Starting A Spring Garden With Seeds

Starting a spring garden is always fun but some know how and a few good gardening tips always helps.  I have about 8 long planters in my yard (counting front and back) and the rest is grass or concrete (driveway).  I’m planning on building some raised garden beds soon but want to make sure all the current planters are 100% filled first.  A few weeks ago I bought some small onions (red, yellow and white) at Home Depot.  They were $1 a package of 60 and then on sale for 50% off.  I planted about 1/2 of each package.  No, I’m not a huge onion fan but had never grown them, know they last a long time, think they cost too much in the grocery store and they last a long time when stored properly after they are harvested.  The onions are doing fantastic and I’ve done nothing after planting them besides a little weeding around them.  I’ve read they can be harvested in the spring but I think I can let them just grow a while too and get bigger. You can also check out 23 Spring Garden Ideas For Beginners for more tips and tricks.

Red, Yellow & White Onions

Here is packages of seeds from iGrowForIt

I received a bag with 50 varieties of Non-GMO Heirloom Survival Seeds.  In Southern California we don’t have to worry about frost so I chose about 1/4 of them to plant now for my spring garden.  Some are summer plants and a few are ones I don’t like (okra, collards, dill, cabbage).  The package contains a huge mixture.  Cantaloupe, celery, swiss chard, a few types of tomato, kale, beet, plus some herbs and a few I’ve never heard of (corn salad dutch and kohlrabi purple vienna).

You can find this bulk-supply of seeds on Amazon here—>  Heirloom Vegetable Seeds Pack

The seeds can be kept in a freezer for long-term storage.  They also have an 85% germination rate.
Here is the first planter I wanted to use.  It had some wood chips scattered in it and a some grass that needed to be pulled. Almost finished.  I also loosened all of the soil a few inches down by turning it over with the shovel.  This will help the seeds’ roots grow into the ground. Nacho the cat kept attacking the grass as I pulled it out of the ground.

GREAT TIP- to keep cats and dogs out of your planters or from pooping on your grass.  Sprinkle generously a Red Pepper Seasoning in area you want to keep them away.  When they smell it they’ll go elsewhere to go potty.  It needs to be reapplied after heavy rain.

A few weeks later the plants started showing.  I totally forgot to put markers up!  So now I will have to play the ‘I wonder what this is’ game for a while.  A few I recognize, some… no clue.More Unidentifiable Plants (yes, I’m a genius).
These look like a squash?  Broccoli!  YES! I know this one. 🙂  Pat myself on the back.  Broccoli is normally a winter plant so we’ll see how it does in California right now.  It might last for a few months but not full-summer months.  When the temperature is in the 100’s it’ll be too hot for broccoli.

Spring Garden Onions are super tall!

Love how easily they grow.  I thought there would be an onion scent in the area but I don’t smell them at all.  Swiss Chard is starting to come in nicely too. In another planter I planted lettuce a few months ago (and harvest it regularly for salads) and I just put some tomato plants around them.  Hopefully there will be some shade so the summer heat doesn’t kill all of hte lettuce. More tomato plants and some strawberries. Cilantro, a few lettuce, one stray onion and the bushy one on the right is oregano.
My front porch plants do not get wet in the rain so I found this cool hack.  Terra Cotta Wine Bottle Spikes.  I still need to soak the wine bottles to get the labels off but wanted to test it out first.  The water slowly drips into the pot as it is needed and now I can water the porch plants less frequently.

You can find them on Amazon here —>Plant-A-Bottle Stakes

They are also great for indoor plants and for self-watering when you go on vacation.  Make sure you get wine bottles that have use a cork and not a screw on cap (the latter of the two don’t fit the neck right of the terra cotta spikes).

Let me know if you can identify the unknown vegetables!

You’ve probably read that diabetes, poor diet, and heart attacks, can cause erectile dysfunction, that’s not the whole story find address viagra cheap india when it comes to plaquing up the arteries. Now that’s not all, ED can be a signal of health brand levitra 20mg issues that need treatment. These viagra stores emotional disturbances eventually causes disharmony in your relationship. The buy levitra professional factors affecting the sex drive in women such as mood changes and some hormonal changes.