I came across the Old Farmer’s Almanac website a couple of days ago and discovered that they have a lot of handy information for gardening. This isn’t too surprising, that a farmer’s almanac would have useful information for… farming. But, what did surprise me is they have a lot of free information on their website. There is a guide for when to start your vegetables, you enter your zipcode and they calculate when you should plant things based on your last frost date.  They also have very basic bullet point guides for each vegetable, which are a good summary of what you should do and not do when growing the vegetable.  If you are just beginning to learn about gardening these are a great place to start.  They also have a guide to container gardening for vegetables, which gives information about what size of container to use and what varieties do well in containers.

I’m planning our garden right now and these summaries are pretty helpful.  We bought a grow light this year and are planning to grow our own starter plants with it.  Jeremy built a grow light stand in the basement, and we are just awaiting our bulb.  Hopefully later this week or next week he’ll post a “how to” on building grow light stands and getting them all set up.  I’ve rough planned when we should start planting our seeds whether indoors or outdoors, using the Farmer’s Almanac guide along with a couple of books.  I still need to draw up a garden plan for us this year, which I think will be more difficult than last year if we try to use crop rotations.  We’re also planning to plant a few things at our townhouse in containers this year, maybe a tomato plant and our pepper plants which seem to do better up against our house where it’s warmer.

Dates we are planning on planting our vegetables here in Louisville, CO:

Brussel Sprouts -  Indoors the weekend of March 26-28 (typically 4-6 weeks before your last frost date), transplant outdoors late spring (when soil is around 60-65°F)

Pole Beans - Outdoors the weekend of May 13 (when soil is between 60-85°F)

Bush Beans - Outdoors the weekend of May 13 (when soil is between 60-85°F)

Fava Beans - Outdoors as soon as the soil can be worked

Carrots - Outdoors in successive two week plantings starting the weekend of March 27 (when soil is around 60-70 )

Cauliflower - Indoors the weekend of March 26-28 (typically 4-6 weeks before your last frost date), transplant outdoors late spring (when soil is around 65-70)

Celery & Celeriac - Indoors the weekend February 27 (typically 10 weeks before your last frost date), transplant outdoors late spring (when soil is around 60-65)

Potato - Outdoors the weekend of April 17 (when soil is between 60-65 )

Kale - Indoors the weekend of March 19-21 (typically 6 weeks before your last frost date), and transplant in early spring.  We’ll do another direct-seeded planting in late summer.

Leek - Indoors the weekend of April 10 (typically 4 weeks before your last frost date), and transplant outdoors the weekend of May 14th

Mustard - Outdoors the weekend of April 17 (typically 3 weeks before your last frost date), we may do successive plantings of mustard too.

Tomatoes - Indoors the weekend of March 19-21 (typically 6 weeks before your last frost date), transplant outdoors the weekend of May 21-23… we may try planting a few sooner with Wall-of-Water to protect them from the cold.

Turnips - Outdoors the weekend of April 10, we may do successive plantings.  We will also plant some midsummer for a fall harvest unless we are sick of turnips by then.

Last year I planned out when we were going to plant everything but we were always a week or so late on actually doing it.  I’m hoping this year we will be more on top of things to help us get the most of our short growing season.  If anyone out there knows when to plant things in the Denver / Boulder area and sees that I have some dates off please let me know!  Happy garden planning.

Today I finally got around to ordering the seeds for our garden this summer.  Jeremy and I had been narrowing it down for a while, but today I got on the internet and made our purchases.  We order from two different catalogs, Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds and Seed Savers.  Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds is our favorite catalog, it was started in 1998  in the Ozarks of Missouri, by Jere Gettle who was 17 at the time.  His first catalog offered 70 seeds and was sent to 550 people and today they offer 1400 varieties and mail their catalog to 250,000 people.  There is a video of him talking about his seed catalog and how he got started on YouTube:

Anyhow, Jeremy and I probably did things backwards of what we should have.  I probably should have drawn up a garden plan first and then ordered seeds, but we went through the seed catalogs first and picked out what we were going to plant this year.  Here is the list:

Long Island Improved Brussel Sprouts - we grew these last year, but planted them to late and only got a few sprouts.  This year we know to plant earlier!

