Garden tips

It occurred to me to share some tips about what has worked for me in regards to my garden.

Every year I start my tomato and/or bell pepper seeds early in the house.  This year, I planted my seeds around the beginning of March.  I didn't do anything fancy.  In fact, I used the Jiffy Greenhouse Kits that I got from my local big-box store.  You can pick a kit for tomatoes only (the pellets are larger) or there are kits for all other plants.  You can also buy pellet refills for the "all other" kits; I have yet to find the larger tomato pellets sold separately (I had to buy another complete tomato kit just for the pellets this year).  The kit comes with instructions.  It's really incredibly easy to use.  All you need is an area in your house with a decent amount of sun once the seeds sprout.

**IMPORTANT TIP** Only start the tomatoes with the larger pellets!  When I planted the first seeds this year, I didn't have any of the larger pellets for tomatoes.  Now that the seedlings are really growing, I see why they need larger pellets!

If you want to try cold-weather crops (spinach, scallions, lettuce, peas, etc.), try to grow these in the spring instead of the fall.  I have found that the spring growing season here is much longer than the fall season.  It gets SO hot here in the summer that it is really hard to tell when is the right time to plant cold-weather crops because it is hard to tell when the seasons will finally change.  And when they do change, it seems to go from very hot to pretty chilly very quickly.

This spring, I decided on a whim (and because I found myself in my local hardware store staring at the seeds) to try lettuce and snow peas.  I've been wanting to try lettuce for awhile and it's difficult to find snow peas in any form anywhere around here (even the grocery stores).  I waited to plant either of these until the 7 day forecast did not have any days going below freezing (how very scientific of me), which was the first week of March.  The temperatures did go up and down after that date, but I did some research and found that as long as the temperatures didn't go below 19 degrees Fahrenheit the plants would be fine (and they were).

I found a great free app for my phone for gardening - it's the Burpee Garden Time planner.  It lets you create a garden (or two or three) in the app and then add plants (vegetables, herbs, flowers or fruit).  Once you put in your zip code, it customizes to-do lists to let you know when the best times to plant those items are.  It's really cool!  I was browsing through the list of vegetables and started creating a "dream" garden (Zucchini?  Cool - add that!), which helped me plan the garden out better.  It's also nice to have a list with reminders of when to plant what (although I don't think this app will integrate with other calendar apps like Google Calendar).  Another nifty thing about this app is that it also has videos related to planting different vegetables and videos related to gardening in general.  Again - super awesome feature especially if you're trying to grow something new.