Getting ready for planting time

I’ve been meaning to post about the plant growing situation around here. This year I took a plunge into new territory–starting seeds indoors. I set up an area in the basement with florescent lights for the seedlings.

Though some seeds didn’t really work out, I’ve had a lot of success and just hope everything survives another week or so so I can put them outside! Miles’s marigolds are already starting to bloom indoors.

Though it’s too early to put the plants outside, I have started getting their beds ready. Today I went to Lake Street Landscape and got a half yard of compost, which happened to be the exact amount I could fit in the car. I filled in the vegetable bed and kept the rest for containers. A few cilantro volunteers had already cropped up in the vegetable patch so I dug them up and replanted them when all the new compost was in.

Then, to complete the fun day of gardening, I built a new bed on the concrete in the front of our house. The patch of concrete to the right of the stairs has always bugged me (even as concrete goes, it is a particularly ugly patch!) and I was recently inspired by a speaker from We Farm America to create a prominent garden in an unlikely spot. We’ll see how it goes but another win here is that I built it out of scrap lumber that was taking up space in our basement. I stapled landscape fabric to the bottom so that the soil won’t run out, and then I put in some broken concrete pieces that also were lying around in our yard, and some pea gravel that the gas company left in front last year. When I go back to get the other 1/2 yard of compost (I bought a full square yard) this bed will be filled.