It is finally nearing the time to start putting our plants in the ground. We started our seeds indoors that need to be a little plant first before being placed in the ground, and they are already growing. We planted them less than seven days ago.  Wow! My husband and son expanded our garden area so that we will have room to plant zucchini and beans. This is our first year for the zucchini and beans, and I am looking forward to the harvest once they start growing. We will also continue growing tomatoes, bell peppers, jalapenos, and basil.

We are starting everything from seed, so hopefully everything we touch will grow (keeping fingers crossed over here). I don’t have much of a green thumb, but I consider it a great honor to keep the bad bugs and weeds out of the garden. We saved some of the seeds from our basil plants last year, and I can’t wait to get them into the ground. We over planted our basil last year (six plants), not expecting it to do so well since we’ve always grown them in containers. It was like a basil jungle, we had bags and bags of the stuff. We finally pulled four of the plants out near the end of the summer and the two remaining plants still produced enough for our needs.

Our last frost date is around April 15th, so we’ll be keeping everything indoors until it’s time to transfer everything. Check NOAA’s site to get an estimate of when the last frost date is in your area. Select the state you reside in, and then follow the chart to the city where you reside or that is closest to you. The chart is then divided into three categories of 90, 50, and 10 probabilities indicating the date and the probability, or how likely, frost will occur at that date. To play it on the safe side you can opt for the 10% probability, which means there is only a 10 percent chance that frost will occur after that date. We are using the 10% date, which is April 13th for Oklahoma City and will plant somewhere around that date.

As you can see we started a new raised bed garden right on top of the grass. We did this last year as well, and had no problems with weeds or grass coming up through the dirt. The new raised bed offers a lot more space than we had last year, and once we are in the full swing of growing season, we’ll really be able to tell how many plants the bed will be able to hold.

Here are the little seedlings that have started to grow:

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 21st, 2010 at 8:47 pm and is filed under My Garden. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.