So, I noticed a big difference when I used dirt from my garden to grow some of my indoor garden this year!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! And it wasn’t good. 🙁

I now highly recommend using only sterile, baged indoor potting soil for indoor gardens. Either that or you have to go through a process for preparing your soil to be indoors. (Such as treating it with a pesticide for a few weeks every 5-7 days and then letting it rest or washing it before bringing it inside. – much easier to just get some potting soil!)

Same is true for wintering over. If you have an indoor garden *and* you want to try to winter over some plants from your pots or garden I highly recommend keeping these plants separate from each other.

This year I used some soil from my garden for my indoor garden and I brought in a lot more than just soil for my garden! I also brought in some pests that put my indoor growing season way behind. There are bugs in that soil!!!

In particular Spider Mites and a type of Fruit Fly were what did the most damage to my indoor garden. I actually had to resort to using pesticides to get rid of these little buggers. (I got some that were highly recommended by organic gardeners that are specifically for food, and specifically for indoor use.)

So! Grab that potting soil, you’re not doing yourself any favors by trying to use raw outdoor soil for use in your indoor garden!

Thanks for stopping by!

Sara

Hello fellow gardeners!

I haven’t been around in a bit, but I am ready to dig back in and get started!

For this first (gardening) post back I will show you my indoor garden that is thriving this year!

Here’s a picture:

In the top left you can see the carrots. Some of them are just about ready. They are the long thin Danvers variety. I tried a few types in the garden last season and these are the best growers so I decided to see if I could get them to grow over the winter. They’d better hurry up though because I need the space and the light for some seeds starting in February!

On the bottom left you can see my herb garden. I recently restarted it. It was getting over grown and got destroyed by some spider mites before I realized what was going on. I have new Sweet Basil and Cilantro seeds/seedlings in there.

On the top right I am wintering over my red Geraniums. Two of which fell victim to the spider mites before I had a chance to stop it. They are doing great though. I don’t water them very often and they seem to like that for wintering over.

On the bottom right (in back) I have some thriving Broccoli, which also had better hurry up and get some heads going! The plants them selves are doing great, so any time now!

On the bottom in front I have yellow onions. These guys need a lot of sunlight so I will probably not do them again over the winter. They are doing just great, just going very slowly and I have a feeling the layers are going to be quite thin because they need the sunlight to get them pumped up.

The dead thing in the front was a really nice Petunia which was on it’s second life with seeds from the original plant! It got taken over by the Spider Mites like crazy. I have a feeling that either the Basil or the Petunia was the origin of the infestation.

Notes: There are several safe controls for spider mites and other bugs for indoor gardens out there in the garden centers. Look for ones especially for vegetables and edible plants. They are the safest.

Look at the calendar for the seed planting and starting and other important dates!

Thanks for stopping by,

Sara Murray

This post is pretty much completely unrelated to gardening, but it is what I have been doing over this long and snowy winter here in MN!

I found this cool website in September called FLY Lady, http://wwwflylady.com

It’s a site that walks you by the hand through getting rid of clutter and leaves you with an amazing way of keeping your house nice and clutter free! So I dug in and I am almost done de-cluttering the entire house. I have re-modeled several rooms in the house, and even got a small “bagster” (it’s kind of like a dumpster) to throw all the garbage and unnecessary stuff away. I have also made several trips to the thrift store near by to drop off donations of all sorts!

I have re-modeled the upstairs bathroom, the downstairs office, and the junk room is now a beautiful princess bedroom for my daughter. Every closet is cleaned out, my storage area under the stairs is cleaned out, stocked up with nice labeled bins. I also cleaned out a space in my garage and bought nice plastic shelving for them and it is all stocked up with nice labeled bins as well.

Here are the pictures!

Bathroom before:

And here’s the Bath room After!

After

Here’s the Office Before:

Before

And here it is AFTER!

After

And Finally The Junk Room:

Before

And here it is AFTER!!! (There’s no sound in this video, it is a flash video)

[flv:http://www.freeyouup.com/allison/maddiesroom.flv 480 368]

So you can see I have been extremely busy!!! I do have an indoor garden this year though! So look for the post coming soon! I will also be updating my calendar with seed starting, transplanting and planting dates so go check it out!

Thanks for stopping by!

Sara Murray

So, I thought the yellow onions were dead, done, gone.

I was lazy about getting them out of the garden just because I didn’t have anything to go in anyway so why bother. Well, our weather dried out and I went out to check the onions after about 2 weeks and they had new shoots!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Up until yesterday when we started getting tons of rain and wind they were doing just great!

We’ll have to see what happens over the next week or so if they survive all this rain and if they survive the cold that is now on the horizon.

