Spring Planting

Well, spring continues it's warm and welcome march. We've had a windy and stormy one so far. Thankfully the hardneck garlic that is a foot tall can handle the abuse. The onions are hanging in there, as are the cabbages and lettuces. Peas are up, and would be doing better if we could get some rain. There's lots of rain forecasted for this weekend, so hopefully they'll take advantage of that.
I've been planting seeds, as often as I can. Most of the beans are in, my usual mix of Empress and Purple Podded bush beans. I also have a lot of Runner beans planted, in an effort to tempt pollinators into my garden, and shade some weeds out of a trouble spot.
Potatoes are in the ground and hopefully going to sprout soon. (If I didn't kill them by putting them in too early.)
I have parsnips, beets, bok choi, radishes and swiss chard planted as well.
The tomatoes and peppers are still happy in the greenhouse. They won't go out for another couple of weeks.
I don't do all my planting at once. I never have the time for it. So, I'll plant one or two things a day, and somehow it all still gets done. I make sure I'm working in order of cold tolerance, so I spend the blustery early days planting peas, and then when things warm up I choose according to season length. (Things that need every last day of our short season get priority over those that only need half the season.) Sometimes I'm better at this than others, but that's my general plan every year.

Jess mentioned in a previous post how much she enjoyed my winter storage experiment, and how nice it will be to see it from the beginning. There is a lot of truth to that statement. Winter storage planning does start now with these small seeds. Really, it started last fall. I planted my hardneck garlics last October, and that's what I'll eat this winter. I do keep my storage numbers in mind when I'm planning the year's garden. I know, for example, that I want at least 50 garlic heads to get me through the year. I can't physically grow that many, but I easily have the room for 2 rows of 15, which gives me 3/5ths of my yearly garlic needs, from my front lawn. Leaving only 20 that I'll need to buy from a local farmer. Knowing that number makes it easy for me to buy all at once, when the price is right, instead of 1 or 2 at a time every week. To continue the example, I know that I have some jars of tomatoes left, but no jars of green beans. So, this spring I'm devoting more space to green beans and a little less to tomato vines. I always end up buying a bunch of tomatoes anyway to do things like sauce and maybe this way I won't have to buy any green beans. (And maybe my potatoes are dead and I can plant tomatoes in that spot! hahaha) Parsnips handled winter so well that of course I have another row of those planted in the garden. Beets though I'm pretty sure I won't store, I just want some for variety, so those are in a container, where I'll (hopefully) remember to harvest them nice and small and tasty.

You can certainly get by with just throwing seeds in the ground, and if you're just starting your garden adventure, there's no better place to start. But, if you want the most bang for your buck, and return on your time, put some thought into how you want to use the veggies, when, and in what amounts. :-)

Snow tonight

Well, I finally finished the previous post. It took me 10 days, so I hope y'all like it. There was a lot of slogging through agriculture reports and organizing it into something (hopefully) coherent. For posts like that one I do try to include sources as much as possible. One thing the internet excels at is providing a platform for anybody to write anything they want, and sometimes it's hard to filter out the nut-job opinions from the fact-based theories. So, if you are curious about any of the statements in that post, feel free to follow the links and make your own opinions. I do try to make the post sturdy enough to stand on it's own without the reader having to review all of the source material first. It's hard to gauge that sometimes, so if you have feedback, I'm very receptive to that.

Looking ahead in blog land, spring is usually a hectic time for me and this year is no exception. But, I've got a couple of hefty posts like the last one I'm slowing working on, as well as a wrap up of the winter food storage experiment that's a bit overdue. Mixed in will be my 200th post!!!! As well as updates for my extended family who probably only read my blog for those posted pictures of the cute grandbaby.

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As the title suggests, we have snow forecasted for tonight. boooooo. The Dakotas have a foot of the white stuff in some places, and parts of Nebraska are under a blizzard warning. I've got seeds in the ground (peas and greens so far,) as well as potatoes and onions. The garlic is 4 inches tall! I'll review my books this evening and drape my garden blanket over part of the garden tonight. Right now I'm thinking the potatoes will be most in need of snow protection, as the greens are in the cold frame and the garlic can take the cold. If I change my mind, I'll let y'all know. :-D

Easter frosts are a grower's worst nightmare. A few years ago we suffered through an Easter Blizzard here in Iowa. These hard late frosts can do a lot of damage, not only to tender sprouting seedlings, but to fruit trees and perennials as well. So, it's always a tricky dance to get seeds in early enough that they have time to mature properly, but not so early as to be damaged by hard late frosts. Tricks and tools like my cold frame, and garden blanket, as well as mulches and floating row cover can help mitigate a lot of the damage. They do take some trial and error, but I find they are very useful.

