Alli brings home magazines from time to time as her parents own an independent bookstore (www.theinsidestory.ca) and that obviously has it’s privileges. She’s always scoring uber cool stuff like Mother Earth News, Urban Gardening and more. Anyways, the other day she brought home a copy of Starting from Seed magazine that I finally got around to picking up and checking out tonight and I must say it’s really cool. They have a neat info section where they review gardening products but give you an economical and a high-end product but also recommend a green or free alternative. Kind of like gardening projects for every budget which I thought was cool. Grab a copy at your independent book seller or have them order it for you!

Winter is certainly not the time to start gardening, but we’re itching to get out there as soon as this damn snow melts!! In anticipation of the spring, we made a trip to visit our local nursery/greenhouse: DenHaan’s Garden World

They didn’t have much in the way of seeds yet, in fact they were just tidying up the Christmas stuff and reopening after the holiday. We did however get a few things including a seed tray, some vermiculite, potting soil and kelp fertilizer for Mary’s wheat grass. We also bought a packet of every seed they had in stock - which should at least help get a head start on the herb garden! We’re going to start the seedlings this weekend, as well as place an order for seeds from Halifax Seed Company for all our garden veggies.

Although the snow is still here, it`s not too early to start planning the garden, so when it`s time, we`ll be ready!

It’s been quite a while since we’ve updated the site, we’ve been super busy lately… the last couple months have brought a lot of change our way.

It’s exciting to let you all know that we’ve moved to a new province and a more rural area of the country. It’s hard to think of the gardens we’re leaving - all the work we put into them, but thrilling to think about  future plans for bigger and better.
We’re renting a house on 4 acres of land with a huge backyard and permission to put in a garden, so I look at last season’s endeavors as a learning experience.

We made the mistake of over-planting, which caused the zucchini leaves to shade everything else in that bed -mainly carrots I believe. The 2 carrots we did get were short and stubby - a result of raised beds that weren’t dug deep enough, perhaps? The zucchinis we did pull must have weighed about 4-5 pounds easily and were the length of my entire forearm, we ended up with quite a few. The green and cayanne peppers also did well, as did the herbs, which are hopefully now being enjoyed by the new tenants.

I think our raspberry plant died, but I couldn’t tell because we didn’t stake or cage the tomatoes so they all ended up falling down and most rotted on the ground.

We’ll do things properly this time round, now that we know what not to do. It is getting cold here, and they’re expecting snow tonight so no outdoor garden yet, but the house we rented has a garage with a large picture window in it so I’m thinking of planting shelves of lettuce. I wonder if it can stand cold temperatures. I think the garage is insulated but it’s defiantly not heated. Herbs are another thing I’d like to grow over the winter - they’re too expensive to buy in the store.

If anyone has any other ideas, please share them, we’d love to hear what all our readers think