Holier-Than-Thou Badges

Perhaps you have a few. Such badges are common where one's interest-at-hand is different from the general population. Here are some examples of Holier-Than-Thou badges, plus an entirely-too-sarcastic-and-exaggerated-and-thus-purely-hypothetical blurb from a hypothetical holder of such a badge. The bolded indicates the Holier-Than-Thou badge.

• Point-and-shoot cameras vs. SLRs (single lens reflex)
  "Ha, good luck taking any sort of professional grade pictures with that little thing. Do you even know how to change your aperture settings? I would choke if I had to use a point-and-shoot" And further within the photography realm...



• Manual focusing vs. auto focusing lenses
  "Have fun with your precious auto focus in low light conditions, while my $500,000 focusing screen and vintage f/0.4 lens gets it perfect every time. I could never go back to auto focus."



• Making your own computers vs. buying pre-assembled computers from Dell, HP, etc.
  "My computer is so much more powerful per dollar because I didn't have to pay myself $90/hr for labor. I would choke if I had to buy an assembled computer."



• Linux vs. Windows
  "Bow before me, mortals, I am so cool because I use Linux, death to everything Windows. BTW I am non-conformist for the sake of non-conformity.
"


• Traditional board games vs. Euro/German style board games
  "I'd much rather push wooden cubes around in a non-confrontational manner than bleed you dry in Monopoly."



• Store-bought vs. home-grown vegetables
  "The vegetables from our yard are so much higher in vitamin, mineral, and antioxidant content than your store-bought vegetables. Have fun dying of cancer."

The next few get a bit more relateable to any readers we still have left, mostly because I have/had personal experience with computers, cameras, and gardening and can't think of any others. And BTW, there is a point to this post besides being a vent or a rant; I shall put it after the list which follows.

• Homeschooling vs. institutional schooling
  "My homeschooler read Cicero's Greatest Hits in its original Greek, translated Swaziland's constitution into Latin for fun during his free time, and built a particle accelerator in his closet and has collected 153g of antimatter so far. What does your public schooler do with his time?"



• Cloth diapers vs. disposable
  "Cloth diapers are better for you, better for baby, better for life, and a prerequisite to enter Heaven."



• Avoiding trans-fats vs. Not
  "Avoiding trans-fats is better for you, better for the world, and a prerequisite to enter Heaven."



• Having many children vs. Not
  "I guess those people just don't view children as God's blessings."



• Grinding your own grain vs. white flour or store-bought whole wheat flour
  "You don't grind your own wheat? No wonder you're fat and diabetic."



• Backyard eggs vs. store bought
  "I guess those people just don't view fresh eggs as God's blessings. Oh, and backyard eggs are a prerequisite for entering Heaven."



• Natural childbirth vs. Not
  "BLARGH epidural anesthesia now, methamphetamine I.V. later."

In recent years, I have become much more sensitive to exhuding a Holier-Than-Thou attitude in my writing, speech, and actions. In discussing the topic with Harmony, both of us agree that our miscarriages and fertility woes were a big catalyst in changing the way we presented ourselves. For the duration of this blog post, I will refer to the period before miscarriages and fertility as BM&I, for "Before Miscarriages and Infertility."

BM&I, it was always my (our?) intention to have more children at this point in our marriage. After all, having lots of children is an indicator of God's blessing on a married couple living in holy matrimony, and we were pretty good people, right? Well. Then June 19, 2007 happened and our lives were never the same again. October 15, 2007 happened and set in stone that our thinking would never go back to BM&I mentality.

Miscarriages and infertility dampened our self-righteous tendencies quite a bit. Pregnancies and children were no longer Holier-Than-Thou badges to be smuggly flaunted, they were more like "oh-my-goodness-what-you-have-is-SUCH-a-blessing,if-you-had-any-idea-what-it's-like-to-not-be-able-to-have-that-you-would-spend-the-rest-of-your-life-cherishing-it/her/him." Viable pregnancies were something to be maddeningly but cautiously nervously grateful for, not casually addressed as "oh another blessing here and on the way, sweet, let's see how many tons of tomatoes we got today."