I'm hopeful that we're spared the worst of this storm, but there's no way to tell. Spring weather here in NW Iowa is very active. We had 70's last week, which brewed up quite the storm, and spawned tornadoes just 30 minutes SE of us. We had the wind and the hail, but thankfully no tornadoes. Lots more wind and rain this week, and now snow. Gardening here is not for the faint of heart. Really, even living here keeps us on our toes. I was in bed fully dressed, listening to that hail last weekend. I knew exactly what a storm like that could produce and I had the baby in bed with me, and the emergency kits ready for a dash to the basement. I knew we were prepared though, which spared me the worst of the worrying.


Pictures out of the tornado flattened town, just serve to remind me of the very stark realities that my emergency prepping is designed to handle. Mapleton residents had 10 minutes warning before the tornado flattened 50% of their town.

This snow storm that's headed our way is full of the heavy wet snow that loves to collect on tree branches and bring down power lines. Just West of us in Nebraska, power went down in several place overnight. That could just as easily be us, and we're certainly not out of the woods yet.


Anyway. Back to the happy spring gardening news.
My flat of tomatoes and peppers has pretty little sprouts up in most of the cells. A promising beginning, hopefully I'll keep enough of them alive to donate some seedlings to the plant sale that my Garden Club hosts. I'd also like to have enough on hand to donate to neighborhood children that want a plant to grow. There are a few who have a small green thumb, and their parents are kind enough to let them grow a little patch garden.

I'm having a bit of a problem with damping off in my new little greenhouse. Mostly I think, because of the restricted airflow in there. Once all the little seeds sprout, I think I'll try rolling up the door to allow more airflow. Hopefully the baby and cat won't take that as an invitation to create havoc in there.

As soon as the weather calms down I'll be putting the flats outside in the hardening off area that Dave and Rowen put together for me. (It's a big window from my parents, propped against the house in the sun.) That will help keep the damping off to a minimum I think.

Fresh Tomatoes in December

I love love love the veggies provided by the garden. Even though we're in zone 4, I still managed to extend my tomato season through December this year. :-)

The plants were pulled months ago, but the bag full of green tomatoes I picked on Samhain ripened beautifully (with only a 10-15% loss) and we've been eating on them for the past month. The last half dozen of those are in the fridge and will be gone in another week I bet. It's amazing to look out at the snow and ice and then eat homegrown tomatoes for dinner. Slightly shriveled and not as tasty as the ripened on the vine, they are still delicious and free.

Other veggies trickling in this month include a couple of kohlrabis and the parsnips that I'm "storing" in the ground. :-D Storing in the ground is a valid storage technique for parsnips, but really I'm just being lazy. I should dig up at least a few to have on hand for cooking and evaluation.

My cabbages didn't do so great this fall. I blame the root-bound, sad looking seedlings that I got at the local plant sale. They didn't make good heads, and they all kicked the bucket at the first frost. Total fail. I will probably try to grow my own cabbage seedlings this year. While the timing is always tricky for me, (they take a long time to grow) the quality will be worth it. Starting seedlings early enough for cabbages means I might try again with onion seedlings. I only tried those once, and when it was time to plant out all I had was onion flavored grass. :-) We'll hope for better timing this go-round. Although, really, I shouldn't put all the blame on the sub-par seedlings. My garden was a little small this year and instead of expanding, or finding another place for them, I crammed the cabbage seedlings into small nooks and crannies, and that's not the best way to treat them. I also forgot to side dress them with compost. (If I'm remembering correctly they need some mid-season love.) So, next year I'll try again. Unless we move again I imagine I'll make the garden bigger next spring, and I'll add in enough room for the cabbages to have their own row so I won't neglect them.

The cold frame is in use again this year. I found myself 4 bricks short for some reason, and sadly unable to find 4 bricks at any of the local hardware stores. (Not even at the Lowes in the big city south of us!) So, the poor thing has gaps in the construction, but I have some lettuce bravely holding it's own in there, as well as a small cabbage that's mostly just hanging out. I'm not expecting a lot from the frame this year, it's the first year this far north, and once again it's mostly in try-and-see mode. Plus, I have plans for bigger and better ones, just waiting on time/money/wood. :-D Isn't that always the truth.

