Getting Ready to Garden

We got some distressing news while watching the local news tonight--3 dreaded words were uttered by the weatherman: Winter Storm Watch! Starting tomorrow evening (yes, the first day of spring) and extending all the way till Friday evening, we may see up to half a foot of snow.

OK, enough of that depressing crap, because today it was in the mid-40's and sunny, a perfectly lovely day for the middle of March in Minnesota.

I'm starting to get excited about planning my vegetable garden for this year. I'm planning to add another 12 X 12 raised bed in order to plant more varieties of vegetables. So as long as I was planning that, I went ahead and placed my on-line seed order from the Seed Savers Exchange 2008 catalog.

Their seeds are a little more expensive than at my local stores, but they're local (Decorah, Iowa) and I'm planning to try starting some extra plants and see if I can sell them reasonably to some of my co-workers. I've already got my little "seedling greenhouse" kit and some potting mix, so next week once my seeds arrive, I'll be starting broccoli, tomatoes, cucumbers, and peppers.

Penny inspects and approves my gardening supplies.

I also want to try planting the "garbage can potatoes" that Robin at Bumblebee posted about last summer. I sent Robin a quick e-mail to see if there might be a good time to call her and ask more questions about this project, and it turned out that she needed a diversion from what she was working on and it was a perfect time for her to talk a while. We had a fun chat about vegetable gardening, dogs, and other things. I hope someday we will be able to meet in person, but on the phone she sounded exactly as I imagined she would.

I did pick up this neat tool for weeding a few weeks ago.

Unfortunately, it's not self-propelled, but hopefully it will make my weeding job less strenuous and eliminate some of the time spent down on my knees.

But what I'm really happy about are my new purple polka-dotted boots!

Aren't they cute? It's a good thing my garden is behind the house. At least I won't have to worry about people seeing me traipsing around the backyard in my PJs and wearing these boots on my early morning trips to the garden and bird-feeder filling.

I also ordered my new compost tumbler this afternoon, so I'm almost ready for gardening season when it finally does arrive. Now I just have to get that raised bed assembled and call for a truckload of black dirt to fill it with, plus 3 garbage cans for potatoes. (And there you have it, Robin.....I think I'm almost at that $64 tomato level!)