Who's feeling the urge to get your hands in the dirt? Me me me! I have to hold back every yr to keep from planting my seeds to early. What's a girl to do, but dream. Sooooo, lets dream and plan. Thats part of what we do here over the winter. We begin to plan and put some things in place to prepare garden areas and be ready when the season is right.
We'll folks I love seeds! There i said it I have a slight seed problem. It's so amazing to me to grow something new and know that God created these plants so I can continue to grow them for years to come if I put in the effort. I grow almost all heirloom plants that I can continue to grow true. With the exception of a few items like watermelon. My family really loves to eat seedless watermelon. I have in yrs past tried a few other hybrid plants with the hopes of and extra big harvest or more disease resistance. I've not really had much luck with any of them. My heirloom plants just seem to really ring true every year.
We have always used compost on our gardens that we create and have always added any rabbit manure straight to the garden. Well this year we have added kune kune pigs to our homestead. I will say we absolutley love these critters. We have been letting our sweet girls earn their keep. We fenced off one garden area and allowed the girls to eat all the weeds and root/till. These girls will help to erradicate weeds, their roots and even grubs. All the while they are tilling and fertilizing. When they finished an are we moved them to the next garden area. We go behind these girls and cover the garden area in a mulch to supress the early spring weeds. Pigs can be on a garden area safely as long as you have 120 days before you harvest any crops. Their manure needs these 120 days to be fully broken down before you harvest any food. We started the girls on the garden we would plant our early spring veggies on so it would have the most amout of time before harvest. We are also letting these girls till us up a new garden area this year. They are doing an amazing job.
Seeds and plants, seeds and plants yes seeds and plants. We are in zone 6a and I have already begun to sow some cole crop seeds indoors. This year i'm trying to get an early crop in with row covers . With the garden mulched I will pull back an area to plant and push the mulch back around the plants with some added black bunny gold. Then I will be adding a floating row cover fabricbto protect these plants from frost. I will be starting with kale, broccoli, cauliflower, spinach and then lettuce's. I'm also gonna try to plant some early onions that have sprouted. I will separate them and place in a dish of water to get roots going then they will go out under a row cover with some added mulching to protect them. Having row covers this year is something new and im hope will give me a little early edge to my growing season.
I do wide rows in our garden and some years I've done wide raised rows which really helps if you get lots of rain and gives added loose soil depth but it is more work at first. I love this method of growing. I can fit twice the amount of veggies into half the space. I companion plant and love to add flowers in here and there for the bees. Planting lettuce between your tomatoes really works well to help lettuce from bolting so fast. The tomatoes grow up and shade the lettuce. Plants really do help each other out. We interplanted clover in with our corn this year. The clover will add much needed nitrogen to the soil for the corn. I will be trying this again. This year I will plant the clover when the corn plants are about 3 inches tall. Last year we waited until the corn was about 10inches. I felt like a lotnof the seed got shaded out before it took. I do think the areas where the seed took did help. I'm all for plants helping plants and critters helping me with some of the hard work. Many hands make light work. Those hands may just be stems,roots and critter legs and snoots.
Get your garden thinking caps on and get out your seed catalogs. Make a plan and be ready to get those hands and plants in the dirt. Feel free to comment and ask any questions you may have or even drop me an email. I'm no expert but have learned a thing or two along the way and enjoy learning and trying new things. We can all learn from each other. I'm a very natural/organic gardener. I believe God has given us everything we need. We just need to learn how to use his resources the best we can. With Gods help and little hard work we can all flourish in a bountiful garden.