I start my lettuce seedlings indoors for transplants, to get an earlier crop, but if you direct seed outdoors, you can lay your seed down anytime. I always have some volunteer lettuce come up in the spring from lettuce seed that fell from the plants that let go to flower and make seeds in the fall, so I can collect some for the next season. One lettuce plant can make thousands of seeds, and many can survive in the cold. frozen surface of the soil all winter and germinate in the spring.
For lettuce seed to germinate, there are 3 critical factors, TEMPERATURE, LIGHT, AND MOISTURE.
Lettuce will germinate best when the soil temperature is in the 50's and 60's
Lettuce seed needs to see light to germinate, so don't bury the seed. Just press the seed lightly into the surface of moist soil, or cover with a very light covering of soil

Starting more seeds today.

Zucc, squash and my tobacco are on the list, plus a few others.

We already have tiny pepper, tomato and eggplant sprouts.

The new grow lights we bought work great...

Ray thanks for the tip. Will try.


Onions have came up. Apparently they held on during this cold winter and are just popping up through the shredded cardboard mulch I put down over them.


Rototiller the garden this morning. Supposed to be a big rain coming tonight so hopefully next month /late next month when I get ready to fill it and plant it , it should work up nice.

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Good news Jake. Onions are really good when it comes to handling cold. I have bunching onions that have been in a 5 gallon bucket for 4 years or so, the soil can freeze solid during the winter and the onions will die back, but every spring they start growing again.
My onion seedlings that I've been growing from seed indoors under lights since January have been spending as much time outdoors now as weather permits. I have learned from experience that seedlings grown in 4" pots won't survive frozen soil like mature plants will, so when the temperature drops to near freezing up here, they go back inside until the temps are better.

All of my garlic is up now and ready to explode in growth once the temperatures are consistently a little warmer. Temperatures are all over the place this early spring, from the low 30's to the 60's and low 70's some days.

Bought 400 pounds of lime for the new garden, at Southern States.

They were out of "balanced" fertilizer (No triple 15, no triple 19) Said it would be in stock next week...

Also bought a hoe, some blades for the sawzall and some 4ft rebar. I'm gonna spray paint the rebar orange and use it to mark off the garden.

So the new garden is 72x122 (8,784 sq ft) . Jake said 30 ft rows for corn. Down the center of the garden will be 30 ft rows--each set marked with the rebar. 1,500 corn for first set, 1,000 corn for second set, tobacco (whatever will fit) in behind the corn rows. On the side of the corn with the most shade I'll do 120 ft +/- rows of potatoes and on the sunny side of the corn I'm gonna plant 120 ft +/- rows of bush beans (Blue Lake, 1/2 Runner, Roma).

The old 1,750 sq ft corn garden will be for the melons. Watermelon, cantaloupe, honey dew...

The the 2,600 sq ft "OG" garden will be for tomatoes, squash, peppers...basically everything else.

That's the plan anyway...

Robert, Do you have real acidic soils where you are? What's the PH?

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No idea, Ray. Still haven't done a soil test.

The new garden has never been limed. I limed the other two gardens for the first time last year and it made a big difference. That and using a balanced fertilizer increased out yields from the prior two years.

So gonna lime this new one without doing a test on the soil. West Virginia University AG Extension office will test my soil for free but didn't even sign up for it.

You don't need to send a sample of your soil to a lab to get a PH test, but if the Extension Office will do it for free to test PH and other things like nutrients in the soil , then get it done.
PH is the easiest thing to test for at home. One of those inexpensive soil PH test kits or a handheld PH meter that is popular with hydroponics will work. Don't buy one of those goofy meters with the 2 metal probes you stick in the ground. They're junk)
Knowing the PH of your soil (actually soil water because the insoluble solid components of soils don't have a PH, only liquids have a PH) is critical to knowing if nutrients are being taken up efficiently by the plant roots.

Our natural soils up here are limestone-based, on the alkaline side, I've sampled various places in the garden and have seen PH's as high as 8.0. That's not optimal for most crops that do best with a PH of 6.5-7.0. So for me putting down dolomite lime would be counterproductive, if not crazy.

But if your WV soil is more acidic, then putting down lime to bring the PH up a bit would make sense.

Getting ready for the summer. I don't even come close to what youze guys are doing. Just a couple of these things for a deck garden.

https://tinyurl.com/b32k8bfm

I actually bought them last fall when they were about $20 each and put them together, half filled them with dirt and let them sleep for the winter.

I have them raised off the deck a couple inches using some plastic deck scraps, put down some plastic deck lattice for a base, lined them with landscaping fabric so they can breathe and drain from below and not in physical contact with the deck. Filled them half way with some container garden soil last fall.

I still have a few more bags of soil to toss into them before I plant. I also have a full 55 gallon drum that I've been using for composting. That black earth will be added in before planting.

I looked at the compost drum this weekend and dug into it. It was warm to the touch in the core and some steam came out of it. Good sign that it's still alive. I'll let the microorganisms do their work to make black gold. Bought some red wigglers (compost worms) that I will toss into the compost bin and the garden troughs. Let them do their work to eat compost and $hit out natural fertilizer.

