A New New Beginning

Dear Readers,

I am chagrined by the date of my last post and humbled by the amount of friends and relatives telling me they actually read this blog. So, I'm launching a new beginning for the Horto in Urbs blog.

Again.

Well, it's mid-February and the garden planning is well underway. This year's lineup:

• Carrots
• Cantaloupe
• Blueberries
  
• Broccoli
• Garlic
• Herbs (basil, cilantro, and thyme)
  
• Lettuce (head and leaf)
• Onions (yellow, from sets)
• Raspberry
• Spinach
• Squash (acorn and butternut)
• Strawberries
  
• Tomatoes
  

And the most daring addition:

• a Braeburn apple tree!

Owing to last year's overabundance of lettuce, mistimed cilantro (it was gone before the tomatoes were ripe) and frequent fallow patches of good soil, I've made a weekly garden calendar. It will help me keep track of indoor and direct-seeding dates, transplant dates, succession planting intervals, fertilizing refreshes, general weather data, growing notes, and harvest totals.

Gardening is a continual process of refinement and improvement that will likely only stop when they plant me in the ground. Some of the major changes from last year:

• No more corn. The squirrels ravaged the entire crop in one awful afternoon. I'm using last year's entire corn bed for cantaloupe, which Ellie loves. Sixteen plants oughta keep her in melons, I should think!
• Much more interplanting. This is the main handkerchief garden/square foot garden concept. I did some last year, but didn't really utilize my available space to its fullest.
• More succession planting. I succumbed to the temptation of planting several rows of things that would then be ready for harvest all at once--like lettuce. It turns out that no matter how much my family likes salad, we just can't down six or seven heads a week! Hopefully, an organized plan will help restrain me to planting in increments that we can reasonably use or give to friends.
• Using cold frames. Over the winter, I've been collected discarded/replaced windows from back alleys (I think I'm up to a dozen now), and in the next couple of weeks I'll be turning them into cold frames to direct-sow early, harden indoor seedlings for transplant, and later to extend the fall harvest.
  
• Bulk planting. For things that store better than leafy greens, I'm planting more of them this year: carrots, onions, garlic, and cantaloupe come to mind. I'm also adding three more raspberry bushes to eventually have a decent harvest that we can make jam with or do some useful with, rather than getting a handful of berries now and again.
• Determinate tomatoes in containers rather than crazy indeterminate ones on an 8-ft trellis. Just easy to deal with, and hopefully easier to shield from squirrels.
  
• Oh, and blogging more.

I also need to look at my indoor growing setup. I had good luck last year in the area I set up (rather inconveniently) in the furnace room, but the customized, out-of-the-way space I created in the laundry room did not do well. At first I thought it was the light (fluorescent tubes designed for plant growing), and then I suspected the soil mix (still do), but now I think it was too cold in the room (the basement is not well heated). I'm going to try again with different soil and more heat.