We discovered that, hey, you know, it doesn't quite feel great to hear people on blogs or blog comments boasting of God's blessings and their family size and implying that smaller families were that way because they actively rejected the blessings, in light of what had just happened. And I'm sure these people (I honestly do not remember any specific instances anymore) did not intend to come off that way, but that's the way I read things during that time. Losing hope for our "Has Many Children" badge humbled us in that area, as well as all the others. If it was that unpleasant to hear self-righteousness in one area, then it must be unpleasant in others as well. After all, who wants to feel like they are being condescended and condemned because of their choice of gardening philosophy or where they get their eggs?

I wish we had not had to endure the post-BM&I period, but good came of it. This is how life is, though - God gives us trials to help refine our character. I cringe to think what my thoughts might be if we'd had a honeymoon baby and easy children born at 1 year intervals after that. "Well anyone who rejects God's blessings shouldn't cry about it when they have difficult children. Well those people [who might have untold fertility issues or whatever, none of your business] obviously are rejecting God's blessings...I mean their first daughter is 2 and the mom isn't pregnant yet..??" You get the idea. Post BM&I, there's a greatly reduced (but still non-zero, as we are sinners) probability that such presumptuous thoughts will cross our minds.

In the end, all of these Holier-Than-Thou badges might come to us. I would, of course, welcome having many children, which is the Holier-Than-Thou badge which has proven most elusive to us. But perhaps God thought that it would be better for us to take the long route there, so that we could be fully grateful for what God has given us, with much less self-righteousness than if He'd given the blessings to us right away. But even if He chooses not to give us any more children, at least we'll be much less likely to be self-righteous, Holier-Than-Thou bags of hot air.

Weeds in my backyard

I like to think that I have a rule about weed in my backyard. The rule is that if the weed is pretty, it gets to stay. If it's ugly, it must go. The rule is firmly enforced every year until about May, when days get hotter, mosquitoes start swarming, and vegetable gardening starts taking off.

But now, in March, it's fine to have nice ideals like that.

I don't understand why some plants are considered weeds. Take violets, for example. Do you see that lovely plant in the picture below? Pretty purple flowers, deep green leaves. It's a lovely plant. Why would someone want to tear it up? I certainly don't want to... which is, of course, why four years after moving into this house, there are large areas of our backyard which are carpeted with violets. They get big and weedy later on in the season, of course, but by that time they've already re-seeded the yard and a weedwacker won't do them any harm.



Another lovely "weed" is wood sorrel. The leaves look like tiny little clover leaves, and the flowers are a very cheery yellow. It's a low-growing plant, and it would fit in quite well in a flower bed. So why bother uprooting it? Just let it grow and enjoy it.



Of course, not every weed is as pretty as wood sorrel or violet. There are plenty of ugly weeds out there, and I do my fair share of weeding. But even among the eyesores of the plant world, every now and then I am surprised.

I am not very fond of henbit. It grows too tall and spindly, its flowers are too small, and fuchsia really isn't my favorite color anyway. But today, Pearl made a bouquet of flowering henbit that she had picked, and it was actually very pretty.



So even some of the lesser eyesores in the yard can be pretty in the right light. But despite the fact that the weeds in my back yard are pretty, I get the idea that most people prefer their yards to be neatly covered in grass.

Why grass?? If we are talking about invasive, impossible-to-kill plants, grass would be right at the top of the list. It's unattractive, it makes you sneeze, it's itchy, and it can sprout from nothing.

I have to conclude that our society chose grass as a cover plant for one simple reason: if you can't beat it, join it. Grass is the ultimate survivor. I was watching the Planet Earth episode on grasses, and they're indestructible. You can burn them, drown them, have a plague of locusts descend on them, or a hoard of wildebeests, and they will grow. They survive the arctic, deserts, and even pesticides. We cannot win. But, aha! If we pretend like growing grass is an art form, then we have won.

Or so I assume the thought process must have gone. Because I can see no other logical reason for having a lawn full of grass.

