re: 2024 Spring Garden Thread

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always hate thinning them cause I feel like I’m wasting good plants.

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You sound just like me. I cannot waste a plant.

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I always hate thinning them cause I feel like I’m wasting good plants

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Nothing like snuffing out potential before it gets going

It's why I do one per and plan for 80% germination. Besides, it's easy to give a handful of plants away.

Started tomato seeds ahead of this weekend's trip. Hopefully, some will pop up before we get back.

All seeds started. I'm hoping to end up with:

40 California Wonder
10 Craig's Grande Jalepeno
6 Cherokee Purple
32 Martino's Roma

On to potatoes in a week or so...15 lbs. of red La Soda.

Note to self: Don’t get 6” plastic pots next year. I might be able to fit 6 per tray. I’m going to run out of room real quick.

ChenierauTigre, that is awesome. I love this idea of deliberately overplanting and giving.

It's a plant people disease. You always share plants with anyone who might show an interest in horticulture. Or maybe it's a misery loves company thing.

My Dad always taught us how to grow food and how to find it in the wild. I have greatly benefitted from his teachings. So I want to pass it on to my grandkids. I guess it works, because I rarely get to eat any of my blueberries. They started raiding my garden by the time they were two.

Now I am learning to grow mushrooms. It just never ends.

72 maters seeded and about 20% are up after 4 days. I'm switching gears this year and doing mostly smaller fruit varieties.

Celebrity
Early Girl
Rutgers
Atkinson
Roma (two varieties.

I'm doing them mostly for canning so hoping for better results. In years past doing the larger fruits, with as sporadic as rain has been I had big problems with splitting after long dry spells.

I have red and white potatoes "eyeing out" and will plant those in a few weeks.

Will get peppers seeded out soon.

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Ole Rob Perillo said earlier today that the long range models aren’t showing any arctic intrusions reaching the GoM into March, and there are no expected freezes in the forecast. He said winter is pretty much almost over.

Now, I don’t want to jynx it, and I’m still going to wait until at least mid March to plant, but that would be great news for spring gardening! At the very least I hope for some good weather to harden off my seedlings early March!

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I remember last year a week or two out the forecast was showing 45 degree lows or so. I planted beginning of March and then every day the forecasted temperature dropped a bit. I think we got down in to the 20s around the 15th. I'm waiting for this year. I didn't listen to you last year and lost half of my tomatoes and peppers. Took the ones I didn't lose a pretty good while to recover.

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But I'll do like I always do...start watching the 10-day forecast around mid-March and plant when I see no lows in the 40s.

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Bingo. I was just passing on the info from the local weatherman. I am in no way advocating that we jump the gun. But I do hope he is right!

Same! He didn’t say anything about rain, but one of the other meteorologists (Fradella, maybe?) that I follow posted a long range forecast a while back and it looked like we are in for a wet spring.