Basil, Beets, and Beans

 











A few years ago I started buying and planting Basil starts in my garden.  The year before last, I had an abundance of basil which I allowed to go to seed.  At the end of the season I collected many of the branches of seed pods and brought them inside, where they have been sitting in a vase by the glass sliding door to the back yard.  Over the past President's Day weekend  DD4 was home from school and had desire to plant something to take back to her apartment with her, so we bought a large bag of potting soil.  I had some peat pots that I'd found at the thrift store, so I decided to plant some of my basil seeds.  The photo is a bit blurry, but you can see that I now have an abundance of basil starts that need to be thinned out and planted outside once it warms up sufficiently.  Hopefully we will have plenty of basil this summer too.

It is rather cold right now, and we have had a bit of snow most of the past few days here, but earlier last month we had some warm, dry days.  We do have cold winters here, but we also have hot, dry summers, and very few weeks of warm spring weather.  If we want to grow cool weather crops at all, we must take advantage of the warmer dry days of march.  So, several weeks ago I was out planting a few of the beet seeds that I had stored from previous years.  The seed packet is almost faded from the sun and the snow, and it is still too cold for the seeds to have sprouted, but I have faith in warmer days ahead, and that the garden will have beets this year.  I also plan to  plant plenty of blue lake bush beans, one of my favorite and most successful  producers of fresh vegetables around these parts.  There's plenty to look forward to!