Mark & Beth's Homegrown Adventure

Okay, so I know it’s not really week 1 of gardening. We’ve been planning and starting seeds for months. But the weather was sooo nice this week in western Pennsylvania, that it really felt like the beginning of the real gardening season for me. So let me tell you about what we did!

The biggest project was filling in our largest garden beds, and despite our mission to save as much money with the gardening initiative as possible, these are a large expense. I think the beds themselves were $120 each (made of cedar, not gold), and then we had to buy topsoil and potting soil to add to them. One thing I was able to repurpose for these was the lining. Since we’re filling in raised garden beds on concrete rather than on the ground, there’s a risk of staining. To prevent that as much as possible, I lined them with a shade cover that we pulled off of an ancient pergola that was here when I moved in. It drains nicely and is weatherproof. Then we threw some cardboard on top of that, added some wood that will provide nutrients as it decays, and a mixture of the topsoil, potting soil, and crumbled leaves. We repeated a similar process on some smaller raised beds, and I’ll be doing it again with several planters.

Unfortunately, the good weather isn’t going to last. We’re going back down into the 30’s at night here for the next couple nights, and so getting an early outdoor planting isn’t an option for anything that’s not considered a cold weather crop. But we do have a few of those, and so we planted some potato cuttings and carrot seeds! Also transplanted the pea seedlings into their new home, so we’ll see how they weather the cold. I’m a little worried about my babies trying to grow out these in those temperatures, but they say “plant outside after danger of heavy frost.” Everything else that has been hardening off outside for the last few days is coming back in with me until this passes.

We did so much and still have so much more to do, but I can’t bog you down with all that information in one short blog post, so here’s a quick photo dump, and I’ll see you on the other side of this cold front!