It's GARDEN time!

The snow is melted, my tulips are poking their heads above ground, and my garden boxes are calling my name begging for some plants to fill them up! So I’m finally going to get started on everything for this season and I am sooooo excited. Here is a list of what I’m doing in my garden this week:

Installing my irrigation system (ok my husband is doing this part, he must really love me). Last fall we installed sprinklers in our whole yard but just left one pipe open for my gardens. So we need to install a drip system that will run all through my vegetable gardens. Hitting Home Depot on Saturday!
Refilling my garden beds with compost. If we can get our truck working I will buy a whole truck bed full. This is only about $40 at our landfill. If the truck is out of commission I will probably just buy a few bags from WalMart. Look how empty and sad my garden beds are!
Purchasing my potting materials. My favorite method of starting seeds indoors is to just use the little jiffy pots and put a few seeds in each pot and make as many pots as I want to have plants. It works great and is super cheap and easy. Once the roots start poking through I transfer them into bigger containers filled with potting soil.
Make my Garden Plan. Every year I move plants around, change up what I plant depending on what we actually ate and canned the previous year. So this week I’ve been obsessing over my plans for this year. I think it will be a GREAT gardening year. I’m really excited to plan my garden based on what I need/want for food storage.
Replenish my seed supplies. Ok this is the funnest part. I love picking new seeds! My only problem is I very rarely use up all of the seeds in a packet in one year. So I typically only have to buy a few refills and the rest I reuse from year to year. They might not get QUITE as high a germination rate but they still work well for me.
Start some of my seeds indoors! I’ve been following the website of my cousin Emily at mysquarefootgarden.net and she has come up with a GREAT color system for knowing the right time to start planting things based on where you live. I am going through her charts this week and figuring out the things that I’m able to start planting indoors already based on my area’s last frost date. It looks like I can start broccoli, parsley, celery, and hot peppers already! I’m so excited to get cracking. I have this cool little indoor greenhouse I love to use to get my plants going inside. I’ll be bringing it up this week to help out with the new seedlings!

How are you all doing on your gardens? Don’t forget to head over to our Facebook Page if you want to have lots of great conversation about gardens this year!