What an amazing day yesterday! Have I mentioned how much I love Colorado? After rain all day Saturday, yesterday was bright and shiny and clean and deliciously warm.
The husband and I spent the whole morning poking around local nurseries. We have exciting plans for a container vegetable garden out on our patio. We were hoping to buy seedlings, but realized that it’s still pretty early for vegetables here; one lady told us that the last freeze isn’t predicted until Mother’s Day weekend. Yikes! But she did give us some good ideas for crops we could start now, like lettuce, spinach, broccoli, and kale.
We had to stop for lunch, having become overwhelmed with our options, and once we had some food in us, we decided on a plan of action. We purchased two beautiful wooden window box-style planters on sale, some lettuce seedlings, a raspberry bush, a bunch of seeds, and those cute little pop up soil thingies for starting seeds. Oh, and some soil.
Our plan is to start a bunch of seeds indoors and wait out the 4-8 weeks for them to mature and for the weather to warm up some more. By then, we should be able to transplant them outside easily, and we should also be enjoying our first lettuce crop!
I can’t even tell you how excited I am to try my hand at vegetable gardening, even if it is only in pots on our patio. The last time I grew vegetables, I was probably about eight years old, and my parents did most of the work! But I still remember the pleasure of eating fresh peas and carrots straight from our back yard.
There’s something so satisfying about growing things. Gardens have a lot to teach us, like patience and responsibility. Nothing happens on an artificial time table with a garden; things grow in their own way, in their own time, and they depend on you for food and water and care.
We plan to grow lettuce (as I mentioned), spinach, eggplant, zucchini, tomatoes, green onions, basil, oregano, thyme, cilantro, nasturtiums, zinnias, and sweet peas.
And then, today, You Grow Girl posted a review of seed-starting techniques! Must be that time of year.
Becoming. Beautiful. Healing from binge eating disorder. 
Ooh, you should go on rivercottage.net
Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is my personal idol. I love him. He gave up his job to go and live in Devon, and started a small holding, and did tons of tv programmes to chart his progress, and he’s been mega-successfull and now makes loads from his tv and other projects. But if you look on the website it’s got lots of good tips for starting out on stuff like vegetable gardens.
I haven’t started any veg. I thought about it, but never got further than planting marigolds and geraniums. However, they’re doing really well, and I’m gonna start introducing them to the big bad world by the rabbit hutch. I ought to start growing veg now, shouldn’t I….