Still gonna still do some grow bags for what doesn't fit in the troughs.

My plan is for the limited garden space is carrots, garlic, tomato, peppers, pole beans, peas, cucumbers, fresh herbs (parsley, oregano, basil, chives, and others). Herbs will be grown in pots rather than take up room in the troughs.

Gotta do some flowers too (pots) for the pollinators.

Ray, I'll add Ph test kit to my garden "to do" list.

Our plants are coming along well other than the jalapenos. Haven't been able to get most of them to germinate and have no idea why. Our other pepper plants are doing fine for the most part. We have tried jalepeno seeds from Burpee and Ferry Morse. Who knows...

Got the deer netting around the 9,000 sq footah. Took us about 5 hrs to do it. Set up our solar powered electric fence "energizer" facing in a south/southeast direction--it's charging. Still have to put the fence up. The grounding rods for the energizer are 6 ft long--surprised me bc that's about double the length of the grounding rods for the electric that runs to our house.

I plowed our smallest garden. We removed the grass clumps from that one. That was a big job... Gonna put black plastic down and plant our melons and couple other things in there. Not gonna remove the clumps from the big garden. Jake said leaving the clumps would be fine, and since we're not using the plastic (other than for a small amount of tobacco) for that garden it doesn't matter too much.

That's the garden report.

Forgot to mention, wife went and got all of the lime and triple 19 fertilizer that we'll need for this season.

Got 30 pounds of 30-0-4 from last season (for the corn), so all I need is maybe another 20 lb bag of that...

Got the black plastic down in the small garden. It's ready--been plowed, clumped and now covered. No weeds will grow with the plastic down, so won't mess with this garden until it's time to plant, around mid May.

Wife and I (mostly wife) transferred most of our plants from the trays to plastic solo cups and empty yogurt containers. Got the fans going to build their strength.

Most of the jalapenos came up, still having problems with the bell peppers.

That's the garden report.

I enjoy gardening but for pepper, cucs, tomatoes I go to the garden center and buy the seedlings when it's time to plant. Yeah, I'll admit that I'm kinda lazy with that respect.

I'll do pole beans and peas from seed. Save space and vertical garden with them. I'll do garlic from cloves and carrots from seed. Probably do some sunflowers from seed to attract pollinators and because I think they are cool to see.

I'll do some herbs like oregano, basil, chives, and such in pots. My garden is a raised bed deck garden. The feeding troughs are half full with fresh soil. I have a large trash can of compost that has been brewing since last fall so there's some black gold in there. 40 lbs of composted cow manure and another 100 lbs of bagged garden soil and a bunch of red wriggler worms are waiting for warmer weather to be tossed into the troughs.

I may have bought too much soil for the new raised beds but better to have too much and not need it then need it and not have it.

That's my back deck raised garden update.

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Yeah you really can't get too much dirt/soil. We ran out of potting soil today, so I went out and bought 4 more bags and 100 more solo cups. Even then we ran out of cups and yogurt containers.

We try to start everything from seed. If it doesn't work out we'll buy from Walmart, Southern States or a local greenhouse. If we were planting tomorrow we would have to buy some bell peppers, and probably some jalapenos, in order to get the number of plants we need...

Wife plants sunflower seeds every year. Another good one for the pollinators is Bee Balm. We tried it several years back when we did raised beds and have planted it almost every year since.


https://www.thespruce.com/bee-balm-growing-guide-5204121 

When I had a house, I had a nice large garden but not nearly the size of yours. Mow the lawn and all the clippings were put in the garden. In the fall, mulch the leaves and put them in the garden for a winter blanket. In the spring when the soil was soft enough I'd rototill it into the soil for some nice organic matter.

There's some local farms around here that will give away free composted cow manure. Come and get it, it's all yours. You just gotta shovel it and take it home. A few horse farms too but horse $hit isn't as good as cow $hit. Cows have two bellies and digest the feed twice so there are less weed seeds that come out their butt.

I soaked a few bricks of coconut coir and mixed it in with the compost last fall. Never tried them before but folks tell me that they are good brown material for compost and helps with water retention. I still have a few more bricks left. When it's time, I'll soak those overnight or for a day or two until they sponge up and use them for mulch.

Planted just a few potatoes April 10th. I don’t grow many but I like to have a few. Kennebec is what I planted

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Been playing with this richters pot maker and kinda love it. Garlic looking good onions looking good. Hopefully start some tomatoes around may first

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Got the OG garden plowed, clumped, fertilized with triple 19 and most of it covered with black plastic.

Took us about a week working on and off. Only the big garden is left to prep...

Hey Jake, just want to make sure of the steps for how you personally plant your corn...

1) Til garden, don't worry about removing the grass/weeds debris

2) Take a hoe and make 30 ft rows How many feet apart do you make the rows?

3) Plant corn 7 inches apart using a PVC pipe to save my back, then cover row up with dirt. How deep do I cover?

4) Use the nitro on em when they're around 8 to 10 inches tall.

Is that how you're gonna do it?

Thanks my brotha. We couldn't find Kennbec potatoes so we're going with "Yukon Gold".

30 inch rows


2” deep 1 3/4 at least. I want soil to be warm

24+ hours no rainfall

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