No pictures, lots of thinking

So I've been a bit flakey about getting photos lately for which I'm sorry. Right now at least the photos would be too interesting even if we did have them, so at least there is no great loss. The big thing going on in our life at the moment other than day to day work of course, is planning for spring starts. Some of this is obvious enough, we need to bring the shelves we've been using for seed starting up and get them set up first. But before we actually start seeds, we should probably do some garden planning so we have a reasonable expectation of how much we'll be able to plant so we only start 2 - 3 times what we can plant.

The catch of course is that I neglected to get measurements of our garden beds before the snow covered them for the entire winter. Definitely an example of "No really, you can't just wait to do it." We've also never done actual garden planning before. What we're probably going to be doing is doing a fair amount of guestimating on how much space we'll have. This year at least there will be less garden bed digging than there was last year. I am planning on building some new beds this spring though, I just need to not get Too ambitious!

Right now the things we know we want to plant.

Sunchokes otherwise known as Jerusalem Artichokes
Red lumpy squash I can't remember the name of
Cherry Tomatoes of a few varieties
Paste tomatoes of a few varieties
Winter squash
Cucumber
Zuchini
Radishes
Lettuce
Hot peppers (Limon, Scotch Bonnet, Sweet Habenero among them)
Sweet peppers
Kale (though this may not be going in a bed per se)
Eggplant
Pole beans
Amaranth

I think I may have already over run our reasonable space to grow in just with our basic things we definitely want to grow! At least the new garden bed we put together int he fall will be available to plant in. Of the things above, not all of them need to be started inside.

The ones we need to start inside soon are sunchokes and peppers. Maybe also the eggplant. Others to start inside, but not immediately are tomatoes, and maybe others. For the peppers at least we're going to need to try to keep the soil warm enough that they will germinate and grow. We've been considering a few solutions to that other than keeping the house warmer which isn't efficient. We need to do research on how warm the soil needs to be for how much of the day, and what the low temperature can be. If the soil can tolerate being 50 at the lowest, then we'll only have to provide extra heat for part of the day to help growing. There's so much we don't yet know about gardening, and with how much work has been going on I haven't been getting ahead on research! Hopefully we'll be able to share a lot of information as we learn it.

Expect a lot of research going on in the near future, and we'll still be trying to keep updates on the rabbits and chickens as things go on!