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.

A little video of Jacob being silly, to provide some Friday cheer!