Tendercrisp Celery - We’ve never tried celery before.

Celeriac Caesar - We’ve also never tried to grow celeriac, which is related to celery but a root vegetable.

Red Russian Kale - We grew kale last year but planted it too late and it never really took off.  It is in our garden now and is still hanging on, I’m not sure if in the spring we will get any new growth or have to plant more.

Yellow of Parma Onions and Tropeana Lunga Onions - We grew Tropeana Lunga onions last year, they are a long red onion, and they grew easily.  Last year we also grew Gold Princess Onions but only a couple actually came up, this year we are trying a different yellow onion and hoping to have more success with it.

Green Grape Tomatoes, Monomakh’s Hat Tomato, Fox Cherry Tomato, Siberian Tomato, and Silvery Fir Tree Tomato - Last year we did not plant any grape or cherry tomatoes and regretted it, so those are on our list this year.   The green grape is supposed to be like a mini green zebra, so we are excited about that.  I am also reading a Rocky Mountain Vegetable Gardening book right now and it said to look for Siberian tomatoes that ripen early, so I found one of those to try as well.  We also have seeds from last year that we will also try to finish off, so there may be a few other varieties we grow again as well.

Slo-Bolt Cilantro - Last year I tried to grow cilantro but it bolted so fast we didn’t get much.  This year, I found a Slo-Bolt Cilantro and am hoping we will have more luck!

Thyme - We’ve never grown before.

Giant of Italy Parsley - We’ve never grown parsley before, this is a large leaf variety.

Arugula - We’ve never grown before.

Cherokee Trail of Tears Pole Bean and Scarlett Runner Pole Beans - We grew Scarlett Runner’s last year and they were beautiful and we had a lot of luck with them.  We also tried Molly Frazier White Cut Short beans last year and had trouble getting them to grow, so are trying Cherokee Trail of Tears Pole Beans this year, which is a type of green bean that also dries as black beans.

Aquadulce Fava Beans - Fava beans are new for us to try growing this year.

Bloomsdale Spinach - Spinach is new for us this year, we decided we needed more cool season crops in our garden this spring.

Lady Godiva winter squash - We have never grown winter squash before.  This year we got a lot of winter squash from our CSA, but we found this variety that you can grow specifically for the shelless seeds.  Jake loves roasted squash seeds, so we thought we’d try this variety.

Stevia - This is an herb that is very sweet and can supposedly be used in place of sugar.  We’ve never tried it, but it sounded interesting.

Southern Giant Curled Mustard Greens - The farm where we get our CSA from grows mustard, arugula, and some type of lettuce, and gave us a mix this summer to use for salad greens and they were delicious.  So we thought we’d try to grow some ourselves this year.

Cauliflower - I can’t remember the variety we have, we tried some last year, but couldn’t get them to work, but we still have seeds left so will try again this year.

Leeks - Another one we tried last year and were unsuccessful with, but will try again this year.

Lunar White Carrot and St. Valery Carrot -  Last year we tried a yellow carrot, which was really sweet and delicious.  This year we thought we’d try something different and picked the Lunar White carrot which is also supposed to be really sweet and also not supposed to have much of a woody core to it.  We grew the St. Valery Carrot last year, it is a normal looking orange carrot, which was really tasty and easy to grow.

Turnips - We had so many turnips this year that we are a little burnt out, but we still have seeds, and want to grow things early in the season, so we’ll do it again this year.

Alma Paprika Peppers, Joe’s Long Cayenne, Joe’s Round Pepper, Chinese 5-Color - Last year we didn’t have much luck growing peppers in our garden, it is too cool and windy, so this year we are going to grow them up against our house on the south side where it is warm.  We did that a few years ago and had a lot better luck with them.

Caribe Potatoes - We’re going to try potatoes for the first time this year, and thought we’d try something we can’t get in the store, so are trying these purple potatoes.

I think that covers it!  We are really hoping to be more efficient in our garden this year, we have already used most of our stored food from last year, and now that we are hardly eating out because of our food issues it would be really nice to have a lot of food to freeze or preserve this summer.  Now I need to work on how we are going to fit all of this in our 20×20 plot!