When to Start Your Garden

Swiss Chard was our favorite last year!

I'm really new at gardening.  As a child I saw my parents plant one or two over the many years.  It was only about six years ago, when I bought my house, and had a small patch of dirt to call my own that I actually tried growing food.  And it was only last year that I really tried, as in I planted more than two things!  I even bought some good dirt and put it all in one spot so I could say I had a garden, and not just a few plants growing in my back yard.

For the last year now I've been doing a lot of reading on gardening.  I even checked out a book or two from the library!  But the best thing I did was subscribe to mysquarefootgarden.  Just this month I started getting emails that told me it is time to start planning my garden.  Here it is February and I find myself thinking about growing vegetables.  It's actually sort of refreshing.  So this morning I pulled out my folder where I had my assorted leftover seeds.  Out of the 12 things I hope to plant this year I still have seeds for 7 of them!  Some people might see the date on the package (2006) and think I'm silly to even try.  But last year I tried and they grew some great plants!  Being frugal I figure I'll try again. 
 

Seeds I gathered myself from last year's crops.

In fact, I'm so frugal, that I have some envelopes of seeds I gathered from produce that people gave me last year.  The radishes I actually grew myself, and let go to seed, so I saved the seeds to see if I could plant them this year.  The delicatta squash actually came from my sister-in-law who lives in New Hampshire.  When I visited her last October we dined on the best delicatta squash ever, so she gave me some seeds to take home.  She even folded up a scrap of paper to make a seed envelope for me!  I've read about people growing plants from seeds they gathered from their own plants, but this is the first time I will try it myself.

By the way, the store bought seeds came from discount places like Dollar Tree and Restore.  They cost about 25 cents a package.  When I was at Winco earlier this week (using super great coupons to get things like chicken for a dollar a pound) I browsed through their seed packages.  I couldn't help it, I have gardening on my brain.  They were about $1.75 and had a sign saying 30% off.  I didn't even have to do the math to know that wasn't a good deal.  I think I'll head to the Dollar Tree this week to see what I can see.  Yesterday my mom told me I could plant peas now.  Are you thinking what I'm thinking?

Sarah
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