Happy Friday everyone!

The sun is shining here and it’s a beautiful Friday…but I don’t know whether or not I’ll be spending much time in the garden today because (a) it’s been quite chilly the last couple days and (b) I slipped while coming down the stairs last night and am rather banged up. It’s pretty much just my upper thighs that are looking like someone used them for boxing practice and are super sore. So as much as I would like to make Mack’s week and go plant some carrots in the garden today, I’m just not sure if it is going to happen. These are the small setbacks and distractions we sometimes go through when things are all falling into place otherwise! 😉

At any rate, I am so thrilled that I got to get my hands a bit dirty this week, and started laying out the first grid in our garden behind the barn, which already has raised beds in it that we built a few years ago. This is just temporary to help me know what I’m doing. But we’re hoping to use some of the spare trim pieces for this task that the PO left behind…and I’m willing to bet that there’s nearly enough of it to finish our beds. And I put about half the onion starters in the ground that I bought over a week ago…and will put the rest in the ground in about two weeks I think, just to stagger the harvest a bit.

We elected not to build new raised beds for now because we have too many other things to worry with and these are still good enough. But as you can see, they are way bigger than the usually recommended size, and the row in the very middle is a bit tricky to get to…but certainly not impossible. So that will get long growing season crops in it.

We have a helper guy who randomly shows up to ask if we have jobs for him when the weather is nice, and he started turning the beds and the stuff beside the beds early last fall. Although the guy kinda does whatever he wants and I clash horns with him from time to time, I’m really thankful that he did what he did right now. Three and a half of the 4 beds this size are in perfect planting shape after a bit of weeding, and as you already heard last week, I’m so excited to get going.

There’s way more to be done back there than just getting stuff planted and growing, but I have to start somewhere!

What about the slugs?

My major concern about planting in the rear garden is the fact that there are snails and slugs galore. Our potato farmer neighbors just dump a slew of chemicals on their garden and call it done. But I’m not about to go that route after I’ve managed to overcome so many other pest issues without breaking out the harsh stuff. So everything I plant will be generously surrounded by crushed eggshells, since I hear slugs hate crawling over them due to their rough edges.

I will also be putting out corn meal traps which have done really well in the past. Just get some glass jars or other containers (I usually use old mayo jars) and put about 1/4 cup corn meal into the bottom. Then lay the jar on its side in your garden, near the plants you are trying to protect. The slugs will go into the jar, eat the corn meal and then slither off and die. And they seem to love the stuff, because whenever I put it out in the garden, there are little slime trails going in and out of the jar and the meal. Yum.

I’ve heard the trick about putting copper trim or tape around your plants because they won’t crawl over it, but I have yet to find an inexpensive source for that. Oh and the beer traps have always done pretty good, except that it rains so much around here that they have to be refilled often.

So if you have any other advice, I’m all ears!

Hanging Strawberries

Last week, Carrie asked if I could go into a bit more detail about my hanging strawberry plants. Let me start by saying that I bought them this way, but basically it was just 3 healthy strawberry plants in a hanging pot that was sending off shooters like crazy (as strawberry plants tend to do).

Since I didn’t have many ideas of where to hang them, I decided to combine the plants into one big hanging pot, which is where they are now. They suffered a bit this winter (as did all our strawberry plants) but once I brought the pot indoors about two weeks ago, it really started to perk up.

I’ve got a ton of dead leaves to clean off and then it will look like there isn’t much of anything left. But I’m also a firm believer in letting strawberry plants have a few weeks of warm weather to prove whether they are in fact dead or not. Because sometimes, they are just trying to trick you. 😉 And IMO, you just can’t have too many strawberries around at once…especially when your three year old eats them all first!

More about garden planning help

I know I recently talked about a garden planning software that I think is really smooth and had some fun exploring this week, but what if you don’t need all that planning stuff and would just like some help figuring out what you can be planting now and what will be coming up next? I know they give you a lot of info on the back of the seed packets, but if you’re like me, you have tons of seed packets and even with them all divided up by month in their box, you still wonder what you’re missing out on planting right now and what you could be replanting in the season later on.

Well that’s where sites like Sprout Robot come in. It free, it’s customized to your zip code (unfortunately only in for the US right now) and it’s quite thorough. Plus you can get free email reminders as well.

Featured Gardens

And I also thought I would introduce a new feature this week. This is the first of the Featured Garden elements in my Garden Life posts…but I thought it would be fun to show off a few of the gardens of others who are linking up, in case you didn’t get to check out their posts!

Cranky Puppy has put together a very cool plan for their garden this year…and the contents of their beds are going to be really similar to our own, if the weather and the snails cooperate! 😉

I love what Charlie & Jo are doing with their frugal garden upgrade. They’ve reclaimed some old fencing wood and are using it to build new, sturdier SFG beds to replace the old ones which Hurricane Irene was rough on. I love this image so that you can get an idea of just how large these frames are. And of course since I’m now officially in love with square foot gardening, I like having another garden to check out on a regular basis! 😉

Have you been writing about your garden lately? We’d love to see what you’ve been up to! You can share anything related to gardening, old or new posts, from recipes to harvesting to grow reports to DIY projects or inspiration.

Here’s how this works:

PLEASE READ THESE GUIDELINES, especially if you have never linked up before!

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