Don't give up on gardening, if you're someplace with snowy-death winters. Besides the season extending tricks that can lengthen your season, winter is a great time to plan for spring's busyness.

Garden Buddies Oct

Hello again garden buddies.
The joy of fall gardening is upon us, harvesting winter squashes, pumpkins and potatoes.
We had record high temps this last weekend and my tomato plants were obliging enough to ripen a whole box of tomatoes for me. Dave and I cooked up one last batch of tomato sauce, we were a little lazy though and just tossed the jars in the fridge instead of canning them. They'll last a couple of weeks, which is good enough. We had a frost scare a couple of weekends ago, and I took the time to cover my tomato babies before going to bed for 2 nights. Now, I'm glad I did. This is one of those judgment calls that gardeners have to make. Yes, you can cover your tomatoes and save them from light frosts for a couple of days, but if you find yourself out for a week or 2 doing nothing but covering and uncovering tomatoes, it might be time to let them die gracefully. Grab the nice looking green tomatoes if you have decided to let them give up the ghost. Those greens will ripen on your counter in most cases and be almost as tasty as the vine ripened ones. (almost)

Fall gardening is often a lot of prep work for spring. It's a great time to pull out or hoe under the old, dead and spent. Cover everything in a nice thick layer of compost to protect the soil from harsh winter conditions. I have 4 or 5 cabbages heading up in the random corners where I squeezed them in this summer. They spent most of the summer really cramped with their neighbors, but now that we've got a bit of frost, their neighbors are declining and the cabbages are just hitting full stride. The Kale is still going strong. I'm hoping the parsnips are sweetening a bit in their little row. (The one I dug a month ago was a little tough.)

Garlic planting time is here as well. Plant them one clove at a time, pointy side up and cover with a think layer of mulch/compost to keep them from heaving up in the spring freeze/thaw cycle. At least 4 inches, and you can't go wrong with 6. I've got about half of mine planted, and hopefully I'll get the other half planted next weekend.

If you're overwintering biennials for seed production, make sure you give them a nice warm bed of straw too. I have some turnips I'm attempting this with. They have 4inches of straw on them.

I'm also checking out my cold frame and making the little last minute adjustments to it so it can perform it's function this winter. I have a couple of little cabbages in there, and some lettuce. It won't be anything extravagant, but it'll keep me entertained. :-D I'll probably need to start putting the cover on it at night this next week.

The last farmers market day is Weds. I need to wrap up my preparations for the Winter Storage Experiment. :-D

Garden Buddies: Fall planting time!

I know, I just finished planting all the summer veggies. But July is half over and that means it's time to start seeds for the fall harvest.
Fall plantings can really make a gardening season worth the time and effort. Seeds are less likely to wash away, seedlings are less likely to rot, and there's lots of light to get plants off to a good start.
It's important to pick veggies and greens that can handle the cold up here in zone 4 and zone 5 Iowa. Get them started and growing by August, and they'll be at a good mature growth when the first frosts come and the light starts to fade. So, I'm thinking a little bit of beets, and some carrots and spinach and lettuce. The greens don't need to be started yet, they can wait till August, but the beets and carrots need to be started ASAP. Other options for fall plantings include kale, cabbages, parsnips and radishes.

Thanks to Donna my garlic grower for the season, babysitting my babies back in Des Moines. She sent me some pictures of the bulbs, and I'm so excited to harvest them, it'll be soon! The picture above is one of my hardnecks that was planted last fall.

Seed saving reminder, if you left peas on the vine to dry and save, now is the time to start gathering those dried pods and separating out the dried peas to store for next year. Don't be afraid to leave some of the pods on, especially the higher up pods, as peas will mature from the ground up and the top once might not be totally done and ready to save yet. Wait till they are dry and crunchy. Lettuce and spinach from spring should be finishing their flowering and starting to set some seed, but they're definitely not done yet.

Go ahead and try some fall gardening, you might find you really like it. I'm making a couple of cold frames next month, so expect posts and pictures on that, maybe I'll get some greens to survive until Yule. :-)

Garden Buddies: The End of Lettuce Approaches

No, not a doomer prediction on the state of our nation's lettuce farming. Merely a reminder to my garden buddies to start watching for bolting on your lettuces.
Lettuces and spinach will bolt, or go to flower, once weather gets hot. Different varieties have different temps that trigger it, but once it starts the lettuce goes down hill in taste. You'll want to check out the middles of your lettuce heads, that's where the flower stalk starts. It'll be thick, with smaller leaves and will start to get some height to it. You have two options once that flower stalk starts forming.
1) pick everything and toss it in a container in your fridge to enjoy over the next week or two
2) mark a head or two for seed production and leave them in peace to flower and go to seed.

