Getting Down to Our Roots

It's spring in Colorado, which basically means wild temperature fluctuations and what others might consider odd weather. It was 60 degrees last Thursday. The day I'm writing this, a whopping two days later, we have 8-10 inches of snow. It's been blowing snow and ridiculously cold. Our high tomorrow, March 24th, is 28 degrees.

Amidst all this weather, Tagawa Gardens was hosting a root vegetables class during the heinous weather. It was a fight, but I got my husband to un-hide the car keys and come to class with me.

We learned a lot in our little class. Like that carrots and parsnips do not like to be transplanted and should be started directly outside. Oops. That we should already have our asparagus in the ground. Oops. Potatoes should also be started already. Oops. And onions are best planted in fall. Oops.

Given all those oopses, we loaded up on Saturday. We grabbed a potato kit (details later), some more carrot and parsnip seeds (they will probably need a re-do, oh well), asparagus crowns (more details later), onion sets (later!), and some super fertilizer the teacher told us about.

Just to prove I'm not lying about the weather, here you go.

In case you are curious, here's the financial breakdown:

Potato Kit (2 bags of root soil, seed potatoes, and some fertilizer) = $29.99
Fancy "Soil Activator" Fertilizer = $16.99
More seed starter soil = $12.99
Age Old Kelp Fertilizer for our seedlings (big size) = $14.99
Asparagus Crowns = $8.99
Shallots Sets = $2.99
Onion Sets = $2.99
Carrot Seeds = $1.59
Parsnip Seeds = $2.49

Total w/tax, after discounts = $88.61

I did however save 20% using my Tagawa Card and they let me use the $5.00 off coupon I forgot at home all since I ventured out in the horrible weather.

Not gonna lie, the trip stung the wallet a bit. But it will be totally worth it if I'm up to my eyeballs in onions and potatoes come fall.

Comments

Plant Problem #2: Peppers

My peppers are looking funkified. I know it's a horrible picture, but I'm sure you can see those blackish spots. I'm not sure if they have picked up the previous plant herp, aka fungus, that the broccoli and cauliflower had. Or maybe some other kind of blight? I'm treating it with the fungicide and rolling with it. I've come to accept the fact, long before we even started this whole gardening thing, that not every plant was going to be a winner. If they don't make it, they don't make it. C'est la vie. For a dose of good news, we had our first zucchini harvest this week. I made lovely zucchini ribbons with a meat sauce for a couple lunches this week. In the background, you'll notice a zucchini accident (young one I broke while trying to trim off dead) and a pepper. Apparently, you are supposed to remove the first peppers to encourage growth. So I lopped him off and here's to hoping between that and the fungicide, the p...

My Little Review of Smart Gardener

My good friend introduced me to Smart Gardener via Pinterest . The description was something along the lines of, "this site plans your garden for you." As a new gardener, I was skeptical. Sounds a little too good to be true, but I checked it out anyways. At first I was enamored. It allows for garden planning in 4 steps: 1. Layout your garden - you are able to choose the square footage of an in-ground garden, or choose from a variety of containers/raised beds. Cool! 2. Select your plants - this is limited by season, and you cannot mix cool weather and warm weather vegetables. Not cool! Varieties of vegetables are also limited if you are looking for something specific, but you can add them manually. 3. View your plan - you get a little image with your selected plants on it, plus the space they require in your garden (square footage), planting depths, seed spacing, plant dimensions, and what to plant next to each other or not (F...

Garden Noob's July Recap

Dear Time, Please stop moving. Thanks, Me Hello August, or what I like to call the gateway month into Christmas. The garden has been moving along. I did a major cleaning this weekend of overgrowing leaves and vines, tomato suckers, and ripped out all our broccoli and cauliflower. They had issues, let's just leave it at that. Sadly I didn't take a lot of pictures of the work I did because quite frankly, I was frantically trying to get it done before a very busy weekend. I'm glad I did as this week has been nothing but rain, so all my freshly groomed plants can soak it all in. Our first tomatoes are starting to turn red, mostly the Romas and heirloom cherry tomatoes. I find that I like these heirloom versions much better than the standard grocery store ones. Go figure. :-) Hubby also has a baby watermelon. Watermelon are notoriously hard to grow out here, so we'll see how he does, but so far, so good. Zucchini is ...

Project Garden Noob - Year 6

Search This Blog