Sprouts!

We started some seeds this past weekend in our indoor greenhouse. We don't have a great window for it, aside from the big bay window that the entire neighborhood can see. And the last time we did that, the neighbor thought we were starting an entirely different kind of 'grow operation'. Let's just say we cleared up that misunderstanding very quickly! So, to avoid that kind of situation again, the greenhouse is down in the bathroom staying toasty warm and humid with fluorescent lights.

We started onions, roma tomatoes, pink ponderosa tomatoes, chocolate and lemon yellow habeneros, and black hungarian hot peppers. Joey was determined to plant broccoli this year (even though we hadn't planned on it) so we made room in our garden space at home and he started his own broccoli seeds. And they were the first ones to sprout! He doesn't quite understand just how long it takes for broccoli to grow, and I'm sure he will lose interest, but right now he is so gosh darn excited about checking on his broccoli, watering it, seeing if it got bigger yet. I have two pink ponderosa tomato sprouts, and I noticed one itty-bitty onion sprout this morning. We haven't had a ton of luck growing onions at home from sets, so we will be trying them in our big garden over at my mom-in-law's house. I think they just don't get enough sun in our garden at home.

We are trying to keep better track of what we are growing, how we are growing it, and what kinds of yields we are getting for our efforts. We've been checking out books from the library all winter, trying to learn as much as we can about vegetable gardening organically. We're far from organic (gotta work on that compost pile!), but we're trying. My parents gave me a Gardening Journal for Christmas this year, along with a book about seed starting, and they have been incredibly helpful so far! Hopefully with the help of the journal, we will have a better idea of our yields per plant and how much canning or 'putting up' we do. And keeping track of how much we use in the winter so we don't end up with ridiculous amounts of zucchini, pickles, and tomatoes.

This is what is left of our canning efforts last year - obviously way too much jelly, salsa, pickles, well, too much of everything maybe! The cases on the top shelf are full of jellies, the 4 cases of quart tomatoes don't fit on the shelves, so they aren't in the photo, and on the bottom shelf we have 3 cases of salsas that you can't see very well. And this is after gifting about 40 jars of jellies for Christmas, and using up stuff all through the winter. The corn is in the freezer, along with zucchini, squash, and rhubarb.

And it's almost gardening time again. Let me know if you want to get rid of some old canning jars, I have a feeling we could use them!