But honestly, if you had your choice, wouldn't you rather have a pretty carpet of wild flowers? Or am I the weird one?

More about the Garden

In the July 2009 garden update, Alice asked "How do you organically control bugs from eating your tomatoes and crops?" I wish I could say I have some magic silver bullet, but I do not. I will list a bunch of my thoughts on the matter, since I do not have the attention span to organize them all into a coherent, flowing narrative. Just because I list it doesn't mean that I strongly believe it is the cause of our lush garden.

We're Just Lucky?
We haven't really done much to prevent pests. Have they just not found us yet? Are we in an ideal ecological environment? Who knows?

No Pesticides, Organic or Not + Beneficial Insects
Whether out of laziness or being too cheap, we have not used any form of pesticides this year. The driving factor behind this policy was because we wanted lots of beneficial creatures in our garden this year. Perhaps the beneficials are doing their job? I have seen hoverflies, ladybugs, soldier beetles, praying mantises, anoles, skinks, braconid wasps, ouchy stinging wasps, leafcutter bees, and honey bees in our yard this year. I do not believe the last two on the list actually do anything to control pests. Anyways, who knows how many more beneficial creatures there are that I have not seen..

Not Hard to Keep Bugs Off Tomatoes
We have had limited success in growing heirloom tomatoes from seed ourselves. But once a tomato plant is established in our garden, it usually lives out a relatively long and healthy life. We have not yet encountered a bug that will completely decimate an entire tomato plant in a very short time span. In fact, we have observed (in our short gardening career) that tomatoes just aren't very threatened by bugs.

I can recall three pests attacking our tomatoes: tomato hornworms, leaf-footed bugs, and aphids. I don't know if there's much you can do to prevent hornworms, but they are easy enough to hand-eliminate. Leaf-footed bugs, I don't know. They only appeared at the end of the season last year, when the tomato plants were already on their way out. Aphids were not as numerous as they are on bean-type plants and did not cause any noticeable damage. If a plant is hardy and established, a few aphids will not hurt it too much, I think.

What I am afraid of though, is squash vine borers. We had a pumpkin plant that was growing nicely last year. Then we noticed some holes in stems, and then within a couple of days, it was dead. I don't necessarily mind that much if bugs eat some of my vegetables. But taking a whole plant? That's not cool.

Healthy Plants to Start With
We have applied fish emulsion sprays several times, as well as mixing in organic soil amendments before planting seedlings out. I had also intended to spray plants with compost tea, but we sort of had a baby and then while my dad was here, he dumped out the tea brewing bucket. (a small price to pay; all he did while he was here was work work work and now our house is probably worth $200 more) It seems likely that healthier plants will stand up better to slight incidences of bugs and disease.

Pest Threat Overinflated?
In our very short gardening career, we have noticed we are either really lucky, or the pest threat is overinflated by biotech companies. Aside from the one squash vine borer incident, we have not had any decimating failures due to bugs. Aphids get quite numerous on legumes, but they are always still edible.

Not to say that we never have problems...
Of course, this is not to say that we never have problems; it's just that bugs themselves have not caused us much heartache yet. We still do have thrips, aphids, squash bugs, etc. I would say that our problems come more from "failure to thrive." Many times, we have planted seedlings, and many end up staying really small and not doing anything, or they end up dying. Perhaps it's soil- or seed-borne disease, perhaps we do not water enough, perhaps we water too much. Perhaps we just don't have enough experience to even know what the problem is.

We are also growing more new things this year, such as corn, potatoes, and strawberries. Perhaps these will be more troubled by bugs. I believe that corn and potatoes are susceptible to everything and will probably die if we look at them wrong.

Garden Update - July 2009

In spite of negligence, in spite of hot dry weather, our garden has taken off.






Those are tomatoes growing in the trellis. The tallest ones are as tall as I am. Sadly, they are not one that we started from seed, but they are at least an heirloom variety (German Johnson). No ripening yet though.



Corn, among other things. Southern Gentlemen cultivar.

Garden Update - May 2009

As our garden expands, there are getting to be more pictures per garden update. This leads to garden updates becoming a bit tedious for me if I have to describe every single picture. So I will only describe the ones that have something notable, and if you have questions or comments on anything, please leave a comment.

