Posted by shadawyn on January 29, 2014 at 16:23

Right around New Year's Day I start itching to plant things. It's a little ridiculous, because even in our mild Seattle winters, cool weather crops go out–earliest–in February, but more realistically in March-April (or at least, that was my experience from last year).

We bought a house at the end of 2012, and did our first garden in 2013 with sort of freakish results (our best cultivated crop was our tomatoes and peppers. But the cool season greens were a flop. What?)

Last year, I tried starts in our southern facing window and got stuck with these spindly, leggy, weak little plants. Some survived, some didn't; none of them really thrived. So for this year, we got a Grow Light and set it up, and a couple of days into January, I put some flats in underneath it to try it out–nothing for the garden–just some lettuce micro-greens for us, and wheatgrass and buckwheat forage for the chickens.

Come later January (23rd, I think), I added my first flat of lettuce and Swiss chard destined for the yard. Soon after, a fresh new set of herbs–my other ones seemed sad last year (they had been transplanted and moved a few times from our previous home), and my chickens (who are not supposed to like herbs) think they are the best thing ever for a wintertime snack.

I'm also going to try wintersowing in plastic containers, as my friend V has been telling me about. Possibly today!

Super excited to find this site! I really struggled with garden journaling last year because I didn't have a good format to organize my thoughts, and this place looks just about perfect for my needs. And the ability to track harvests is fantastic–that's one of the things I wanted to add this year so we could start making some benchmarks.