It’s been “Spring” where we live since probably February.  However at the Kiddo’s preschool, they started doing a lesson about plants at the beginning of March, to coincide with the actual calendar start of Spring.  One of the projects they are working on is starting seeds – two bean seeds and one sunflower seed – in a plastic ziploc baggie with wet cotton balls to provide moisture, taped to a south-facing window.  Basically, a miniature greenhouse.

When I saw that my daughter’s seeds were struggling while another classmate’s was taking off like crazy, it sent a lightbulb up and gave me an idea… Why not try it at home, too, so she could see the plants growing both at school and at home?

So I went and bought a packet of bean seeds and a packet of pea seeds, and a special “grow cup” for some sunflower seeds.  I have other various seeds from previous attempts to grow things in the windowsill, so I pulled those out too, and prepared about seven or eight baggies to put on our sliding door which faces south.

I started: a few tomato seeds, a few small sunflowers, strawberry seeds, two different type of other flowers, bean seeds, and pea seeds.

The peas and beans were the first to take off.  Shortly after they sprouted I put them in some soil in some peat pots.  Then I did the same with the sunflower seeds, forget-me-nots and the strawberry seeds, including any that had not sprouted yet.

At first my idea was to just grow them in containers.  But then I got the hairbrained idea of actually having an entire garden.  I even went outside and marked off a square to till up, but when it took my husband almost an hour just to do one row of digging to remove the rocks before we tilled…. I changed my mind and decided I would try a Square Foot Garden instead.  Not just because of the backbreaking work of digging up all the river rock out of our yard, but our soil is clay-based so we’d have to add all SORTS of additives to get it garden ready… With a Square Foot Garden, we simply have to build the raised boxes, and purchase three ingredients for the soil, make or buy a trellis for any climbing plants, and plant.

I’ll continue this in a second part since it ended up being REALLY long! 🙂