If you are going for seed production, choose a head that's well formed, with not too much harvested from it, and one that's in a good place. The lettuce head will need water and light as it forms flowers and seeds, so you don't want it to be too crowded. Lettuces will cross pollinate, but I've never had a lettuce sprout that I didn't like, so I never worry about keeping the genetics clean. The flower stalk can get as tall as 2 or 3 feet, depending on the variety. A little bamboo stake to tie the stalk to can come in handy to keep things looking tidy, but it's not required. Flowering lettuce can be quite pretty, shortly afterward the seed will start to set. Late in fall I'll remind you to gather the dried seed stalks and show you how to clean them.

Beans should be sprouted, if you have holes in your bean rows, pop another seed in the ground, if there's space where your lettuce has all been harvested, put another bean row in. Beans work great as succession crops, especially if they are bush beans.

We're coming up on the heat of the summer, do you have your mulch in place around thirsty tomatoes? Beans will thank you for some mulch too.
Potatoes needed a hilling last week for me. They need hilling with every 6 inches of growth. I hill them up with a combination of compost and top soil, use what you have, just keep those spuds out of the sunlight.
Radishes are filling up a container in my fridge.
Turnips and Kale probably need some thinning, I know it's hard to kill the little baby plants, but keep in mind how big you want the veggie to grow, and make sure they have room to get that big. If you had fantastic germination on carrots or parsnips or beets, they'll need thinning too.

Garden Buddies, Last Frost Date

Well my garden buddies, we are past the last frost date. Now's the time to begin prep work on your warm weather veggies. Some years you can plant them out now. Given the cold-rainy ickiness that we've had for the past week, I would recommend you let things dry out at least a week before planting out. Tomatoes and peppers and eggplant, they all get really sulky in cold wet soil. It's much better to wait until things are really warm than to push it and send them all into shock.

But, you can start putting them on your porch during the day, and gradually start acclimating them from greenhouse conditions to garden conditions. They have to get used to things like wind and real sun and that is easier done when you can bring them back inside at night or during inclement weather. You can also start prepping the soil where the warm weather transplants will be set. Aerate the soil, with a hoe or a fork, add some compost, knock down any large weeds. If you want it really warm and toasty for the transplants you can pin down some black plastic to solarize the soil. (I don't, but some recommend it.) You'll want some sort of mulch on hand for when you transplant tomatoes. The best way to keep them disease free, (Dad wisdom here) is to never let the leaves get wet or muddy. Straw works, landscape fabric works, but have it ready so you can put it around the transplants as soon as they go in.

Beans can probably be planted as soon as the soil is dry enough to work with. But, if you prefer to plant by moon sign, I'd wait another week or two until the moon is waxing again. If you don't want to have to deal with trellis or poles, I highly recommend bush beans. Unlike the pole beans, bush beans will harvest in waves, 2 most years, 3 in an excellent year. This makes picking easier as you don't have to search every day for beans hiding in trellis, just watch the section and pick the whole thing once or twice.

Lettuces and other greens should be a few inches tall at this point, if not larger, with several true leaves and no flowers. Now's a good time to side dress them with some nice compost or worm castings, and a good time to nip weeds before they get out of hand. (If you have lambsquarters, chickweed, dandelions or purslane I'd recommend you leave them as they are just a nutritious as the lettuce and spinach you planted.) If you've got small little lettuce plants that are already sending up a flower stalk, that means they got stressed somehow and are "bolting," going to seed, and will probably be bitter.

Other things that should be up and going strong: Potatoes, onions, peas, garlic. If something isn't up by this point, I would recommend you dig down and do some investigating. It might be that the plant rotted, or didn't root right or was damaged somehow. Plug the holes with spare plants if you have them, or random plants/seeds. No need to let good real estate go to waste. Garlic and Onions will appreciate a nice layer of straw, to help keep all the nice rain from evaporating away. I usually don't put it on before the LFD because I don't want things to rot.

Carrots, Radishes, Parsnips, Kale, Turnips, Kohlrabi, these are all things where you might have started some a couple weeks ago and they are up in baby leaves, or you can start some now. These all do well with succession planting, so if you want, leave some room to do another row in a couple of weeks. Also set aside some seed to do a planting of these at the end of summer for fall harvest.

