Ooops! Need to catch up!

I see there's been a week between my posts. It's like I left y'all in limbo! So! I did get the potting soil, 3 bags of organic 50 quart from Miracle-Gro for $9 apiece (Costco is mah frien'!!). 50 quarts is 1.67 cubic feet, and I could have gotten 2 cubic foot bags of conventional at the hardware store, but they would have been $15 apiece and none of us could lift them.

When I opened the first bag I almost started singing. The organic potting mix is glorious!! Fine grained and smells wonderful, feels wonderful. It's brown instead of black and holds a LOT of water. 

The buckets have holes (courtesy Gryph) but I changed my mind about how I want to use them. One is now going to be dedicated to sweet peas because I don't want to take a chance on mixing them in with garden peas (sweet peas are toxic). The other may be a new potato bucket, but the starts I had are now in a restaurant to-go bag, a big clear one with handles. I just couldn't resist, lol. It's now out in the greenhouse and will get more potting soil as the leaves grow.

I've repotted the strawberries--such teeny lil things they are!!--and I've filled another flat of sixpacks with soil and seeds, part bok choi from Baker Creek, mostly salad mix from Wild Garden Seed.

Had to rearrange the garden corner of the kitchen. It still doesn't work quite right and I probably have to address that sometime in the next two weeks.

The 72 cell propagator on the fridge is filled with teensy herb sprouts, almost all of them up in just a week! But it's too soon to plant them out because we're due for frosty weather the 13th through 18th of March. After that they can all be potted up and moved to the greenhouse.

And now I think we're all caught up, at least until I plant something else!

This extraordinary cold

Got a closer look at the peas in the yard--which I had thought were probably freeze-dried in this extraordinary cold--and they actually seem to still be alive!! Now I wish I had planted tons more. It was an experiment, you know? The weeds were sprouting exuberantly and I thought, well surely there must be some equally hardy veggies, peas and lettuces at least, right? But I had NO IDEA the polar vortex would be this brutal. Monday night the low is going to be -11 F (temp conversion says -23.89 C), and that's a record low for us. Normally February is forty degrees F warmer, hovering right around freezing for the nights and a good ten degrees (F) warmer during the day. 

Be interesting to see if the plants in my little greenhouse have survived at all. You can bet this winter is going to inform what and when I plant next winter!!

In the house, tomatoes have the teeeeensiest true leaves showing, sweetpeas are vining, and zukes have one true leaf apiece, the biggest no larger than my thumbnail. Poppies are thread-like and seem to have needed tons more light than they're getting. The kitchen is currently the brightest place in the house because of all the lights. Strawberries and snapdragons remain compact, and such a bright green. Salad mix isn't doing as well as I had wished, lanky, fading, but opening true leaves here and there. Probably past time to plant the fast-growing part of the salad mix.