Our 2013 Garden Year

This year we started our garden in February as an experiment mainly. I thought I'd give the plants a head start. But I'm not sure if it was a good plan as far as getting ahead goes. I think plants just take off in July no matter how early you start them. The plants grew in our sunny window on shelves Peter let me have in the house for about 4 months! They grew, I moved them into bigger cups, then in May we moved them outside, gradually. Half of them were veggies and half were flowers. I could only justify buying annuals if I started them as seeds, thinking they would look like the ones in the garden stores by summer, but I was wrong. They all took way too long or died or didn't transplant well.  So the cool thing is all of my veggies this year were started from seeds (except one early girl tomato I bought at Walmart)!

I will do this window seed starting plan again, but now I know I don't have to start so early. Even though they were ready to be planted outdoors in March and April, I had to wait until the weather warmed up anyway.

Slowly though, our garden is looking like I've always imagined, crammed full of flowers!

These are flowers from all around our house, but mainly from this front area above which welcomes us into the lawn area.

The difference a month makes in a veggie garden:

June left lake garden: tomatoes, celery, swiss chard, cabbage

July left lake garden

June right lake garden: beans, beets, brussel sprouts, eggplant

July right lake garden