Cabbage and broccoli transplants can go in any time now. I highly recommend you cover them with some row cover or Reemay. In our area Imported Cabbage Moths will lay eggs on brassicas and their cute green babies will eat them to lace. A simple row cover over the plants will keep those pretty white mamas off your tasty brassicas. It also serves to ease the transition for those transplants, lessening the sun glare and temperature swings and wind exposure.

There you have it. Get out there and garden! The moon is almost new, which is a great time to transplant. Greens and lettuces and peas should be harvestable in a couple of weeks if they aren't already. Veggies are coming! I can hardly wait.

Garden Buddies Soil Amendment

To amend or not to amend. I know you've heard the phrase, soil amendment. But it can be overwhelming, especially as a new gardener. What should you add and when? I hope to answer at least a few of these questions and point you in the right direction.
Sometimes you won't need to amend. If you are lucky enough to have a healthy raised bed garden, you can go several seasons before needing to add anything to the soil. The reason being, a raised bed has less problems with nutrients washing away and is likely to be uncompacted and full of air and moisture.
Crop rotation can lessen your amendment needs. Some veggies/flowers are heavy feeders, some are light feeders and others fix nutrients into the soil, like peas and beans. A good book can tell you which does what, so I won't post all of them here. (I like "The Gardeners A to Z Guide to Growing Organic Food") If you rotate your heavy feeders to grow where you had beans last season you can lessen the nutrients you need to add to make those plants happy.
Most literature about soil amendment frames the concept in NPK language. NPK stands for Nitrogen, Phosphorous and Potassium. This whole way of thinking about soil amendments comes from the Green Revolution and sees soil only as a sponge-like medium, inert and good only for holding the petroleum based fertilizers that deliver massive doses of NPK. Furthermore this framing leaves out micronutrients and minerals and beneficial insects and mycelium. It's like saying humans need only fat, carbs and protein. :-P
But, it's what the industry uses, so here's my advice. If you must buy some packaged soil amendments, aim for well balanced. There are cases, particular soil types/plant types/problems where you want something heavy on a particular nutrient, but for the most part you won't.
Your best bet is to just find some well-rotted compost locally. Sometimes your city will have a composting service, sometimes local garden centers will have local compost, or you can make your own! (Making your own takes time though, so you can start it this year and have it ready by fall or spring of next year, but not in time for early spring amendments this year.) Layer that good moist black compost an inch or two deep over your garden. You can mix it in with a tiller or a shovel, or just leave it, it'll do its job either way. :-D
Its job is to increase nutrients and organic matter in the soil, generally making your veggies happier. Nutrients for them to grow with, and organic matter to help with moisture control, feed beneficials and to keep the soil friable.
You can go overboard with amendments. You can 'burn' your plants using amendments with too high Nitrogen. You can also encourage the 'wrong' type of growth, i.e. plants growing more leaves than fruit. If you stick with compost you'll find it really hard to do either of these things though.
Another great amendment is worm castings. I keep a tub with red worms in a mudroom off my kitchen. When it gets too cold for the compost pile, (compost needs warmth to properly decompose) I switch to the worm bin for food scraps. More about keeping worms later, for now, just know that worm castings make great amendments. You don't need a couple of inches worth either, just a light covering does the trick. You can also make worm casting tea for a liquid fertilization. Google "worm casting tea" for directions and usage.

Some specific amendments I use:
Tomatoes -- heavy feeders-- when transplanting the seedlings to my garden I dig a DEEP hole, I add in a tablespoon or two of worm castings and two crumbled egg shells. Then I bury that transplant deeply. The eggshells provide Calcium to ward off Blossom End Rot.
Peas -- not a heavy feeder, but they tend to do better with nitrogen-fixing soil inoculate. It's a powder you can buy almost anywhere that sells peas.

Don't forget to spread some compost around your perennials too.
I hope this shed some light on the complicated subject of soil amendments. Now is a great time to add them, as the snow melt is done and the ground is thawed. A second feeding can be beneficial for many veggies around flowering time. Again, a good book can tell you which veggies will respond well to that.
Happy gardening!

Potatoes!

My potatoes are in the ground! I have two rows, roughly 8 feet each. I have Yukon Gold and Desiree planted. It rained all night last night, and will rain somemore today and tonight. That should settle them nicely in place.

