Spring Gardening is Upon Us!

Hello Steem Peeps! Spring is here and yesterday my wife and I began one of our favorite activities. Gardening. We started our vegetable gardening about seven years ago and each year we expand and try a few new things. For example, last year’s new experiment was succession planting and companion planting. Last year we made a very strong effort to plant symbiotic vegetables together. We also container planted red potatoes for the first time, and finally, we used the same bed space for multiple plantings throughout the year. For example, early in the season, we’d plant an area with radishes, then when those harvested in about a month we planted lettuce, and when that harvested put some peppers in the ground. So in some parts of our garden, we were able to use the same space to do three plantings! We like to pretend we're practicing our homesteading skills.

A radish ready for harvest from a previous year!

This year we’re adding a few new things to the garden:

Sweet Potatoes

Since we container planted red potatoes last year, this year I wanted to try to do sweet potatoes as well. Sweet potatoes are not planted the same way as red or russet potatoes. For sweet potatoes you grow “slips” from the potatoes long before they go into the soil. You do this by suspending the sweet potato in water for about a month. In that time it will root and form stems. These stems are your slips. Once the stems are about 6 - 12 inches long, you cut them and place them in water. They will grow roots that are then what gets planted into the soil. You don’t plant the sweet potatoes until the soil and weather are warm. They like hot, humid weather. They take a long time to prepare and to be honest, I think I should have started them last month, but I’m starting them now. Maybe nature will be kind to me and they’ll grow fast. I’ll be posting my progress as this goes along.

So I looked at ordering sweet potato slips online, but the cheapest I found was 12 for $15 and the average price seemed to hover around $22 USD for 12 slips! In contrast, I bought a bag of Georgia grown sweet potatoes from Aldis for $1.29 and used 4 of them as the starters shown in the picture above!

My first attempt at container planting potatoes last year was pretty successful. On the left, I had planted about 4 little potato eyes at the bottom of this 20-gallon container. Initially, I just covered the eyes with about 1 inch of dirt and continually added dirt as the plant grew to the top of the container. On the right: when the potato plant started withering, I dumped the container onto a tarp. We had about a BUNCH of red potatoes from those 4 simple seeds!

Vegetables in the Flower Garden

The other thing we’re going to do this year is “expand” our vegetable garden into our flower garden. For the last few years we’ve noted that our zucchini and swiss chard plants were full and quite frankly, beautiful. This year we’re going to plant some of them in the front yard flower gardens and see how they do.

Our Composting is Working!

This winter we also focused on composting our coffee, eggshells, veggie and fruit scraps. I was pleasantly surprised to see how our compost turned out, and amazed at how much it cut down on our trash! Definitely something people should experiment with if they’re just starting their gardening adventures.

A glimpse in the compost bin. Even though this may look disgusting, it turns into glorious plant food!

This is the product of our compost bin. It's nutrient rich and just recycled from stuff most people throw away.

Fencing

Also, our dog Dory doesn’t quite understand why she can’t play in the garden all of the time. All of that glorious loose soil is there for her enjoyment after all :) .. So yesterday was also staking t-posts and running fencing around the garden to protect it from Dory. She told me later that I had betrayed her and gave me sad puppy eyes.

So that was yesterday! If you’re into vegetable gardening and at all, stay tuned because I’ll be doing a lot of that and writing about it over the next couple of months. Thanks for dropping by!