Never ending winter!

All hopes of putting more plants in the garden this past weekend were dashed upon arriving home to find snow on the ground. Winter refuses to give up this year! Instead of putting plants in the ground, I put bunches of horse manure courtesy of my friends Tom and Kelly.

I stopped by their house on Saturday and filled three 5 gal buckets with high quality Montezuma County hay fed horse manure.



I turned the unplanted portions of my garden and worked in about 10 gallons of the manure and then let the soaker hose run for a while to work it into the soil.

It actually works out well that I can't plant right away because the extra time allows the bacteria in the soil to begin the nitrogen cycle on the manure converting the Ammonia in the poop, to Nitrites and then into Nitrates which plants can then use as food (sound similar? the same process occurs in my AP system).

The seeds I started in my garden are growing nicely. My snap peas are growing rapidly and hopefully within the next couple of weeks I will be able to direct them to begin climbing the chain link fence they are growing along. I am planting climbing veggies along the fence in hopes that by late summer I will have a living fence!




The garlic also continues to grow in leaps and bounds!



The lettuce and arugula are also sprouting up nicely.

Since I was unable to put my tomato and cucumber seedlings in the ground, I decided that I needed a new place to store them. I had been keeping them on my desk because it receives a bit of sun during the day. As we get further into the year the sun has been creeping higher in the sky decreasing the light on my desk each day. To free up some space and get more light on my little green creatures I built a hanging shelf on my western "porthole window" from miscellaneous materials from around my house. Now my plants can get late afternoon sun and be out of my way. I think its pretty ingenious!


I had a near disaster this weekend when I left my cucumbers outside in their trays to get some light during a period of the lovely wind we have been having. I returned home to find the trays over turned and the seedlings in a pile on the ground... I quickly put them into peat pots, watered and gave them a dose of liquid sea weed in hopes to revive them. A couple plants appear to have broken stems, but as of the next day all of them had regained some rigidity and were looking healthier. I hope that they are not all dead when I return from Fruita on Thursday.

Check back in a week for the next blog which will hopefully be about sprout growing and cold frames!