first of the month coming up - what are you planning to do in garden?

Composting everything I can get my hands on right now for the next season. Garden still going strong though. My heated (ahem...by christmas lights) hoop wagons have been successful. Removing plastic off each wagon every morning at 645am before I leave for work and replacing late at night has been added to my daily routine....a labor of love! 8 Packman Broccoli all done with big heads but lots of sweeter secondary ones still coming in to snack on. Seeded 8 Walthams just heading up now: timed that pretty well. Lettuce still going good. Kale is exploding: 7 very large Winterbors still going. Spinach is really growing slowly tho. Just had a tough time with it all round. Have tons of Nantes carrots that are taking their time to mature. Beets are all leaf and no real bulb roots to speak of but I'm still hopeful. Chard still going but noticably slowing down. Will shut down at xmas, rest and get ready for spring. Building cold frame in Jan and waiting for the cedar beds I got today on Cyber Monday sale....yippee!!!

We're gonna be building our new greenhouse!!! Our Park Manager delivered two large boxes to us this evening...the greenhouse he had ordered. I am sooooo excited!!

Because we have rainy/windy weather for the next week we won't be able to start building until next Monday...but it looks like we'll have several days of clear, at least sunny weather after that. From the online directions it may take us a few days to put this thing together...depending on how much help we get!

OMG...I am more than excited!!!

If you haven't read about our community garden, the Apollo Garden, take a look here and then you'll know why I'm jumping all over the place!

https://squarefoot.forumotion.com/northern-california-coastal-valleys-f13/modesto-central-valley-ca-t2996.htm

oh wow!

how so exciting!!!!!!!

building a hoop house this month with a germination chamber inside.
shredding leaves and adding them to grow beds.

Over wintering the pepers and toms I have in the garden now. Starting seedlings for my 30 different kinds of toms to see which do well here in Az. Hopefully, harvesting my peas! Picked one on sunday. It was good, but still pretty small. Maybe a carrot or a beet might be ready as well.

Well I was going to put the new fence up but with a good depth of snow on the ground and freezing temperatures I think I will postpone it till it thaws. I will have just keep reading about what you lot are doing and daydream. aaah!!

Battening down the hatches here! hope to get the rest of my spring flowering bulbs in by Sunday.

Just planted spinach, raddish and 4 types of heirloom toms (yes, from seeds :afraid: )

Had the "itch"... I just couldn't resist the seductive stare and forlorn & pitiful cries of seed packets saying "plant me", "plant me"

Please forgive me in my moment of weakness

Ah, Acara, if we had your weather (even though I know you've got a cool front on the way)!

We here in Europe are in the deep freeze -- snow on the ground, and daily highs below freezing -- wayyyy too cold and wayyy too much snow for this time of year already (it was almost 50 last week!)

Jumiclads got buried far worse than we did here...but I'm afraid it looks like our gardening is of the Farmville or imaginary variety for a few months.

Well, it sounds silly now, but my next SFG project is to read the book.

We had early Christmas at our daughter's last week and her gift to me was Mel's all-new SFG book and cookbook, so I am doing a lot of reading and finding a lot of things I did wrong in the beginning - more than I realized.

I have Mel's original book and I was using that info, plus info from this site, and what little I retained from a very quick read-through of my other daughter's copy of the all-new SFG book. Now I see how I made so many newbie mistakes. (Note to self - put horse in front of the cart in future.) A quick read-through of the book just didn't get it for me. I needed to savor it slowly to absorb all the info. I don't know how I missed so many important points on that brief scanning, but I did.

I'd already figured out the two most important things I missed. One, a 3.9 cu ft bale of compressed peat moss actually makes 8 cu ft when decompressed, and also, five different composts means five different types of compost, not just five different brands. That might not have mattered for me when we began since all I could find here was cow manure and cotton compost, plus the stuff they sell at Wally World which has Miracle Grow mixed in it or is made of sewage sludge, neither of which I wanted to use. Being unable to find enough different blends of compost meant I had to add amendments to mine to enrich it and that just made more work and expense. Had I read the new book first, I would have known to be looking for more compost varieties when we traveled to larger towns and cities.

