I’ve spent a good part of this evening making up a spreadsheet of my garden plans for this summer.  By golly, I’m going to be organized, and keep track of what gets planted when and harvested and whether a second planting can be done and rotating the crops and what needs to be started indoors… because I’ve realized that stuff that needs to be started indoors needs to be started like, next week!

Fortunately the Vesey’s seed company lists both Hardiness Zones and Canadian Frost Dates by region, so even though I only moved back here last summer I was able to get accurate information for planning my schedule.

I’m planning to do a square foot garden, well, a couple in fact.  Probably two boxes 4′ by 8′, which gives me 64 squares to work with.  That comes out to a lot of food… along with the typical things like potatoes and carrots and broccoli, I’m going to try my hand at kidney beans.  Plus, of course, tons and tons and tons of tomatoes.  I plan to try three different varieties of paste tomatoes and compare them.  Roma, San Marzano, and some yet-to-be-decided variety.  I do a *lot* of canning of tomatoes and salsa in the fall, and had a lot of trouble last year finding enough Roma tomatoes locally.  I found some Amish-type farmers (I’m embarassed that I don’t know EXACTLY what their background is) at the Farmer’s Market, but they never had enough Romas to keep me happy!  I think I bought them out.  I need my own source, from my own garden, if I’m going to keep hubby happily in salsa all next winter.

I just have a few more seeds to get, and some sort of indoor propagation sets.  Then I need to figure out where to put them… every room in this house is bloody cold, we can’t really afford to heat up a room just for some plants.  And other solutions like heated propagation mats and grow-lights have expenses to them as well.  I’ll just have to look at all the options and figure out what makes the most sense.

Then I just have to keep the cats and the kids away from the baby plants…

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