In the Greenhouse:

Basil

Cilantro

Pac Choi

Marigolds

Zinnias

In the Garden:

Kale (I could eat it year round)

Leeks (starting from seed for winter leeks)

Brussels Sprouts (direct seed outside)

Ok, that didn’t seem like that much, but it took me forever to do.  Today/ this weekend I need to sow another few rows of lettuce, beets and carrots.  I need to finally get my first set of beans in (I’m a week behind on that) and get the last of the beds built since we have another 5 yards of Tagro coming on Monday.  Once those are filled I can add corn to one bed.  After these last few items are finished I can just do successive plantings until late May.  Once May arrives I’ll have tomato and pepper starts to plant, all of the various squashes to plant out and watermelon to start indoors (yes, I’m trying watermelon again).

My great Tagro experiment has mixed reviews on my part.  Everyone told me that it wouldn’t work (for review, we are starting this giant garden with straight Tagro Mix, not potting soil).  So far most all of the seeds that I’ve planted have germinated.  There are a few lettuces that have yet to come up, but I had low germination rates with those last year too.  The only issue I’m facing at the moment is slow growth.  For now I am blaming it totally on the weather.  We have not see more than 12 hours of full sun in weeks.  The weather guy keeps promising sun, but it never shows up.  I’m not giving up hope.

This season I plan to use Tagro once again.  The expansion of the garden will require us to purchase the mix instead of the bucket method of last year (if you go to the Tagro facility you can shovel as much as you like for free).  We are estimating 10 yards to complete the garden.  Since our soil is very hard from years of compaction we are taking the lazy man’s way out with building the garden.  I’ve been hoarding newspaper and cardboard and I’ll rake all of the Photinia leaves once we are ready.  I will lay down many layers of paper and cardboard and then the Tagro on top.  We are not removing the grass underneath.  This will either work out well or be a very bad thing.  I hoping for the former.

We are also putting in a meandering gravel path, but we will put landscape fabric under that.  We would eventually like to till the garden beds, but not the path.

As for the raised beds in the back we will amend those with Tagro too.  In addition I add Soundgro to those and I’ll sprinkle in a little bid of worm castings.

Next year we should be able to rent a full sized rototiller for the main garden and add more Tagro and various manures.

Now the straight Tagro method may not work for the full vegetable garden since Tagro is a little more acidic than I would like, but again gardening is trial and error.