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On March 29th we planted some of our seeds for our 2015 garden. We have a seed starting rack with lights that Bryn gave us years ago when she upgraded to a HUGE new one. We put it in the sun room.

Here is what we have started:
Tomatillo
3 types of tomatoes (2 for preserving, 1 for eating)
Chives
Dill
3 types of winter squash
watermelon
7 types of cucumbers (I have 3 cucumbers the other 4 our Joshua’s)
3 types of peppers
Eggplant
Cabbage
Broccoli
Green Onions

Some seeds you sew directly into the ground after the last possible frost. For us that will be our corn , lettuce mix, pole beans, carrots, beets, and red potatoes.

Our cucumber starts have thrived.

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We also plan on trying a winter garden. We have raised beds that we will cover, when the weather cools, with a low tunnel cover. What is a low tunnel cover you ask? They are built out of PVC pipe that is bent from one side of the row (or raised bed) to the other. Once that is done you cover completely with garden fabric or plastic sheeting. We did this with our raised beds in our previous home. We like to call it our conestoga wagon. The concept behind covering your rows of plants is the temperature in the covered row will be warmer than the outside temperature. Depending on what you cover your row with you can keep your plants warm even in temperatures below freezing.

Our winter crop will consist of:
cabbage
broccoli
winter lettuce mix
carrots
kale
beets

Tomatoes are still on the small side.

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My peppers need more heat. They are still pretty small.

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Today I transplanted some of the larger starts into larger pots. I also let them enjoy being outside in our 74 degree sunny day.

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Why do we spend all this time and energy starting vegetable seeds. Three reasons really. The first is that we get a head start on gardening. We have more than a month before we are past our last possible frost date of May 23. By then most of these plants will be quite tall. In Oregon we don’t have the long growing season that California, Arizona and Nevada have. It can turn cloudy and rainy before the end of August.

Plants, like tomatoes, don’t produce as much in Oregon if you are starting out with a 4 inch high plant that you put in the ground the beginning of June.

That brings us to reason number two. It is less expensive to grow our own vegetable starts than to go to a garden center and buy starts. Take a tomato plant, for example, before we started our own plants we would buy the HUGE tomato plants from the garden center. At $10 – $20 each that gets expensive. We paid $4.25 for seeds of three different types of tomatoes. 70 tomato seeds for $4.25. Yes, we buy peat trays and starting mix but the cost is minimal. Now that I preserve our food I plant over twenty tomato plants each year. Preserving wouldn’t be saving us money if I paid $10 for each plant.

The third reason is that there is tremendous variety when you buy from seed companies. We like Pinetree Garden Seeds. Joshua, who has an obsession with cucumbers, ordered some very interesting varieties. Brown Russian , Poona Keera and Mexican Sour Gerkin to name a few. Bryn turned us on to a Japanese cucumber called Suyo Long. We plant it every year now.

So now you know how our garden starts. I hope you will enjoy as I let you know how Salt Creek Acres 2015 garden grows.

Happy growing,
Karen