I think we have at least 2 Eastern fence lizards and at least one variety of skink that like to hang around our yard. This is what's known as A Very Good Thing (tm). I couldn't spot any of them for pictures, but felt compelled to report it.


Left to right: bee balm, sage, lavender, yarrow, thyme, stevia (which survived the winter, and a total cut back and two uprootings, only one of which was purposeful), peppermint, oregano, thyme, blueberry. And a grapevine that I am trying to convince to grow along the fence.



Jericho lettuce (hopefully tolerant of Southern climate, considering it was developed in Israel) and American Flag leeks being shaded by our newer non-dwarf fig tree.

Peas, which seem to be greatly enjoying square foot gardening. In turn, the aphids are greatly enjoying the peas. Hopefully more ladybugs will come along and enjoy the aphids. I am using row covers to provide shade for the Winter Density lettuce.

We started these lettuce from seed ourselves. Can you believe they look so great? We had our first harvest yesterday and it was very good. Great texture and it was nice to eat something so freshly killed.


Potatoes in the garbage. I am a bit concerned about the drainage, as it doesn't seem like the garbage cans are draining well enough.

Boring picture of our fifth bed, which is beyond the backyard fence in no-man's-land. Four winter squashes, which Harmony's terrible swift sword will reduce to two. Also along the top row are 4 Korean melon seedlings, which will also be reduced to two. In the two middle horizontal rows, we have corn, 4 per square. So far I have counted 24 germinations out of 32 sowed corn thingies. We will soon be sowing corn in the bottom two horizontal rows as well.

Our green onions have flowered. (Should we not have let this happen?) I included this picture because in the front and center is one of our blackberry vines. We ordered blackberries a while ago, then sort of forgot about them and left them in the packaging for waaaay longer than we should have. Finally we decided that we should at least give them a chance, even though nothing might happen. As it turns out, two of three are looking like they will make it. This is probably a horrible place for them, but we really didn't have any suitable place to put them. Maybe I can train them to grow along the fence or make another trellis for them.

Does anyone want some tomato seedlings? We don't guarantee that they will do well, since they have been in the pots for longer than we'd like. We have no place to put them and don't want to throw them in the compost. They are totally free, you just have to come get them, or you can invite us over for dinner, or we can bring them to church (for all one of you readers who attends with us). However, the bottom two are not up for grabs. Those are doing so well and we always intended to keep those ;)

Trellises Almost Complete

All except for the one behind the fence have trellis netting. It feels quite strong and hopefully we will have some watermelons with which to test the strength. The diagonally tied nylon lines and the nylon lines connected to the fence are to prevent the trellises from leaning too far forward or backward under lots of weight. I discovered that they would do that yesterday while stress testing the trellises. I'm an engineer, after all. Still need a couple more anchor lines on a couple more of the beds.

Hopefully this summer we'll have walls of produce growing on them.

Garden Update - April 2009

We are upgrading our garden again. As you can see, we are adding trellises to each raised bed, of which we now have 5 (one behind the fence). There was a bit of a start up cost, with all the rebar, PVC pipes, lumber, and soil mix, but hopefully we will see a great increase in produce output. We have already seen a great difference with garlic, which is the only thing we have grown so far under both conventional methods and also square foot gardening methods. Two beds currently have nothing in them because we do not have vermiculite for them yet.



Herb / perennial bed is doing great. Surviving from last year are bee balm, sage, yarrow, thyme, lavender, peppermint, oregano (which is creeping more than the creeping thyme), creeping thyme (finally starting to creep), and on the very right is one of our fledgling blueberry bushes.



Overwintered bed. Garlic, onions, carrots. Now has two yellow Brandywine tomato plants and three sweet peppers (one California Wonder and two unknown heirlooms that we got as a complimentary gift from a seed company).



