Hello February! Let the Gardening Begin!

It's hard to believe we've already had a couple of months off from gardening. Maybe because we were laying out the new beds in the orchard until mid-December. It always seems to be a bigger and bigger push to get the garden to bed before Christmas. Although typically, it should be done around Halloween or the latest Thanksgiving. We just never seem to make it. I was still fresh harvesting Collards and Kale for New Year's day dinner. I could count on one hand how many daytime temperature highs were below freezing so the cockeyed weather continues. No snow until yesterday evening, and then we had a steady snow fall of large flakes for several hours for a total accumulation of a couple inches of white stuff on the ground. It just goes to show ya, winter ain't done with us yet.

So why am I talking about gardening? This week I sowed our Red Bliss and russet potatoes are planted in their hay bales with compost. Carrots, green peas, and a host of cool weather crops fill my shelves as soil plugs to germinate all snug within their plastic bag coverings. It's the excitement of the coming spring and it's contagious! Any homesteader, or even just the run of the mill gardener feels this way. We set up trays of seeds that we are looking forward to growing, harvesting, eating, and putting by. Anticipation is at an all time high. Yes, that's February!

Not much is actually planted in the ground yet, but in the next 60 days it will be and the race will be on once again to beat the bugs and weeds into submission.  So we might have a decent harvest to hedge against shortages and starvation. But from the later part of January, when our seeds were ordered and started arriving and now we dream of the abundant harvest and the lush, green plants to come. Somehow the bleak, gray days of Winter seems a bit brighter. Even though the hoped is sitting in trays of plugs that really won't show anything for a few weeks yet.

This is the beginning, it's a fresh start of the 2021 garden. It's an exciting time for us. One of hope and promise of good things to come. It's the first ten trays of  a multitude to follow. May all our gardening dreams come true in 2021.   

Y'all have a blessed day!

Cockeyed Jo