Spring is Here!

 Spring is here, but Peeka agrees with me that it still seems like winter, especially since we got covered with a new thick blanket of the white stuff.  No, I'm not talking about Oreos! 

I don't mind the snow.  I love it when we get dumped on!  Usually when a snow storm comes, Anchorage hogs most of it.  With this storm we actually got quite a bit, and Anchorage got even more.  No surprise there. 

Every day Peeka wants to check to see if winter is over yet.

She was disappointed this day.

But snow, or no snow, here in Alaska we MUST start our garden seeds early and not let the snow affect our judgment.  June 1 is my designated (outdoors) transplanting day, so it is crucial to get things started!  My celery and parsley have sprouted, which is very exciting!  It seems kinda weird to be sprouting these little green things when we still have 2 feet of snow on the ground, but to me, the little green things tell me that Spring is here, even if the snow says otherwise.

Two of my parsleys didn't germinate (yet) for some reason.  I will give them another week or two.  If they still don't show up, then I'll reuse those pellets for something else.  I don't wanna let those go to waste.  And I will just have to make do with 4 parsley plants instead of 6.  But this is why I always plant one or two extras.

Today I started seeds for spearmint, strawberries, broccoli, banana peppers, lavender, peppermint, sage, rosemary, Polar Beauty tomatoes, and Sub-Arctic tomatoes.  It was 80 degrees in the sunroom today, so I put them out there so I could still have my kitchen counter available to make supper.  I will have to move them all back in when the temps cool down.

The are already getting steamy under the lid.

Every two weeks I will be starting more seeds, as per the directions on the packages, so by the end of May, this table is going to be FULL!  Especially since a lot of these seedlings will be transplanted to little pots, which will take a lot more room.

I found a fun way to plan my garden beds!

These are only 4 of them, but since I have 8 beds (for now), I came up with the idea to make a visual aid to help me plan out my beds.  Since I've been collecting scrap booking tools for the last upteen years, I have quite the collection of various sizes of circle punches, so I put them to use.  I used the recommended "thinning space" on the seed packets to determine the size of the circles - 

one inch = one foot.

I used 1" squares for patches of veggies like carrots and peas.  I was NOT gonna punch out tiny period-sized dots to represent each carrot!  So there is probably some elbow room left in the patches because I may not even have enough pea, bean, and carrot seeds to fill up the patches that I planned for. (I could always buy more, I suppose.) This helped me figure out how much room I had and how many of each veggie I could plan for.  And then I cut out flower shapes for some specific flowers that I want to plant in the garden beds, and I wanted to make sure I planned out some room for them.

It took me a LONG time to punch them all out and label them, but I had a lot of fun putting the "puzzle" together, especially when referring to my "companion planting" notes.  I had to move things around after I discovered I had some things together that really shouldn't have been.

Anyhoo, I am on my way to gardening!

And that's pretty much all I've been up to (in my spare time).

Maybe in two weeks I'll fill you in on the next 6 veggies that I will be adding to my windowsill.

Sorry if this is boring.....

p.s.  Last weekend we went to the cabin, and I wanted to share some pictures, but I unintentionally left my camera in the truck.  So I took some pictures with Chuck's phone, but he is terrible about getting them transferred to the computer, and I refuse to keep asking him until I sound like a broken record.  So you will just have to use your imagination.  It was BEAUTIFUL.