best intentions
I had grand plans for making this the best year of gardening yet at our house. It's only the second week of March, and they're already all in tatters. Turns out that transitioning to two parents working part time and dealing with a toddler who sleeps like a newborn negatively affected my abilities to focus on necessary early steps. Like ordering seeds.
Back in the fall I made a chart of the things I thought we should grow, ranking them by their interest to me as plants, by how much we actually eat the crops in question, and by how guilty I would feel paying for non-home-grown alternatives this summer. And I was delighted to see the first seed catalogs arrive in December. Only then I never had any time to really look through all those catalogs, and when February rolled around I just randomly threw together an order of whatever caught my attention in the five minutes I was able to concentrate on the project. I don't even know what I have; I've barely looked in the box yet.
I did get out the onion seeds, though, since I know you have to start them in February to make growing them worthwhile—otherwise they don't have time to get big enough. But my second, bigger, mistake, was deciding to build a new seed-starting setup, which of course necessitated tearing down the old one. And... the new one still isn't done. Maybe 15 of the onion seeds—sowed in such fine style—germinated just kind of sitting in the basement waiting for me to get my act together, and I assume the rest rotted. If those 15 survive to be planted out we'll call it a test crop.
In the meantime it's 70 degrees out and I don't have anything to put in the ground. Last year I vowed to start some cold-weather greens early, but I had no idea how early I'd need to do it to get a jump on this ridiculous weather. Not only do I still not have a seed-starting setup—if I did have one, it would have been colder inside it that out in the garden this afternoon!
I suppose all is not lost. I can still get a few tomatoes and peppers started, and direct sowing the greens in the next couple weeks would still leave me well ahead of last year, when there was still a foot of snow on the ground at this point. And I manured in the fall, and finally got supports up for the raspberries, two years after a falling tree crushed the first set. But overall my feeling is one of failure.
Oh well, there's always next year!