Garden roundup: January-April

In the first four months of this year, our chickens laid 405 eggs, of which 400 made it to the house. 

The only other harvest we’ve had so far are the parsnips we planted last year.  After cleaning them up and cutting off all the little side roots, we were able to get five quart bags in the freezer.  That doesn’t seem like much, but I think it was more than we got last year.  I think we didn’t have the best germination rate last year, so we’ll just have to see how this year goes.

Speaking of this year’s parsnips, they’re planted, but haven’t germinated yet.  Also planted are some turnips and some leaf lettuce.  My sister got a thing of, probably, 100 onion starts.  She planted some, then gave us the last 40 or so.  This happened just a couple days after I went and bought a bunch of new seeds, as well as a pack of 80 onion sets.  I have all of them planted, along with about ten old onions we didn’t eat over the winter.  So we’ll have plenty of onions this year.

Last fall I bought a grow light.  Over the winter, I tried two experiments.  Every year there are a couple onions that start growing, and I’ve planted them but they never do much because they were just set up against a winter window sill.  I hoped with a grow light they might actually do something.  And they grew, they just didn’t produce anything.  I also tried growing a small pot of leaf lettuce under the grow light.  The first batch with old seeds didn’t germinate, so I waited until I bought new, and they grew, but they seemed to get rather scraggly.  I’ve transplanted them outside, and we’ll see if they do anything.

Other seeds I’ve planted, but haven’t transplanted yet, are some zucchini, cucumber, watermelon, sun flowers, and some other flowers.  I think my grow light wasn’t low enough, so they were getting scraggly, and it was warm so I set them outside to get them ready to transplant.  And then the weather grew cold.  I think in a couple of days it’s supposed to get down to just about freezing.  I do have a couple of clearish totes that I set over them to act as a mini greenhouse, and hopefully that will be enough to get them through any cold nights.

As to everything else, I’m waiting for the garden to dry out enough to work it up.  And I need to add soil to my raised beds, but I don’t have enough and don’t really have the time to do it all, so I’m doing some, hoping that will be enough and that I’ll have more time and energy this fall to top them off for next year. 

We’ll just have to wait and see.