I’ve been suffering from spring fever, I want to get back in the gardens!! Maybe I’ve been watching to many gardening videos on YouTube lately.  It has inspired me to make room for my grow lights again.  Tomorrow I’ll be making room in the summer kitchen to set them up.  Hopefully hubby and I will be able to get the stand up from the basement ok.  It’s very heavy!  He built it for me the first winter after we moved in to this house.

We’ve both been thinking next summer will be a cold one.  I checked the Farmers Almanac online and for Southern Ontario they are saying a cold and dry summer.  Hopefully it wont be to bad!  But I’m planning my gardens for a cold season.  I’m just about done my seed order and there will be many Canadian and Russian variety’s this year!

This coming year we are going to start using a living mulch system.  I posted some videos in our forum last fall about these. Basically to start we will be using black plastic mulch in the planting rows.  In between them  we are planing a mix of red and white clover and alfalfa.  As this grows through the season it will be cut and let to compost in place.  This should provide cover for many beneficial insects and feed the soil steadily through the season.

I filmed this video yesterday with my new camera, it was a Christmas gift.  I love it!  The video is coming out very well!  Sorry for it showing so small, I had a setting wrong in the video editor.  I think I have it ok now.

The weather has been so nice, truly a very mild winter for our area!  Maybe that’s why the gardening bug is biting eh?  The winter storm I mentioned in the video so far has not been much.  Last night we had a little rain, a few snow flurries this afternoon and now more rain.  It’s funny what the weathermen are calling storms this year!

Image via Wikipedia

To harvest winter squash for storage in a root cellar, wait until the skins are hard enough to resist scratching by your fingernail.
Then cut them off the plant leaving 2 – 3 inches of stem attached.  Let them sit in a room that stays between 50 and 60 F for a week or two.  Then store on shelves or pallets in the cellar.

This summer was the first in a long time that we did not have chickens.  The last of our old hens had passed away.  They left behind an empty but well manured out door pen.  What a surprise I had when I noticed that we had a “forest” of tomatoes growing in there!  All the seeds left behind from their favorite scraps were growing nicely.  This first vid was in early August.

A few weeks ago the tomatoes finally started to produce.  They turned out to be yellow cherry tomatoes, funny thing is the variety is Egg Yolk!  Yes my chickens left me a harvest of Egg Yolk tomatoes!!! LOL!

The solution is to make compost tea.  It concentrates the nutrients and makes it very easy to apply.  It’s easily watered on your lawn, containers or vegetable gardens.  It can also be sprayed on your plants and dose and amazing job at warding off fungus and pests.  As both are normally symptoms of plant stress.

I hope this video on how I make my compost tea is helpful to you.  I’ve heard some have improved it further by adding an aerator, such as an air stone from a fish tank to it.  As aerating the water adds more oxygen and encourages microbe growth.  I haven’t tried that yet as I’ve had wonderful results with just stirring the mix.  But if you have tried both ways and found an advantage to one or the other, I would love to hear about it!