We're 3-4 weeks away from the LFD, so if you don't have potatoes in yet, do it! Now's prime time to plant spinach, lettuce, peas, onions and potatoes. All these crops have some cold hardiness to them, so they wont mind the cold and rain. The spinach and peas really need to go in early, because they don't do so well with summer heat. Sometimes up here in zones 4 and 5 it can be tricky to find that sweet spot, too early and they can rot in the ground or wash away, too late and they barely get up and put leaves on and summer heat withers them or makes them bitter. How do you find that sweet spot? Is it luck? Instinct? Skillz?

I'll tell you my secret. Succession planting. For example, you plan on a 2 foot row of spinach, (that's not a lot, I would plant more, but I digress) plant the first foot of seed early, then wait about 2 weeks and plant the second foot. You have a great chance of getting both up and sprouted and it's never a bad idea to have crops available to harvest in waves. Should mother nature get uppity and decide to end spring early, she may turn your second planting bitter before they can mature, but there's a good chance your earlier planting will mature soon enough to harvest. I do succession planting with several of my favorites. It works great to keep the garden productive, because it can work in a small space where another crop has just been harvested, or where another crop will grow into later (think vines).

So, try a couple of plantings this spring, and see what happens!

Other things to do this week:

-Keep early spring weeds under control. It's easier to get them now as babies.

-Get fencing and cages squared away. Now's a great time to bang stakes in the ground to hold fencing and cages. The ground is soft and there's not a lot in the garden to have to maneuver around.

-Watch cold frames carefully, temps in the upper 70's can heat them up really fast, no need to steam the spinach before you harvest it!

I'll leave you with a picture from the seed swap. Drew finally emailed me the pics he snapped. Friend Brian is in the red hat, and Drew's wife is sitting on the right. The guy in black is the new gardener who supplied the space for the meeting.

Garden Buddy Series Intro

Gardening, it seems, is like a virus, and it's spreading. Both my mother and my best friend are starting ambitious veggie gardens this year and both are a little new to the endeavor. Neither are what I would call novices, so I expect they'll both do fabulously. Becky has expressed an interest in timely hints and reminders from me, and I'm thinking they won't hurt my mom, even if she thinks she only wants okra and black-eyed peas.

So, I thought to myself, "Self, I bet there are other zone 5 gardeners interested in timely reminders and hints."

So, for this growing season I will be putting out a weekly series here on the blog. Once a week I will write a detailed post about what they should/could be planting that week, what they should/could be harvesting and things to watch out for.

If you're gardening in the midwest and interested in using the information, just add or subtract a week depending on whether you live North of zone 5 or South of it. For those of you who occasionally read my blog in Texas, the information won't be as good, because we don't have the extreme hot/dry spell that y'all have in late summer.

We're coming up quick on the Last Frost Date for our area. I'm North of zone 5, and my last frost date is May 10th, Mom and Becky are probably closer to May 1st for Frost Free. I have seedlings happily growing in the light of the dining room window, supplemented with one of my grow lights. Here's my work area as I was trying to set up flats for potting up the seedlings which I will need to do in the next week I think. The tomato seedlings all have one set of real leaves, and usually around 2 sets of real leaves is the time to pot up.

My work area is just the dining room right now, but there are a couple of places where I hope to move my seed starting area to. Either the small mudroom or down in one of the basement rooms. Nothing is entirely unpacked yet, so it's all a little bit make-do right now.

Tips for starting seedlings in our area:

- Don't start too early. Especially with tomatoes, if they get too big for their britches you might be tempted to plant them out too early, and tomatoes get really unhappy really quickly when planted in cold wet spring ground. Watch for the Last Frost Date and aim to have 6-8 week old transplants for the weekend following that LFD. Other types of seedlings may require different math if they can go out before the LFD or if they need to be bigger than 6-8 weeks old at transplant. Just do the research and sit down with a calendar and map it out.

-Good light is key. A big sunny window can handle a few seedlings, but any more than 4 or 5 and that windowsill is going to be crowded. I have a couple of inexpensive flourescent grow tube lights. I highly recommend them.

-Warmth makes for happy seedlings. I have a warming mat that I place under the tray when the seeds are sprouting. After they pop up and get established I find I can remove both the tray lid and the warming mat and they do just fine.

-Pick your battles. Yes you *can* start everything inside, but trust me, you don't want to. Some plants don't handle transplant well, some don't need the babying. Do some research, and choose those plants that you really need to start early and you know will handle transplant well. (Observant readers may notice that I have lettuce started in my tray. This was a case of wanting lettuce but knowing I would have to move. They were started in my tray just to make them easier to transport to the new house. They will get planted out this weekend I hope.)

Happy gardening!