We bought another fig tree (brown Turkey) to complement the dwarf one (Italian honey) that we got last year. Peas and Winter Density lettuce (under the row covers) are doing great. Aphids have already found the peas, but hopefully the ladybugs that seem to pop up in the rose bush will find the buffet. The trash cans and tubs you see contain our potatoes. (the ones in the trash cans seem a bit waterlogged - we poked a bunch of drainage holes a long time ago)



Our first bed, the only one with a completed trellis. This one will have pole beans crawling on it, hopefully. Planted two paste tomato plants (Heinz) and one hot pepper in this bed.



Our little strawberry patch. Hopefully we will get a macroscopic amount of strawberries from here. Aforementioned rose bush shades them a bit.



This is what's behind our fence, in no-man's-land. It is still technically our property, so we are making use of it. Our small compost pile is on the left, and it is wonderfully and disgustingly full of big fat earthworms :D

Sign of the Times

Lately, we have heard commercials for non-hybrid seeds on the radio. It's somewhat of an alarmist advertisement, and the website has more than a survivalist feel to it. I won't give the address here, because I do not believe it's a product worthy of your money.

Okay, so it's a seed company, fair enough. Well actually, you can't just go and buy one type of seed. You have to pay $118.95 and get one big set of seeds. I'm not the family seed purchaser, but I do believe you could get all these seeds for much less than $118.95.

If you're that concerned about food security, you ought to do your research now, because there are lots of lessons to be learned in gardening...ones that you probably can't all learn in one year. And ones that you can't learn about in books. I'm sure we (in our 2.5 years of gardening) haven't learned all of them yet. You can't expect to get bountiful harvests in your first year of gardening if you just put seeds in the ground. There is a lot to learn.

Our Overwintered Spinach

That is much more than I thought we had! We'd have had to pay a fortune for organic spinach from the store. Perhaps we have paid a fortune if we are measuring by time taken to grow. We planted in September or October.

It was eaten by bugs, but not too much. Maybe we have found a good way for us to grow spinach in our climate and ecosystem. Bugs (specifically thrips, I think) have destroyed all previous attempts, but overwintering probably handles that problem.

We had this in baked ziti. It probably would've been better nutritionally to base a salad around it, but oh well. Having been overwintered, though, the spinach is nice and old and tough and tastes much better cooked. I would guess that minerals (such as the ever-important iron) hold up well to cooking, whereas vitamins are more likely to break down under cooking. Maybe 20 minutes at 375 won't be too bad for all the wonderful nutritional goodness in spinach.

EDIT: Wow, notice that those nutritional figures are for *boiled* spinach. This will be a most nutritious meal for Harmony and baby. Harmony thinks spinach salads are a relative newcomer, and that before the food industry got into marketing baby spinach, most people had it boiled.

EDIT again: PLUS, our spinach is fresh; picked about 15 minutes before being cooked. So nutrition numbers for our spinach are quite possibly higher than those quoted at World's Healthiest Foods.

Garden Update - March 2009

Here are 10 pictures for our long overdue garden update.

Harmony demonstrates that gardening is a very good activity for optimal fetal positioning.


Peas. For support, Harmony tied nylon twine across the chicken wire that we use to keep certain dogs out of the bed.


Some leftover garlic from last season popped out a few months ago, to our pleasant surprise. These will have to be transplanted when I build our fourth bed.


Peppers, tomatoes, and flowers.


Garlic, onions (both regular and multiplier), carrots, and one patch of spinach - all of them overwintered and are looking great now. This is the first time we have ever had a successful planting of spinach. Absent is the broccoli which died a horrible death over Christmas break. We ate all the cabbage, and the brussel sprouts have been harvested and are sitting in the fridge.


The right side of our herb section. It's easier to reference things from the dead center of the picture, where we have our thriving oregano (ants have made their home under it :P). Above that is some creeping thyme, which has not crept much yet. In the sunken container is peppermint. The light colored plant down and left of the oregano is lavender, which hopefully will take off this year. And at the top right of the picture, if you count over three fence boards from the right and look down a bit, you might see one of our three new blueberry bushes. Oh and I almost forgot, lots of weeds.


