Our Garden is like Major League Baseball!

Today is the first official day of Spring! Professional Baseball's Spring Training is already in full swing, and it's opening day is only 11 days away!

I am a bigger football fan than baseball fan, but what says spring and summer better than Baseball, Hot Dogs, Apple Pie and Gardening?!

During the NFL playoffs, I compared my gardening to the NFL, so I thought I should switch sports now to officially welcome Spring.

Introducing The NatureHouse Gardeners Baseball team!

But wait, I now write in another blog with the rest of my family called "Little House and the Big Garden". There I am known as "Pa". In honor of this new blog, maybe the team should be called the LittleHouse Gardeners. I haven't been blogging much on either one lately, but I have been planning my garden on paper. So now I have plans for a new field and a list of teams and rosters.

I organized what is going into the vegetable garden under these categories (teams): Tomatoes, Cool Season, Main Season, Fruit, Decorations, and Annual Flowers.

The rosters of each team can get quite lengthy and some need a bit of explanation. For today's post, I will simply list them all. In subsequent posts, I will explain each "team" in more detail. Are you ready? Its a long lineup. Here goes:

Introducing the NatureHouse Tomatoes:

Early Girl

Kelloggs Breakfast

Prudens Purple

Brandywine

Aunt Ruby's German Green

Dixie Golden Giant

Black from Tula

Cherokee Purple

Big Rainbow

Park's Whopper

Burpee SuperSteak

Burpee Big Boy

Gardener's Delight

Cluster Grande

Golden Girl

Sun Sugar

Sweet Million

La Rossa

Roma

Principle Borghese

Introducing the LittleHouse Cool Season Players:

Broccoli-Green Goliath

Head Lettuce-Sumertime, Tom Thumb

Leaf Lettuce-Buttercrunch, Simpson Elite, Pinetree Lettuce Mix

Spinich-Space, Melody, Bloomsdale Long Standing

Peas-Mr. Big, and a player to be named later

Snap Peas-Super Sugar Snap

Onions-Super Star, Alisa Craig, Yellow Spanish

Carrots-Short 'n Sweet, Nantes Half Long, Little Finger

Radish-Cherry Belle, Easter Egg

Beet-Detroit Dark Red

And now for your Main Season NatureHousers:

Give it up for the new Naturehouse Fruit Varieties:

Watermelon-Sugar Baby, Glory Sugar

Cantalope-Ambrosia

Strawberries-Cavendish

Blueberries-Jersey

Maybe a Cherry Tree?

These newcomers will join our existing Apple, Peach and Pear trees.

Next up, the Naturehouse Decoration Dudes:

Pumpkin-Howden, Jack Be Little, Lumina, Dills Atlantic Giant

Gourds-Bird House Mix, Penguin, Assorted Gourd Mix

And last but not least, introducing the LittleHouse Annual Flowers:

These will be managed mainly by my daughters, so this roster is subject to change or be added to without notice.

Nasturtium

Sweet Pea

Morning Glory-Milky Way

Cosmos-Seashells

Zinnia-Cut & Come Again

Four O'clocks-Kaleidoscope

Convolvulus-Blue Enchantment

Impatiens-Dwarf Pink Baby

Marigold-Sugar & Spice, Happy Days, Double Dwarf, Dwarf Bolero

Sunflower-Mammoth

And there you have it ... The comprehensive list of players for NatureHouse / LittleHouse 2007! Their playing fields have been drawn up on paper and construction will soon begin. Several players have begun warming up inside under grow lights. Many more will soon join them. Stay tuned for more updates on the pending season and players! Will all players actually get in the game? Will they all hit a homerun, or will some strike out? Many questions will soon be answered.

What does your "player list" consist of? What vegetables will you be growing that I have left off my list? Are you as anxious to get started as I am?

Dum dum da dum da dum .... CHARGE!

2007 Garden to do list

I have come up with a “2007 vegetable garden to do list” to keep me focused on what can be changed to improve the garden this year. Each item is designed to improve the harvest, add beauty, make the garden more inviting, or to have more fun in the garden this year. Here is the list:

• We will add many flowers to the vegetable garden.
• We will use companion planting strategies.
• We will grow Horseradish to keep Blister Beetles Away.
• We will build a tall fence around our corn to keep critters out.
• We will use vertical gardening techniques to grow crops on the fence.
• We will use raised beds and square foot garden beds.
• We will make the paths and spaces between beds larger.
• We will use the Florida Stake and Weave for many of our tomatoes.
• We will try to have early tomatoes ripe by July 1st!
• We will grow many new heirloom tomatoes!
• We will use more composting techniques including "worm composting".
• We will try for giant pumpkins!
• We will try some new vegetables and fruits that we haven't grown before.

Now for a few more items that I need to address BEFORE the outdoor season:

• I need to write a comprehensive list of the vegetable and flower varieties we will grow this year.
• I need to map out the placement in the garden of each plant on graph paper.
• I need to write out the calendar schedule of when we will start each vegetable indoors, and when we will plant each outside.
• I need to finish building our double-decker grow light stand.
• I need to manage all of the seed starting under the lights.
• I need to create the NEW outside beds.
• I need to build all trellises and plant supports in advance.
• I hope to make a working cold frame for hardening off the plants.

I realize that my list is pretty big. I will try to write posts addressing each thing on the list to either report that I accomplished an item, or explain my ideas. Later in the season I will report back on each item to see how I did. As I write a new post, I will update this post by making each item on the list a link to the corresponding post. Posts will appear in either Out in the Garden or Little House and The Big Garden, and the links will take you to the appropriate one.

