Long Overdue Garden Update

This post serves as our November, December, and January garden updates. Our winter garden is mostly thriving, especially considering the neglect it has seen recently. While we were gone, some sort of foul weather must have visited our house. As you can see, our turnips, broccoli, and radishes have died. This poor bed has almost nothing left alive in it.



This bed still looks alive and well! The Brussels sprouts, cabbage, carrots, spinach, garlic, and onions all appear to have weathered the, well, weather. The Brussels sprouts have lots of little, tiny sprouts growing underneath all those leaves. Some day, if I understand this correctly, the stem will shoot up and the sprouts will fill out and be ready for my consumption (JunkMale has decided that I can be the lucky one to eat all those yummy Brussels sprouts). Some of the cabbage has already been harvested for use in colcannon soup. The spinach may still be alive, but it is nowhere near the quality we had hoped it would be. Three or four attempts at growing spinach has taught us that it does not thrive well in our backyard. Or perhaps we're just doing something wrong?


So far we are very pleased with the performance of our raised beds. You can see below the difference between the carrots we planted in our shallow, rocky soil and the ones we planted in our beds. Obviously, the beautiful one was harvested from a bed and the short ugly ones were harvested from our soil!



The biggest point of excitement (for me, at least!) is that Sunday was exactly 1 month until we start our first seeds indoors! Our peppers will be started indoors on February 4th. If you remember from last year, we started our seeds much earlier, and this turned out to be a mistake. Not starting the seeds early. It is possible to start seeds early indoors and get a head start on the growing season. But the problem is that our house is cold in January, and doesn't get much sunlight. So we tried to compensate by shining grow lights on the plants. This worked for a few weeks, but the grow lights just didn't allow most of our seedlings to thrive for the months between sowing and planting out in the garden. So this year we pushed back the seed starting dates by about a month, which will hopefully yield better results.

So, any advice on maintaining a garden with a baby on the way? Mom, I know you did some of that because I've seen pictures of you in the garden with a hoe in your hand when you were Very Pregnant with me - and I was born just at the start of the growing season (late April).