2023 Year Recap
What a year! This first year of gardening has been a learning experience filled with errors, aha moments, frustrations, and excitement. I consider this my ‘first real’ year of gardening because it was the year I buckled down, stayed consistent, and was determined to build a FULL garden. My garden included vegetables, flowers, and herbs and although not everything went as planned I still had the chance to see these beauties grow. I do not have acreage, I have a small backyard with limited space which I tried to make the best of. I planted all the seeds inside seedling trays and used grow lights until it was warm enough to transfer them outside. This is a fun recap of what this year brought…
I first started with a Jiffy 25 Cell Seed Starting Greenhouse with 42mm Peat Pellets. I don’t have it pictured below because oh boy it didn’t go great. It was my first time using pellets and I had no clue what I was doing. I thought I had killed all my seeds and was ready to give up when I decided to look into a grow light. One quick Amazon search and I found these neat seed starter trays with lights. I was super excited to try these out and decided to put my pellets in there instead. Amazingly, the seeds I thought weren’t going to germinate.. DID! I had the date of the original pellet seeds I planted however it got lost and likely thrown away.
After losing my original notes I decided to buy a notebook and began keeping track of everything there.
April 1 – I planted jalapenos, lettuce and sweet peppers in the new seedling trays. My first buddies to grow were of course… LETTUCE!
My poor lavender pellets survived and began growing and growing. I can’t remember how many were lavender and how many were chamomile. One of the funniest things that happened was me mixing them up. It’s hilarious looking back on it now but I mistakenly labeled them and then couldn’t figure out why they didn’t look like they were shown online.
As you can tell from the first photo I started with A LOT of seeds. Well… once I started I just couldn’t stop…. I hilariously didn’t think it through and bought another set of the seed grow trays and planted some more!! But wait I didn’t stop after those TWO sets of trays.. I planted MORE but this time I decided to try planting on an egg carton. By the end of April, I had more than two dozen seedlings. My naive newbie brain didn’t even begin to comprehend what was going to happen next once they ALL germinated and began growing. I even bought a mini greenhouse and plopped it in our guest bedroom because I wasn’t quite sure where to set it up since it was still really cold outside.
I’m sure many veteran gardeners are probably laughing and shaking their head about my obvious rookie mistake of planting too much at once
Long story short, my seedlings grew and I began having to move them into bigger pots. I ordered 100 plastic pots off of Amazon and didn’t realize they didn’t come with a bottom. I had to use things around the house to put underneath, including my dog’s extra doggie bowls!!
I had to buy additional grow lights and wrap them in the mini greenhouse. I was not prepared for how large some of the plants grew especially the squash and pumpkins! My lettuce extended everywhere and made it difficult for other plants nearby to get enough light. Unfortunately, I did have some leggy plants because I didn’t have sufficient light even when I moved them near the windows. I would move 6 plants every morning upstairs to different windows so they would get enough light. I had a mini jungle growing inside my house which although I enjoyed was a bit overwhelming as a new new new newbie.
Transfer Day!
I began moving a few of my plants outside when I thought it was safe. According to my Farmer’s Almanac, the last Spring frost was May 4th. I transferred a few plants outside which included my tomatoes and .. oh boy. The week of May 8 and May 15 we had an unprecedented amount of nonstop rain and even hail. These rainstorms were nothing like what we had experienced before living in Colorado and I was not ready for it. When I moved some of my plants out I only had one plant cover, unfortunately, the hail did a lot of damage to the uncovered plants. I was beyond heartbroken, I took a couple of days to cope with the sadness of seeing so many of my little plants ripped apart by the hail.
Since I didn’t have a cover I tried my BEST to protect my little guys, unfortunately it didn’t help much. I had ordered additional covers but they weren’t going to arrive on time. ALL my tomatoes stopped growing after the hailstorms.
After the storms passed I moved more plants over. Many of them grew, the flowers bloomed, the veggies began showing up. I even got some funky looking carrots but I was still super happy they grew!
Overall my Summer harvest was not bad for my first year! I took a break, cleaned up the yard and as the weather grew colder I started focusing on indoor gardening. I’m grateful for the things I learned the past few months. Check out my last post which goes into more details about my first time trying to grow herbs/veggies indoors.
Thank you 2023! You were a learning experience!
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