The left section of herbs. The yarrow is the bright green plant in the lower right quadrant of the picture and it is making a roaring comeback. Above that are two varieties of thyme, but you can't see them that well. In the approximately corresponding location of the yarrow on the left side of the picture is sage, which looks like it has survived the winter. To the left of the defunct bird bath is bee balm, which also has survived the winter.


The first raised bed that we made. I think this bed is in a shadier part of the yard, so things didn't grow as well here.


Blueberry bushling. The tomato cage is there so I won't step on it again.


What will hopefully become our strawberry patch. Fenced off to prevent certain dogs from pooping in the berry patch and from digging up strawberry plants. (I don't know why a tomato cage is in there.)

Recycled Newspaper for Seed Pots

I discovered recently that we do not have enough plastic flats for the number of seeds we want to start indoors this year. So what is a frugal girl to do? I didn't want to buy more, but I also did not want to reduce the number of plants we would be growing. And then, it hit me as I was perusing Burpee's website. I saw this item, which sells for $18 and will help you make seed pots out of newspaper. Well, I figured that there was no need to spend money to make seed pots out of free newspaper, so I started looking around on the internet for a tutorial on how to do it. And guess what - it's easy, it supposedly reduces transplant shock, and it is free (or nearly free, if you pay for your newspaper). I could just direct you to the site where I found the tutorial, but that would be no fun, right? So I'm going to make a tutorial of my own for everyone who might want to do this themselves.

First, a note of caution. Most black newspaper ink is made from soy and is not harmful for your plants. But be careful of colored ink. Some is still petroleum based and toxic. So if your newspaper (like ours) uses mostly colored ink, you might not want to use it for edible plants without first checking with the printers to make sure the ink is safe. Fortunately for us, most of the seeds I was sowing this time* were flowers for my new flower bed (yay!), so I didn't bother checking with my paper first. Okay, now time to get started.

Materials:

*One half pint canning jar, without the lid (this turned out to be a good size for our pots; you could use any size jar you want)
*Newspaper sheets, with the individual pages separated (example: if A1 and A2 are connected to A15 and A16, you want to tear them down the middle so that you have a long rectangle, not a square)
*A box of some sort to give the pots some support
*Soil
*Seeds
*Water
*A place for the seeds to germinate

Directions:

1. Fold a newspaper sheet into thirds so that you have a long, thin strip.

2. Wrap the strip around the open end of your canning jar, making sure that about half of the paper sticks out over the top of the jar.



3. Fold the overlapping paper into the jar.



4. Remove the paper from the jar, invert the jar, and press the bottom of the jar into your pot such that you create the pot's bottom.

5. Fill with soil and place into the box, making sure the pot is supported on all sides (I found that the pots do not hold their shape for very long without support and something in them).

6. Sow your seeds, water them in, and place the box in a sunny window or under a grow lamp or in a greenhouse to germinate.

When it comes time to plant them outside, you could do one of two things (and I'm not sure yet which I will do). First, you could plant the entire pot into the ground, as the newspaper will eventually decompose and allow the roots to grow out of the pot. But in my experience, this does not happen in our soil quickly enough for me to love that idea. Second option is to unravel the newspaper from the soil, and treat it sort of like you would roottrainers.

*Okay, I know I said in a previous post that we wouldn't be starting seeds until February 4th. Well, I apparently have very little willpower. I decided to start some lettuce and wildflower seeds right now. The flowers I'm starting indoors because the bed I'm planting them in will probably have lots of weed seeds germinate along with the wildflowers I'm sowing. So I divided the flowers up by type and sowed a sampling of each kind of flower. Then I plan to take pictures of each seedling as it becomes distinct and keep that on file for when I do a mass sowing. That way I'll know which seedlings are flowers and which are weeds. At least, that's the idea....

The lettuce is supposedly winter hardy lettuce, so I think we'll be safe there. Also, we have use of a sunny South-facing window this year, which we didn't last year (it was blocked by something else). So I anticipate that most of the plants will fare much better than they did last year. But I will wait until February for the peppers and tomatoes. They just didn't do well at all last year, and I certainly have the discipline to wait for better results there!

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).