Kitty Assistant

This got edited out by blogger yesterday, and rather than re-post the entire entry, I will give you here a solo photo of our curious kitty, ready to help with the planting. He's the best kitty in the world, and he loves gardening. He hangs out in the garden when we are out there, loves to sidle up and rub against us when we're working. I'd grow a whole garden full of cats if I could be guaranteed that they'd all be so perfect!

Starting

We are using the guidance of this site to begin our seedlings this year:
http://www.yougrowgirl.com/
Here's our seed collection. These are from Victory Seed Company (all heirlooms):

These we bought at the local Stein's Garden Center.

There's a seed starting calculator somewhere on the site http://www.yougrowgirl.com/ but I can't locate it just now. It told us to plant this weekend, so we did.

Then I went to the farmer's market on Saturday and was told it was way too early to be planting seedlings by a very experienced gardener. Sigh. I'm sure it will be fine, and seed pots are enjoying their time in the laundry room on top of the warm, sunny and vibrating dryer (spouse/botanist says that the jiggling strengthens the growing plants. We'll see).

Best Gift Ever

A bit late in blogging about this, but this was my favorite Christmas gift this year. I haven't really looked at it yet, but I subscribe to this gardening philosophy, and I'm sure I did not spend more than a minute per day on the garden last summer if you spread it out over the entire growing season. And still, we had incredible yields (definitely spent more than a minute a day in harvesting, cooking and preserving from the garden!) Imagine how we'd do if I spent two or three minutes a day!

This gift is from our local used book store so I'm not sure it can be purchased anymore (too lazy to do a search on it). This year for Christmas, my husband, son, and I decided to buy each other a book from this store. So we each bought two and each received two. It was a major success and we were all very happy with the choices. I think we'll make it a tradition. It was fun and has the whole buy locally/recycle advantage as well.

December Salad Days

This is a photo of our final garden harvest, taken on DECEMBER 14! We just finished eating the lettuce pictured above, on DECEMBER 27! And we live in WISCONSIN! How is this possible?
See below:

Here is a picture of our lettuce, taken just before our final harvest on December 14.

And here is the secret: our cold frame that protected the lettuce, even through temperatures around 0 degrees F. There was a lot of snow and cold between November 28 and December 14, and we were sure that the lettuce had died. But it hadn't! Cold frames really work, and they work in cold, snowy climates. We recommend them.

Tomatoes and snow

Welcome to the inaugural post of LakeMichigardener! it's been a fun first year of gardening here along the Lake Michigan western shoreline. We've learned a lot and need to keep track of what we do so we can get better and better at it.

The most successful part of our garden this year was most definitely the TOMATOES! What you see above it the last of our heirloom tomatoes, which we picked about 3-4 weeks ago before the first hard frost. They are ripening nicely on the windowsill, and although they do not have the same delicious quality as the summer tomatoes, they are still MILES better than the typical tomato you can buy in a supermarket at this time of year.

Although we will not be posting as frequently as with our companion lakemichiblog, we hope that this blog will be a helpful resource for other gardeners and mostly, for us. Enjoy!