Lettuce Entertain You

1 square of lettuce is in the ground! The seeds are supposed to sprout in 7-10 days...I can't wait! I held off on planting the transplants because they're not supposed to go in the ground until the actual week of the last frost date (which is supposedly May 10th). The seeds can go in 2-3 weeks ahead of time. All my research says to put 16 seeds per square but when I opened the packet of seeds and poured some out in my hand they were SO small that there was no possible way to only place one seed at a time. So, I may end up with a giant square packed full of lettuce! Hopefully this won't interfere with the way they grow. I keep reading about how to "thin" seeds once they start to come up through the ground but I don't really understand it...so I'm going with the let's-just-see-what-happens method.

I plan on planting 4 total squares of lettuce. I'm spacing out the planting dates by a week or so in order to have each square available for harvesting at different times. This will let me cut leaves from one square each week and give that lettuce time to replenish while we're chowing down on lettuce from the other 3 squares.

In other news, my garden binder (yes, I have a garden binder! I'm now a bit of an organizing freak--thanks to that even bigger organizing freak who is my husband!) is now up to date with a brand-spankin'-new Excel spreadsheet with my garden plans! Have I mentioned that I'm REALLY excited about this new garden thing?! I've planned it out twice on paper; changed positions of the veggies a million times in my head; and now I think I finally have a finished product. It looks so cool in print--let's just hope it looks equally cool when it's growing in our backyard! In case you're super into charts like me, here's what it looks like:


I've emailed a copy of my plans to another garden blogger, Emily. She's the creator of this site. Hopefully she'll email me back and give me some tips. Since I haven't planted anything except for the onions, potatoes and one square of lettuce, I should be able to change things around if need be. Ahhhh organizing, you make me feel so accomplished!!

po-TAY-to, po-TAH-to

We got our first veggies in! Last night, after Samuel hit the sack, Dave and I planted our seed potatoes and onion sets. I'd heard different dates to have these cold-weather-growers planted, so hopefully we've gotten them in the ground early enough that they'll actually produce enough to matter.

When planting potatoes using the square foot method you only plant one seed potato per square. We took about 6 inches of soil out of each square and placed the seed potatoes in --thanks to Becca's dad for those!!--and then barely covered them with a layer of soil. As they grow, we'll keep covering them with more and more dirt; this is supposed to help them develop a strong root system and produce more potatoes. I'm not sure how many potatoes we'll get from each square (we planted 6 squares in all) but I'm hoping it's more than 1! The onions only produce one per plant so we planted 9 onions per square; 3 squares total.

I've been so excited all day about the new stuff in the ground. I think I have been outside 3 times during the day to "check" on them. I know before I get out there that nothing could have possibly grown overnight but I don't want to miss anything!!