It's only February but this weekend felt so much like spring that I just had to do some gardening. I have been flipping through the pages of several seed supply house catalogs all winter long awaiting a day such as today. Every year I save and collect seeds, and can hardly pass up on buying some new variety I have never grown before. Last year I grew Calypso and Christmas beans for the first time and it was dismal. I have learned that just because something will grow in my zone, that doesn't mean it will thrive and produce. Armed with this knowledge, I have decided to grow a lot of different things but in small quantity. My freezer is full and I will still grow a few rows of production proven crops like the Mississippi cowpeas and Jackson Wonder butter beans, but all of the experimental stuff will be on a very small scale, perhaps six to twelve plants each. I need to determine what performs best among the dozen varieties of tomatoes, peppers, peas and beans in my seed bank.
To that end, this weekend I started twenty or so different varieties of seeds. It's about eight weeks from the last frost date and this time of year usually finds my basement turned into a seedling greenhouse. Half a dozen Tupperware containers form mini-gardens basking in the warm glow of fluorescent grow lights until the seedlings are strong enough to pot up for later transplant. By the time the weather is warm enough outside they already have a jump start on life. That's the way we did it back in the day when we ran a commercial greenhouse and it works well.
Regarding news from the farm, last weekend I had only two chores to accomplish and yet I got neither of them finished. The first was to install the water heater, which I did, but used the wrong thickness of pipe and it exploded under the pressure. I was going to put off chore number two, which was to replace the radiator in the tractor, in order to complete something and not return home defeated, but it was raining the next morning. Since I couldn't work on the water heater I started the repairs on the tractor, as at least I would be out of the rain.
I quickly found out that 60 year old rusty bolts don't undo easy, and spent most of my morning just getting the old radiator out. But once it was free the new one went in relatively easy, and I was about halfway finished putting everything back together when we had to pack up and head for home to play a show down in Columbus. Hopefully I can finish both tasks this coming weekend. The garden has been too wet to work, but at some point soon I would like to turn under and plow three more new sections- one dedicated for corn, another for peanuts and the last for spring wheat. That will pretty much fill up the acre I have set aside for gardening. By moving the corn out of my regular garden, that will free up space for some experimentation, and I want to grow some watermelon and cantaloupe this year too.
