides information on where you can order the seeds, etc.

My favorite part is that you can layout your garden on a grid after putting in the dimensions of your yard and decided what kind of beds you'll be using. You can use the "recommend" section and the website will lay out the plants based on what order they recommend you lay your plants in.

Basically, the website does everything for you which is a big bonus in my book!

A few weeks ago we bought this greenhouse that has 72-seed starting pellets to use on our first round of seeds.

On top of using the website, the fiance is a gardening guru so I named off the seeds we had and he told me whether or not we could start the seeds.

To plant them, you simply fill the tray with warm (I used cold at first and was corrected by the fiance) water in order to expand the individual seed pellets.

Excuse the mess: bucket of seeds, spreadsheet, and pellets.

Then, I simply dropped a couple seeds in each one, made sure they were covered and had adequate water, and then put the clear lid on top which creates a greenhouse atmosphere.

These pellets are super easy to set up and use! For our first round we started, 24 broccoli plants, 6 brussels sprouts, 6 cauliflower (because I'm the only one who likes them), 6 pumpkin, 6 basil, and 12 dill (for making pickles, yum!).

A couple of babies sprouting while under the grow light

Granted, we're well aware that not all of the plants will grow and produce vegetables which is why we planted so many of each type.

In two weeks we'll be continuing with our second round of seeds so stay tuned to find out what else we're planting!