Summer is here and I’m excited to once again share details about our garden! This year we started some plants from seed and visited quite a few greenhouses for the rest.
It’s not even June yet and I’ve been to five different local events/greenhouses to look at plants, including:
May Garden Mart
Park Avenue Greenhouse
Venango Technology Center (Vo-Tech)
Wingard’s Farm Market
Wyattville Garden Center
I’ve been picking up a couple plants here and there, but I got most of the ones for our vegetable garden at Vo-Tech and Park Avenue Greenhouse.
The greenhouse at Vo-Tech is actually run by students through a Natural Resources Class. It’s awesome that these kids are exposed to plants and gardening at such an early age! I honestly wish I would have taken that class.
Each year, my mom and I take an afternoon break from work and go to the greenhouse together, and the last two years a couple of my co-workers have gone with us, too. The plants are inexpensive, I like to support the students and that class, and the teacher is a family friend and very knowledgeable.
I’m also a big fan of Park Avenue Greenhouses. I had the opportunity to meet with them in early spring to help with their social media page. I’ve been trying to limit my amount of freelance work because I’ve gotten overwhelmed, but I couldn’t say no to that! I went back up in mid-May and it was amazing to see how much the plants had grown. I picked up some vegetables, herbs, and succulents.
While the majority of our plants were purchased, I took another shot at starting from seed and was more successful this year (I completely failed last year). From seed, I started arugula, lettuce, cilantro, basil, lavender, and rosemary. I tried spinach, too, but it didn’t work out.
Now that our seeds are started and plants are purchased, we’re starting to prepare the garden and get everything in the ground. Here’s what we’ll have in our garden this year:
Kale
Swiss chard
Green peppers
Sweet banana peppers
Yellow cherry tomatoes
Roma tomatoes
Onions
Carrots
Beets
Beans
Yellow squash
Zucchini
Cucumbers
Potatoes
Cantaloupe
Winter squash (acorn, butternut, spaghetti)
Corn
I thought about doing less this year because we were so busy and had a lot extra last year, but we actually ended up doing more. Oops. It’s hard not to want to grow EVERYTHING. In addition to the veggies listed above, we have a variety of herbs (my chives came back from last year!!), arugula, and lettuce in pots on our porch, as well as a couple blueberry bushes we planted in the yard.
Two years ago we planted butternut squash and it took over almost half of the garden, so we decided to plant the winter squash in a different spot this year. About 20 feet from our main garden there is another small garden that Zack’s family planted in years ago. We decided to clean it up and use it for winter squash and corn.
This year, I’m staying organized by keeping a garden journal. In it I’m including lists of what we’re growing, diagrams showing where we plant everything, notes about what worked and what didn’t, and prices for how much we paid for plants/supplies. This will come in handy in future years and help us continue to improve.
Gardening is a whole lot of work, but it’s 100% worth it. I can’t even explain how excited I get when seeing seedlings sprout and produce grow. The next step is to weed, add manure, rototill, and rake, then it’s time to plant. I’m going outside to do some of that now–next garden update coming very soon!
Happy gardening ♥
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