A Garden Year ~January~

     

This is one of my favorite times of the year to "garden". Curled up in front of the wood stove with a pile of seed catalogs; there are no weeds, bugs, or four footed beasts to worry me, I can plan upon plans. I thought I might try and challenge myself to keep it together and follow through with those plans upon plans and journal our garden month by month. If you are a long time gardener you know that it can be a year around activity. Especially if the #1 plan is to eventually garden all the four seasons. I feel like we might have a few of the right tools to get going with this ~ now I'm ready to journal about it!

  January: I went through all my seeds saved from last year and I am extremely pleased with the amount I did managed to save and I had two friends share seeds with me. I am new at this, my methods a bit naive, but I'm learning. One of my book purchases this year will be a seed saving hand book of sorts, I want to be more confident in the quality of my seeds. Anyhow, I still will need to make a seed order: carrots, beets, lettuces, we ate all of our green beans, a few annual herbs, and a few perennials that I am ready to start in a permanent bed. I'm very set with pepper seeds, tomatoes, kale, okra, squash (winter, summer, cucumbers and melons) etc. that I can get excited about.

    Something my aunt told me of when her 6 little ones where young: in those days all our life revolved around food. I feel like that now. Our lives revolve around meal time, how and where I can buy a bigger bag to save and make it last longer, next year I'll grow more of this and that, how can we have fresh greens year around, lets build a root cellar to hold it all...

  My goal is to try and have the around the year fresh food. Utilize what we learned and get the hoop house up again. Properly grow it and stuff it all into the root cellar. Using winter gardening to supplement the fermenting, canning, drying, cold storage equaling lowering our dependency on the grocery store, a better balanced diet, health for my family, and saving money. That's the plan anyway, now lets see how far we get this year.

  As far as green things go: this month around the 31st I plan to start onions and leeks in flats - a new thing for me. I was astounded how much I ended up paying for onion plants last year, I think I'll take my chances, growing the varieties I want for a fraction of the cost.
  I also have one and a half of a sweet potato salvaged from our harvest that I'm growing in the window. I have done this before: by letting it grow wild I keep snapping off  8'' pieces and letting them take root in another jar. By spring I hope to have a large collection of rooted sprigs - in the back of my I'm wondering though if I'm loosing diversity by only having starts from two different potatoes. I'll find out. I love having something green to look at this time of year.

  I'm so thankful that our basement-finish project this summer didn't ace me out of my planting wall. That worked out so well last year. But trying to remember where I stuffed all the hardware will be a different story.