Square Foot Gardening with a Planting Jig

It's March 31 and I am spending most of the day out in the garden.  I've just finished direct sowing the carrots and beets.   What's amazing is that I am doing it in the sun on a very warm day.  In March.  In Washington!  The gardening gods are smiling today :)

This is my "root vegetable" bed.  It is deeper than the other beds and has a permanently installed soil warmer cable.   I plugged it in three days ago and now the soil is up to 70 degrees and ready for planting.  I'll keep the cable plugged in for another 10 days or so, until most of the carrots have sprouted.  You'll notice off to the left the drip system that I drained and set aside at the end of the "dry" season.  What I've found works well for hooking it all up again is to get the seeds and/or transplants into the  bed and then string the drip system for the best coverage.

I'm using the planting jigs FitzGyver made for me last year.  They really make it easy to plant a Square Foot Garden.  I place one seed in each hole ....

... cover the holes with a thin layer of vermiculite ...

...remove the jig ...

...and then gently firm the seed and vermiculite in to the soil.

I used a 16 plants per square foot jig for the carrots and a 9 plants per square for the beets in the back of the bed.

Enjoy!

Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head ....

Well, it's monsoon season in the Pacific Northwest ... we might see the sun again on Saturday.

I've been running out between downpours (and sometimes during them) to work on the newly remodeled raised beds.  As I mentioned a while back we decided to reconfigure the garden and add some mole proofing while we were tearing everything up to put in the new greenhouse.  I have three 4 x 8' beds to work on getting planted now.  Here's a shot from a second floor window of the new configuration with the greenhouse foundation coming along on the left...

The center bed is the deep, heated bed for my root crops.  As usual I forgot to put the heating cable (Charley's Greenhouse) in before we added the soil so I ended up having to dig trenches in the bed to install it ...

Once I got the cord buried I plugged it in and covered the bed with some plastic sheeting to retain the heat and let the bed warm up for a couple of days...

 I used my 16 per square foot seeding jig to space  my carrot seed and a 9 per square foot to space the beets.  I cover the seeds with vermiculite so I know exactly where they are ... anything that comes up outside one of those little circles is a weed and can be safely plucked out.

I watered the bed lightly and covered it with a piece of burlap and then laid another soil warming cable ( a FitzGyvered special) on top of the burlap.

The two cables together brought the soil temperature from 41 degrees up to a toasty 63 degrees and I had my first seed germination in six days.  Once the seedlings started popping up I removed the burlap and replaced the second heating cable.

Once the rest of the seeds have germinated I will unplug the permanently installed cable and remove the temporary one to use on another bed.  It's a lot of work, but with temperature still in the 40's it's the only way to get my direct sown seeds germinated in time to have two crops during the growing season.  Oh, the joys of gardening in the soggy Pacific Northwest :)

Enjoy!

Harvest Monday ... and the First Planting Update

I'm joining other bloggers over at Daphne's Dandelions as we share our weekly harvests...it's fun to see what others are harvesting and what they are cooking up with it...check it out!

I won't have a harvest from the garden for quite a while yet ... my arthritis flare up in the fall kept my fall/winter garden from getting planted (I didn't even get all the fall cleanup done ... it's a mess out there that I am just starting to tackle).  We are still eating from our frozen and canned stores, though.  I made lasagna rolls with some of the Oven Roasted Tomato Sauce Saturday night and (Whoo Hoo!)  my first  homemade ricotta cheese!  It came out great but was unfortunately camera shy (next time, I promise :).

The first of my seedlings are starting to sprout in the potting shed ...

And today the weather was nice enough for me to get the first of the raised beds prepared ...

... and planted my first batch of carrot seeds.  FitzGyver made me some new "Square Foot" planting jigs that I think I am really going to like using.  I have one with nine holes per square foot and another with sixteen.  These are going to be great both for direct seeding and for spacing transplants.

My first 32 carrots were quickly seeded  ...

... and tucked in under a germination mat.  I'll start checking for germination in a few days and remove the mat once the first seedlings appear.

I put the plastic cover back over the bed ...

... and that's one bed started, only 5 more to go!

Enjoy!