Can you believe that February is over half over? Many people in the Northern Hemisphere are looking out at the winter weather hoping for an early spring. Others, like me, have already started the 2024 gardening season.
What We’ve Done So Far
Here at our place, the onions and the herbs that I planted are now up and growing in our grow tent that is set up in our pantry. Since I planted the onions and those herbs, I planted more herbs and brassicas which are also now coming up. This past week, I planted hot and sweet peppers along with eggplants.
In the meantime, we’ve been feeding the wood stove. I am so happy we put in the indoor woodstove and purchased the dump truckload of wood from a local sawmill. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact we’ve had a mild winter, but our heating bill and our electricity bills both are down. We still have so much wood left that we’re wondering where we’ll put what’s left over.
We have a pile of wood ashes and charcoal that we will soon be sifting through so that we can inoculate the charcoal into biochar. Our compost is in process with our chickens doing the turning for us.
Plans for the Near Future
On the first of March, we will be planting tomatoes. This year we’re not planting any type of cherry tomatoes. We plan to just plant tomatoes for slicing and paste tomatoes. The tomatoes for slicing will be Cherokee Purples and Beef Steak. The paste tomatoes will be Amish paste.
We’ll be planting more Amish paste tomatoes because these tomatoes are determinant whereas the slicing tomatoes are indeterminant. The paste tomatoes will be ready all at once so I will have all of them available all at once so that I can prepare the tomatoes for sauce all at once.
You might wonder why we waited so long to plant the tomatoes. I am waiting until March 1 to plant the tomatoes because we don’t want them to be too big before we plant them in the garden. The past couple of years we had to plant the tomatoes too early because the tomatoes outgrew their pots, and we didn’t have space for them in our grow tent. This year by planting them later, we will have smaller plants in smaller containers which will require less room under our indoor lights.
These are all the plants we intend to plant before we start planting the early spring vegetables out in the beds in the garden. Soon too, we’ll be preparing the garden beds for this year. We have the seeds, we have some of the plants and soon the garden will be ready to plant.
Putting in a vegetable garden this year?
I have written several books that can help you get started. All are available on Amazon.
Simply Vegetable Gardening
The Survival Garden
The Four Seasons Vegetable Garden
Help From Kelp
Using Diatomaceous Earth Around the House and Yard
The Perpetual Homesteader 