Start planning the garden for 2012.

Taking into consideration that I successfully cooked all of my cool weather crops before I could even get them into the ground, I did not let that get me down for too long. Here is the list of the crops we currently have in the ground and growing.
pole beans
asparagus beans
chard
kale
tomatoes
onions
peppers
potatoes
sugar snaps
garlic
cabbage
lettuce
corn
eggplant
asparagus
basil
sage
oregano
mint
tarragon
kohlrabi
cantaloupe
flying saucers
table queen
strawberries
rosemary
lavender
chives
parsley
cilantro
marjoram
watermelon
vicks
grapes
peaches
blackberries
That is 36 different varieties of veggies/fruits/herbs and it is only the 18th of April. I am doing better than I have ever done in my timing of the garden. I haven’t even hit the herbal festival yet.

I sure hope that I can keep this up through the fall.

so that they will fit under the shade system. Finished planting the rest of the peas. That brings the total up to 70 pea starts. Still have not gotten to the potatoes but will tomorrow. Nate is butchering 10 of the chickens tomorrow. Got the corner of the garden cleaned out for the freezer. That’s enough for today. I am tired and am so glad today is Friday!

We usually have around 200 starts a year by the time it is said and done. We save 200-300.00 dollars a year by starting from seed instead of starts.

I am starting with the cold weather plants first.
16 Cabbage
4 Kohlrabi
4 Brussels
20 Kale
42 Sugar Snaps
12 Cilantro
18 Cauliflower
Still have many, MANY more to go. Will list them as I go. It is my hope that I will have it done by the end of the weekend. Decided to move the greenhouses out to the garden. February is almost over. I think that we are done with any major storms. The lettuce, spinach, carrots, beets and radishes will go directly into the beds. Need to get online at Mother Earth News and get signed up for the Garden Planner. It’s the best $25.00 you can spend. It helps you plan the beds and gives you the harvest dates which makes it easier to plan the staggering of your plantings for the summer crops. It was a little bumpy at first today, getting the kids and Nate out there helping me get everything set up for the starts. I won’t hold it against them though. After the easy winter months it’s always a bit tough getting back into the swing of gardening. We’ll get the hang of it. ;)

The winter has been so mild that we’ve had time to re-do on two of our raised beds. Even put chicken wire on the bed the gopher were hitting. I really felt good about that one. I love nature as long as it stays out of my vegetable beds, lol. Still have five to go. I will be starting many of the spring crops from seed. Wish me luck. This year I’ll be putting the little greenhouses at my house this year. I’ve already cleared the space in front of the window. I’ll be concentrating on the spring and fall gardens; only doing drought and heat tolerant plants in the summer. This summer is expected to be as harsh as last summer, uhghhhhhhg. Hope I get my new camera soon.

Thank God for our community garden. They are professionals at growing food. I have so much to learn. I did not water last night. I was going to get up and do it this morning. I did not. I slept in. I looked out the window and saw all my wilting and dying plants. I am so mad at myself. I headed out in 103 degree to water. I was so careful to water at the ground level so as not to burn the leaves. Some things are coming back. Things like the chard and lettuces are not bouncing back as well. I will water everything really well tonight. Hope it will be enough.

empty garden bed. When the soil is ready and beckoning you to fill it. It’s like a canvas screaming for some paint to fill it’s emptiness. We are taught that we were created in His image. Man and woman in His image. He is the master creator. So, it stands to reason that if we are in His image, when we create, anything, that we are at our finest. I sure feel like it brings out the best in me.

all of my garden posts have been done in my blog. However, tonight as I sit here, listening to the song birds, crickets and frogs it just felt like a 43things kind of entry. Today was a glorious day! Mary Ann, me, MM, Sarah-bear and Jimmy went to the Annual Herbal Affair in Sand Springs, OK. It is our fourth year in a row and is now to be considered a tradition. I love those! There is something so comforting and fun about them. We start the day with making everyone an excellent coffee, meet up at Mary Ann’s house to load her wagon. Everyone gets out to go and look at their garden. Bob did a great job at building her raised beds! We’re about tied now in the square footage. We have a bit of a friendly competition going on between us. Then, we all load up, girls with the girls, boys with the boys and head out to spend the day in the sun, finding all of our deals. As always, I bring my camera and get a pic of us unloading the wagons but nothing else till I’m home. I always get too excited looking through all the plants for my little treasures that will complete my well-planned masterpiece. I was able to find every single plant I wanted except for one. I was also able to get quite a few new and exciting ones as well. Wrap the outing up with a ten dollar pizza from Pizza Hut and head home to plant the beautiful bounty we purchased. It only gets better, Bob has volunteered to come over and help MM fill the final bed! Can it get any better than that? Yes, yes it can! I get the house straightened up, Mary Ann comes over to our place, helps me plant, we have a blast, my mom brings home armfuls of clothes for me and Sarah-bear’s grow-up box from garage sale hunting and a gorgeous new rug for our living room! To top it off MM helped me get some sentimental plants of mine out of the full sun. They just aren’t ready for it yet and if anything happened to them it would make me cry. Yes siree, today was a perfect day.

I am really going to move things up this year. I am incorporating some new aspects that we have not done before. The first being fruit trees. We will be planting peach, pear, apple and plum trees. We planted two pomegranate trees last fall. I also heard that the state will donate pecan trees to anyone that wants to grow them. I will be checking with the Department of Agriculture to see if that is true. We also planted blueberry and thorn-less blackberries last fall. This spring we will be adding strawberries and raspberries. I’m really working on getting some perennial food sources going. We want to get a beehive to put in the meadow to help with pollination of all our garden areas. It blew my mind to learn that the bee population has dropped 90 percent in the last 50 years. They don’t know why really but that is a scary fact to me. They are so vital in the food cycle! I am allergic to bees but as I’ve gotten older I’ve learned how to avoid angering them and if we are going to have a thriving garden then we need their help.
Another new venue that we will be incorporating into our garden this year will be grains. We will be considering barley, buckwheat, oats, rye, corn and wheat. You don’t have to have acres and acres to grow them. They can be planted in flower gardens just like ornamental grasses. Once I have mastered growing them I will move to the “field” planting method.
As always, we will be doing the herbs. I am also concentrating on perennials in that category as well. Oklahoma is perfect for sage, which will come back for about five years and rosemary and lavender, which will live for years and years. The mints and oregano I’m going to keep in pots this year. They both seem to want to take over the beds. The rest will be bedded. I usually get three to five harvest per year off of them when I do it correctly.
I’m going to be moving my tomatoes, and the vine plants out of the raised beds garden this year. I have plenty of room around the property to accommodate them with out robbing the other plants of sun and nutrients. That was probably the biggest lesson I learned last year. I nearly choked out a lot of my plants.
I will have the lettuce, chards, carrots, beets, onions, radishes and sweet potatoes in the ground in late February – early March. I still have cabbages, swiss chard, garlic, lettuce and spinach growing right now! I love the growing season here in Oklahoma. In April I will get the snow peas, tomatoes, grains, berries, cabbages, peppers, eggplant, rhubarb, beans, asparagus, black-eyed peas going. In June I will start the okra, squash and the rest of the vine plants (aka: cucumbers, melons, pumpkins, etc) The squash bugs are too invasive in the spring. Last year I had over 25 plants that were killed off by that stupid bug before they could produce! Yet, when I replanted them in June they did great and produced well and they (squash bugs) were all gone for the most part by then.