Now I am contemplating removing all the semi-MM from those first boxes and adding more compost and vermiculite to the mix and seeing if I can't get it right this time.

ander217 wrote: five different composts means five different types of compost, not just five different brands. That might not have mattered for me when we began since all I could find here was cow manure and cotton compost, Being unable to find enough different blends of compost meant I had to add amendments to mine to enrich it and that just made more work and expense. Had I read the new book first, I would have known to be looking for more compost varieties when we traveled to larger towns and cities.

I had the same issue when I was building my MM too. There were simply not more varieties available.

ander217 wrote:Now I am contemplating removing all the semi-MM from those first boxes and adding more compost and vermiculite to the mix and seeing if I can't get it right this time.

I feel as I have taken care of this issue this fall in that I found a local dairy that I have gotten stable compost from ( loaded with worms!) and also that I had successful home composting this summer. So, with the addition of those 2 sources I brought the number of different compost source up to 5. There was a lot of settling of the MM/soil over the growing season, so when I was amending the beds this fall I added 40 pounds of the dairy manure compost and a whole wheelbarrow full of home made compost to each 4X4 square. filling up the box to the brim. I expect settling over the winter and fine results next season.

staf74 wrote:snip.... "Garden still going strong though. My heated (ahem...by christmas lights) hoop wagons have been successful." ....snip

Now that's kewl!

Deborah.... who is only dreaming of next year while mulching herself with a big quilt, watching the plethora of sale adds so as to not miss the new seed catalogs when they come.

One, a 3.9 cu ft bale of compressed peat moss actually makes 8 cu ft when decompressed

Made this mistake as well ..... but hey, my MM in the box didn't compress/compact a bit all season ... LOL

Still wondering how I crammed everything in that 4 x 4 box :?:

Ah, Acara, if we had your weather (even though I know you've got a cool front on the way)!

Yep ...cool front arrived this morning. Nothing major though (39-40F low). It's the wind kicking up with the cold front thats giving me fits. Back of my house has been like a wind tunnel for the last 48 hours & I moved the potted WFET's to avoid losing the new fruit. I'm probably going to lose a lot of the blossom off the WFET-wall though ...but such is life.

The Mr. Stripey tomato bush was topped flush with the cage recently & the fruits at about 1/2 lb already ....so a little wind shouldn't hurt those.

Some of the generic container hybrids got bent over last night due to wind/fruit weight ..... but no great loss.

I also grabbed a bunch of almost-ripe cherry toms off the plants this morning ... before they end up all over the lawn and/or snapping branches.

pleased to check in that i have cleared out 3 more boxes this afternoon for the winter. have a bunch of compost to carry to back of yard, but i got tired and figured i could finish that tomorrow. so almost done with my december tasks! after i finish the outside stuff, i get to start dreaning about what to seed start inside next month!

ander217 wrote:Well, it sounds silly now, but my next SFG project is to read the book...

I've been thinking I should read it again, but slower.

We had a good freeze with our snow in the PNW over Thanksgiving. The chard finally quit. The kindergarten teacher on KIRO promises a clear cold day for working in the garden. I've got to get out and get the remnants of the now slimy looking chard into the compost.

The wire tops need to go back on gardens, supports for tomatoes and peas should come down. I was not going to compost until spring but I have lots of rather raw compost, and since the boxes are alive with earth worms I should give them a bit of heat and nourishment that a layer of compost will provide.

Other than that, since I never did get an overwinter garden going, I should go through my seed stash, decide what worked and what is bird food while waiting expectantly for those seed catalogs to come.

Deborah.... busy making Christmas Cookies and blogging the results.

how's it going ya'll?

i finally carried another 2 buckets of compostable materials to the back compost piles and brought from the shed some shovels to deal with the snow - a broom just wasn't working so well, so i gave in to winter.

still have a few more buckets to carry but i'm doing it in baby steps.

trying to decide if i want to bring in the empty planters (i found containers that fit sfg guidelines and were 1x2 and similar sized - i just used electrical tape to mark off a grid on them) and scrub them down in the bathtub or just deal with them in the spring. decisions! so many decisions to make!