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In our part of the planet, we're still about a month away from last average frost date.  We started our second group of seedlings to fill up the rest of the shelves in our "seed starting hot house".  So far our little hot house/green house has been great.  Our first round of seedlings have all taken and thriving.

We planted 3 more trays to fill in the rest of the racks in the hot house/green house: Onions, Jacob's Cattle Beans, Scotia Tomatoes (ya more tomatoes!), Cucumbers, Green/Yellow Beans and Giant Oregon Snow Peas.

With the nice weather announced this week, we're going to take advantage to start prepping the yard and garden.  It's been a very dry Spring and I hope we get cues that Mr. Frost is now gone for good so we can uncover the strawberries, garlic and start to work the garden ;o)  We're also pretty excited to move the starter seeds with greenhouse to the garage to start the hardening process.  It should make a big difference.  A few pictures....

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It's been 5 days since we started our first batch of seeds for the 2012 garden.  The new little greenhouse seems to be working nicely keeping a nice temperature, but can't wait to get it outside in a month or so to try it out on hardening the transplants.

Was plesantly surprised to see a few things sprouting already.  It's nice to walk into that little greenhouse and smell the fresh soil ;o)  This weekend we'll start the next 3 trays of transplants... so excited!

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Our average last frost date is mid May, so we started our first batch of seeds over the weekend.  We are actually a few weeks later then last year, but I don't think it will make a huge difference.

This year we bought a small 4 tier green house that was on sale.  I've always had a hard time hardening my plants, mostly due to inexperience, but I hope this will help as we can move the entire green house outside when the temps are right.  We started 3 x 48 pod trays:

Tray 1
12 Fat'N'Sassy Peppers
6 Applaus Tomatoes
6 Sweet Heart Tomatoes
12 Golden Cherry Tomatoes
12 Paris Island Cos Lettuce

Tray 2
48 Scotia Tomatoes

Tray 3
24 Summer Dance Cuccumbers
12 Norstar Onions
12 Cabbage

As you can see, to say we love our tomatoes is an understatement ;o)  We want to bottle tomatoes and salsa for winter, something we thoroughly missed this past winter.

We have another 3 x 48 pod trays to start this week and have to finish the garden design for this season, but that will be another post ;o)

Wishing everyone a Happy Spring and Seed Starting Season!

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Now that winter is rearing it's ugly head here in Eastern Canada, finally took the time to winter prep the strawberry beds.  Reminder to cover them up with straw for the winter.

Last year we did not cover our beds with straw, but we had lots of early snow before very cold freezing weather so were lucky.  The snow acted like a thermal barrier from the harsh cold.  This year we picked up 6 bales of straw to cover them up.

Straw is a good cover cause it's light and easy to remove in the Spring and reuse as mulch.  You want to use straw not hay, since straw has no grains in it.  Straw only contains the stalks of standing plants that contains no grains.

It's best to cover the plants with about 6" of straw when the temperatures start to dip into the freezing mark and leave it until just past your local last frost date.  The new flower buds are tender and susceptible to late spring frost so better to be safe than sorry ;o)

We plan on moving this bed out of the row garden as we transform it into raised beds, but that's another post all together.