It’s my favorite time of the year – garden planning and checking off my monthly gardener’s to do list. I’m thrilled that warmer days are just ahead of us and that as soon as the soil can be worked I can start planting early spring vegetables!
If you’re new to gardening and would like to start your own organic vegetable garden, head on over to my post, Organic Gardening 101, How to Start an Organic Vegetable Garden. It should get you started on understanding key terminology and how to go about starting your own vegetable garden.
This year, I’m planning on sharing with you a post about gardening or some topic in homesteading each Thursday. If you’d like to keep up with these posts, please sign up for my email list by clicking here.
As many of you know I’ve been urban homesteading for many years now. It’s all that I know, really.
This year I’m excited to say that I’m moving to a 10 acre homestead that we’re building from the ground up. I am very excited for you to join me on this journey from urban homesteading to full fledged homesteading. It’s going to take a lot of planning as I want to make sure we set up the homestead in a way that will aid in permaculture. This is a whole new topic that I’m starting to dip my feet into but still have much to learn about; however, it does bring me great joy to envision animals, plants and weeds, all the way down to microbes in the soil, working together in harmony. As I mentioned, I still have quite a bit to learn about in this area, so (as always) if you have any advice, feel free to drop me an email or leave me a comment. I always appreciate your wisdom.
As I’m in transition between homesteads, I’m not quite sure what my garden plans are going to look like. Honestly, they may not be much of anything at all but since I’m in gardening mode, I went ahead and started most of my seeds indoors anyways 😉 Why not, right?
Below is my March Gardener’s to Do List for Zone 5. Again, if you don’t know what zone you live in, check out my post, Organic Gardening 101, How to Start an Organic Vegetable Garden.
March Gardener’s to Do List (Zone 5)
- Start hot summer crops such as tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants indoors under lights.
- Start hot summer herbs such as oregano, thyme, sage, and marjoram indoors under lights.
- As soon as the soil can be worked, begin to plant lettuce, peas, radishes, carrots, and potatoes into the garden (Yeah!!).
If you live in a different zone, head on over to Organic Gardening to find your zone and list.
I’ve already checked off the first two in my list and still need to decide my plans for planting. Next week, I’d like to share with you a little bit about the importance of soil quality. Until then, get those seeds started … spring is nearly here!
I can’t wait to follow along as you guys plan, build, and move into your new homestead!
You’re probably already familiar with the Back To Eden method of gardening, but I thought I’d mention it just in case. It sounds fascinating and highly effective, but I’ve never incorporated his techniques myself. http://www.backtoedenfilm.com/
Our family has been implementing the Back To Eden technique over the last 2 years – I think our soil will continue to improve as the wood chips decompose more and more. So far we see huge benefits with almost zero weeds (and the few that do come up are so easy to pull out), and having to water significantly less! We do have a add some nutrients back to the soil since a few vitamin deficiencies were cropping up, but I think this will improve over time. Definitely a fun experiment – I don’t think we’ll ever want to go back to “bare ground” 🙂
So excited to follow your progress! You know Quinn at Reformation Acres has done a ton of research about the pros and cons of the wood chips/ back to eden vs. the straw/leaf mulch that was absolutely invaluable to us plus TONS of other hands on trial and error reports on almost every other homesteading topic. Hope it will aid you as well, if you aren’t already familiar with her.
God bless,
Lea
Found some great ideas here! I’m almost done with planning this year’s garden and we are all so excited about what we are planting this year. My kids madte the drawn planning of all veggies and fruits and I made the checklists on different plants. Your ideas are great and some seem to work perfectly for us, so I’m having them on mind. thank you for sharing!
No problem!