It’s garden time!

Spreadsheets say it’s ok

I find that gardening has an overwhelming amount of information at any given time about any number of factors. In times of information overwhelm, I find myself craving order in the form of a spreadsheet (or several). So, I’ve been developing a gardening database since last year and it has made seed starting / planning slightly easier this year. Here’s how the planning part of my database is set up:

Table 1: The Timing Table. This is based on the Farmer’s Almanac average last spring frost and first fall frost dates for my area. Since most sowing recommendations are written as “x weeks before” or “x weeks after”, I just worked backwards and ahead from the Almanac dates to get a nice cheat sheet for calculating the dates. The next table also uses these to “look up” dates based on the recommended # of weeks before / after the frost dates.

Table 2: The Plant Catalog. I take info from the seed packets and populate a table with all kinds of info. Below is the section of the table where I’ve pulled in the recommendations for sowing indoors and/or outdoors “x weeks before last spring frost date” from the seeds, and used a formula to turn that into a date.

Table 3: The planning table. This is where I make my plan and record what I’ve actually done for seed starting. It pulls in info from Table 2 to pre-populate Start Inside Date and Start Outside Date. That helps me pick a good planning date to start the seeds for a particular plant. I pick a plant, populate the planning section with some dates, and then each weekend I can basically look at which seeds I should be thinking about starting. Then, when I actually sow some seeds I put that date in the “Actual” section so I can have that info for next year / later.

Yes, I realize this is overkill for a hobby garden. However it genuinely helps me to worry about it only once, and then trust the system so I can actually be a little less rigid with my schedule knowing that I have established some reasonable estimates for myself. It has helped prevent my mistake from last year of just starting everything in January (although lets be honest I had all of the same info last year I was just bored and impatient…). Plus I just love a system.

Seedlings so far

In addition to the winter sowing experiment, I’ve started several seeds so far!

In the last month I’ve started some pineapple sage, green onions, shallots, a few types of basil, and rosemary. Most of them are happily camping out on my window sill growing slowly until it’s time to go outside.

Today I filled this starter tray with a whole army of seeds and things should get exciting. I’ve filled it with plants that I think have a similar growing rate so they should all bump into the lid at around the same time:

• Biquinho peppers (red, and yellow)
• Poblano Peppers
• Tomatoes (cherry red, ping pong, currant, and san marzano)
• Cabbage
• Brussels sprouts
• Broccoli

In the past I’ve mixed plants in the same tray that have wildly different growing rates and had to evict the zucchini before the rosemary had even poke it’s head above ground. I’m hoping I dodged that this time.

Ground truth

If you recall I have a new plot this year! Last weekend I stopped by the garden for a garden planning workshop and visited my plot with the Master Gardener to pick her brain about planning my layout. The next day I was back to do some weeding and leveling. In the process I removed MANY dill plant skeletons (prepare for a bounty this year) and encountered some grasshoppers, asparagus, and a mystery tuber. Behold the stunning transformation: