More spring planning

More gardening chores accomplished:
Started seed indoors for yellow crookneck squash, zucchini and cantaloupe. Spread seed for sweet basil and marigolds out in the garden and planted some nasturtiums in the garden. Also planted potatoes in the garden today. We bought 12 pounds of seed potatoes--7# red lasota and 5# yukon gold--which gave us 80 separate pieces (plants). If all goes as well as last year (and hopefully better now that we have learned some things), we'll probably get 1-2 pounds of potatoes per plant. The best part about having potatoes in the garden is that it's so easy to go dig some up whenever we want them for dinner, but leave the rest safely growing in the soil.

We also have a new garden space we were preparing today (probably should've been done earlier, but we have two small children and time is limited...). It's about a 13'x13' square we want to use for planting directly in the ground. Last year, we put down a bunch of cover crop--hairy vetch, rye grass and field peas. This morning we put a covering of compost and aged horse manure over top of that and tilled it all in. I'm still a little worried it might just turn into a brick when it rains, but for now it looks really nice. I'm thinking it's just gonna take some TLC for the next few growing seasons. This is our first time to really attempt building a productive in-ground bed, so we're experimenting at this point.

We also got to harvest some winter vegetables. On Friday I picked the rest of the broccoli out of the garden and made stir fry for dinner. This morning we picked cabbage and I'm thinking we'll do cabbage fried with bacon for lunch or dinner today. The onions and carrots we planted last fall are doing really well. Our strawberries are also very happy. At the moment, we're still picking off any blooms they put out so they will continue to put their energy to foliage instead of fruit (bigger plant=more srawberries, plus if there is fruit out and we get a freeze, we'll lose it anyway). I literally picked about 10 blooms off ONE plant this morning. It's never a good idea to "count your chickens before they hatch", but the potential strawberry harvest is still exciting. We'll give them about two more weeks to work on building foliage, then we'll stop picking blooms and let them make fruit.