🙂 So, if you get a lot of rain chances are they will loose their tops and stop growing, but they aren’t dead. If you can dry them out some how or if the rain stops and the ground gets dry again they will come back!

thanks for stopping by – Sara

So, my Mom kept pestering me to post pictures of the greenhouse I had put around my vegetable garden. And now it’s down due to high winds we are having here. 🙁 I don’t think I got any pictures of it at all.

The Weather:

We are having a 2 day wind storm (rain too, but predominantly wind.) started out with sustained wind of 20 mph with gusts to 40mph. We are supposed to be getting sustained winds of 40-50mph and gusts over 60mph. That is like being in the middle of a huge thunderstorm! I just checked to see how high it was now and it’s only at 26mph sustained and it is hard to walk, branches are down out of trees and it is miserable to drive. Other than a bad thinderstorm I really cannot remember wind like this over such a long time. I guess we are in a super low pressure right now. The lowest air pressure ever recorded for the state.

What the Greenhouse Was:

In short, it had 3 ribs of 1″ PVC pipe which were made up of 3 10-foot pipes with connectors. With 2 shepherd hooks (for hanging baskets) supporting the middle of 2 of the pipes.  Then a sheet over the top and front. I had to keep reinforcing the packing tape that I put on and finally found that if I taped the PVC pipes to my garden fence, weighed the sides with several bricks, and closed the back side with a separate sheet of plastic it was pretty sturdy.

I contacted the University of Minnesota Agricultural Extension service and research facility to talk with them about my structure and they said that sounded good to them. 🙂 They build stuff with PVC all the time.

Things to do differently next time:

• Trim the large bush on one side of the garden so I can get a tighter fit between the backing and the main sheet of plastic.
• Get more bricks for the sides.
• Tape the pipes and the plastic along the pipes better.
• Get thicker PVC. (The 1″ ones actually bent over in the wind this morning.)
• Get at least one more hanging basket shepherd hook to support the 3rd pipe.
• Do not attach it to the trellis (this also was crashed down from the wind this morning. This may require a 4th pipe to place flush with the back wall – which is the side of my garage.)

That’s about all. It was working out pretty nicely. It was about 12 degrees higher than air temperature on colder nights, and at least 20 degrees warmer than air temp on warm days and in the sun. I did get a lot more produce because of it. The neighbor ripped out her garden over 2 weeks ago because of 2 frosts we had. I still had green beans, tomatoes, and summer squash coming in.

Plan for the Greenhouse Going Forward:

I think it’s going to snow here tonight which means that there really wouldn’t be a point to putting the greenhouse back up this season. I might get out there in March or February depending on how much snow we have at that time to try to extend the season on the front side as well.

If I find any pictures I will post them. 🙂 Wish us luck with all this wind, hoping the damage in the morning isn’t too bad. It is Tuesday afternoon and it’s just supposed to get worse until Wednesday night.

Thanks for stopping by!

Sara

Hi everyone,

The fall plans are in effect! First order of business is building PVC pipe supports for the plastic sheeting that will become the temporary greenhouse I will be using to extend my seasons! The over night low yesterday was 45 degrees Fahrenheit so I better get this thing up. Last year we had one early frost mid-September. Never mind the unseasonably warm October we had, or the subsequent 80 degree days. Everything had died in the frost and I lost a good 1.5 months of natural growing season.

I am going to purchase 20′ sections of 1″ or smaller tubing and make some large hoops. I am not quite certain how to secure the plastic to the tubes. So far my ideas are zip-ties (which will rip the plastic over time)  or packing tape (which may not hold up in the freezing and wet of winter and spring. Ideally maybe I don’t have to secure it that well. I have enough to cover a very large area, so maybe draping and securing to the ground with rocks will be enough.

The other project that needs to get done is to move what used to be a nice border of small purple mums. These mums are on the outside, front edge of my veggie garden. They started out the size of a basketball, and are now over 2 feet across! They take up so much room in the front of the garden I am missing out on about 3″ by 10″ section of good soil. So they are being moved to the outside corners of the garden. I have a Victorian fence around the veggie garden with rose bushes in the corners on the inside. The mums will be opposite them on the outside of the garden.

This picture was taken last year. The rabbits has eaten every thing right to the ground. So I went to my local super store and bought this Victorian fencing and lined it with rabbit fencing on the inside. It is the Fort Knox of veggie gardens!

So the roses are on the inside and the mums will be on the outside corners 🙂

When I get it a bit cleaned up and moved around I’ll post more pictures. This year’s garden is 100 times better than this poor sad eaten over one.