This post will become "home base" for monitoring and reporting my "to do list" progress. Doing all of this may be more for me than for you the reader, but possibly we will learn some things together.

Happy Gardening 2007!

I have too many seeds...but want more!

I recently went through all of my seed packets from previous years. Look at this mess!

Even though it looks like I have a lot of seeds, a gardener never has enough! Actually my "seed tool box" was in desperate need of a good cleaning. I had many packets from as far back as 1998. I decided too... gulp... throw some out. That is really hard to do as a gardener. I threw out only seeds that I sow directly in the garden. Things like corn, beans, pumpkins and squash had to go. I kept old seeds for crops like lettuce, spinach, tomatoes and cucumbers. The difference here is that I plant these indoors under florescent light. I will just plant double of these to compensate for a possible poor germination rate. I can not afford poor germination when it comes to the crops that are planted directly in the soil.

Another good reason to get rid of some old seed is to make room for new seed! I have placed orders with Park Seed and Pinetree Garden Seed already, and plan to get some things from Johnny's Selected Seeds and probably more from Pinetree.

Pinetree has always been my favorite seed company because they offer good quality seeds at about half the price of most other companies! I like Park and Johnny's because they both offer many unique varieties. I am getting some crazy tomato and corn cultivars! I will tell you more about that in future posts.

As for now, it is time to dig out my florescent shop lights and seed starting supplies and take over the corner of my basement family room once again. As soon as my new seeds come in the mail it will be time to get my fingers dirty and plant some lettuce and onions! I can hardly wait!

The Garden is like the NFL

I know I haven't posted in a while, but this is the off-season for me out in the garden. But even though it is the off-season, it doesn't mean I haven't been thinking and working on next season's garden. My garden is a lot like an NFL football team. Let's call my team the Naturehouse Gardeners!

The NFL off-season for a team is spent figuring out which players and coaches are good enough to remain and which ones need to be cut. They look to add new players to better next year's team. They also look back at the season that has just ended to figure out what worked well and what didn't. All teams but one did not achieve their goal of winning the Super bowl. They try to learn from last season's disappointments so they can do better this season!

These are the things I have been doing in the past couple of months. I have been pouring over seed catalogs looking for new star players to draft! I have decided to cut some of my under-achieving vegetable varieties. I am redesigning my whole game plan. I am even planning to double this year's playing field!

I have carefully looked over last year's "touchdowns" as well as the "dropped balls", and will report some of that to you here in this blog.

Actually, I hope to start posting regularly again. Even though the NFL is currently in its Post-Season from last year, The Naturehouse Gardener's are about to begin their Pre-Season for 2007! Many players will soon report to my basement to begin their season under the grow-lights!

So as I'm watching the NFL playoffs this weekend and next, I will be mapping out the 2007 garden and figuring out what plants will occupy what spot on the field. Of course I will also be dreaming of winning the super bowl of gardening in which every vegetable grows to perfection and every flower is beautiful!

If you are reading this, chances are that you are also a gardener dreaming of a winning 2007 garden. I know it is only January, but I must ask you that famous question:

Are you ready for some Football

Gardening?!!

I sure am!

Raining is good for Reading!

I enjoy visiting the garden in the evenings and early in the morning. Both last night and this morning were very rainy, so I had to stay inside.

What should you do if you still want to be gardening while it is raining?

Read about gardening!

That is why I have a whole bookcase of gardening books and magazines. There is always plenty of reading material ready when I need it.

Of course it is good to read anything on a rainy day, and if you don't have a good book in mind, read from the greatest book of all time - The Bible!

Have a great and blessed day! I hope it stops raining this weekend so I can again go Out in The Garden!

In the Beginning / New Beginning

The beginning of my interest in vegetable gardening was back in 1992. Recently married, we were living in an apartment. I grew up in the country but always took the greatness of that for granted. One day at the Public Library a book caught my eye from Rodale press about organic gardening and intensive gardening techniques. It so intrigued me! You mean you don't have to plant vegetables in long rows and weed with a hoe for hours in the hot sun? You don't have to spread chemical fertilizer at every planting? You can put more than one vegetable in the same space and train some veggies to grow up trellises instead of sprawling all over the ground? These were revolutionary new ideas to me - and I wanted to give them a try!

That first year my mom and step-dad let me have a quarter of the land where we used to have tobacco. They grew their garden on the other 3/4. I arranged my crops in tightly spaced beds. They planted traditional rows. There wasn't much rain that summer and my little plot faired much better then their side because it was easier to water and the plants shaded out the weed competition. At the end of the summer I got twice as much produce from my part as she did on her part and my area was 3 times smaller!

I went on to learn more and more about French intensive techniques, organic gardening, square foot gardening, and companion planting. We moved to a sub-division house with a small backyard and continued producing good gardens for many years. We then moved again in 1999 back to the country. We only have 1 acre, but we try to make the best of it. For some reason, even with landing back in the country, I fell away from gardening for the past few years.... Until Now! This season will be the new beginning, and I will record the whole process.

I never could find that original book available for purchase, but I collected many other books and magazines about organic gardening. Recently my loving wife bought and put together a new bookshelf just for my old books. We unpacked them from the boxes in storage and now they are back where they belong - ready to be used again! So I thought it would be appropriate for my first blog picture to be one honoring these wonderful books.

This weekend we worked in the garden quite a bit and took pictures of it all. In my next post I will detail how we've prepared the yard and garden for this growing season. We already have strawberries, broccoli, onions, spinach and lettuce growing. I will update you on how well or not-so-well they are doing next time too.

I am very excited to begin the gardening season as well as this new blog!