Ramblings of Garden Tool Co.
Posts tagged raised garden beds
Planning Your Garden…Tools
01 month ago
Planning this spring’s garden can be fun activity and it can be a bit overwhelming. Those garden supply and seed catalogs have been filling your mailbox and every year the gorgeous pictures in these catalogs give us an idea of what gardens and vegetables look like in the perfect world…you know, that world that has set designers, lighting consultants, make-up artists and I’m guessing someone whose job it is to shine the vegetables or airbrush a little more color on the flowers.
Well, that’s not my gardening world and I’m guessing it’s not yours. What’s in our gardening planning are all those tough jobs that go into making our gardens more beautiful or veggie gardens better producing.
You know what I’m talking about… what do I want to plant this year , does my soil need more amendments, what can I plant this year that requires less water, does this new planting area get enough sun, how will I deal with pests or disease, oh, and what about those weeds. These and hundreds of others are on our mind when we’re planning this year’s garden, but there is probably one thing you haven’t thought about…your garden tools.
I’m sure that at the end of the season last year you took inventory of your garden tools. While you were cleaning, sharpening and oiling your tools for their time off in the shed, you might have thought of a few tools that might make your gardening more enjoyable, but probably not. Well, now’s the time to start thinking about what garden tools you might need to replace or a new garden tool that will make your gardening easier.
Now I’m not saying that we all need every different garden tool out there, because we gardeners seem to find all kinds of uses for a single garden tool, but in your garden planning, is there a garden tool that will make your job easier, more enjoyable and less tiresome?
If you are buying new garden tools this year, purchase the best quality garden tools you can afford. It’s just counterproductive to buy cheap tools. You’ll be rewarded with a garden tool that not only lasts longer, but a tool that works harder and won’t end up in the landfill.
One last note and it’s a shameless one: If you’re looking for some of the finest garden tools made, you may just want to check out Garden Tool Company…quality garden tools and fast, neighborly service.
What’s Going on in Your Raised Gardening Beds?
010 months ago
by Anne Schreck
in Gardening
Here in Northern Colorado we can get snow in May, so the planting season starts later than in the south. Just yesterday, it was over 75 and today they are predicting a rain and snow mix. Only cold crops can be planted by the first week of April and many veggies do better if you start them inside. So right now we have peas, spinach, carrots and onions in the raised gardening beds and scallions, lettuce, cabbage, cantaloupe and celery indoors under the heat light. Melons are not typically started indoors, but ours had a hard time of it last year so we decided to give them some time to get established before putting them out.
Lettuce, scallions, celery, cabbage and canteloupe
This year we are planting a few less vegetables than we did last year. The broccoli and the cauliflower took up a lot of space and the results were less than stellar, so they will not be making the cut. We will plant lettuce and spinach again this year, but we are going to do a better job of using varied start dates for the plants so that we don’t have one huge harvest and a bunch of plants that bolt. We are going to go with more carrots and potatoes and hope that they like the soil a bit better this year now that we have added more compost. We also ordered some potato bags and will probably try some in one of those as well.
We had wonderful luck with our tomatoes, radishes, cucumbers, green beans and peppers and we will go with plenty of each again, but all of those must wait until May. We will probably go with seedlings from the local nursery for all but the radishes and green beans. I also got some black eyed pea seeds but they require a soil temperature of 65 degrees, so those will come later as well. We are still pondering corn since it takes a lot of room for a pretty small yield and great corn is usually readily available at the store. Squash is also iffy because I like it but you should see the face that Blake makes when you mention it.
So that’s what’s happening in our garden beds – what’s going on in yours?
Building Raised Beds and Planting Cool Season Veggies and Flowers
01 year ago
by Anne Schreck
in Gardening
Blake and I worked all weekend building some raised beds for our garden and rediscovered many of our muscles that are now aching and sore. We rented a tiller to do the big digging but we also used quite a few of the tools we sell at Garden Tool Co., including the Spork, several forks and rakes, the Sneeboer planting boy hand spade and the DeWit perennial spade.
This week we can start planting the seeds and seedlings for our cool season crops. We will be planting seeds for radishes and cilantro, we started seedlings inside for lettuce, spinach, celery, peas and some onions and we ordered seedlings for the rest of the onions, broccoli, cabbage and cauliflower.
Raised Garden Beds
We also started doing our yard and flower bed clean up jobs so that we can add some new flowers around the yard. For those jobs, we used pruners from both Felco and Clarington Forge, the Sneeboer American rake and a DeWit daisy grubber.
We have an area behind our back fence that we are required to take care of by the city. Up until this year, it has featured an excellent variety of local weeds and scrub trees, but I finally decided that I wanted to do something more with it so that it would look better and I wouldn’t have to tackle the weeds so often. I am amazed at the roots on the weeds here in Colorado and they present a huge challenge to remove. Some of them also have some massive stickers and we don’t want to have to take Cricket back to the emergency vet clinic this year to have them removed. The area does not get the best sun and faces north so we got a nice mix of seeds created for the shade from Botanical Interests, a Colorado Seed Company. There are annuals, perennials and some ground cover included and you start 1/2 prior to the last freeze and the rest after.
We have another shady area in our main front flower bed under the great big pine tree and we are going to add some more shade tolerant flowers there as well. For that area we got columbine, echinacea, aka purple coneflowers, and English daisies. In some of our sunny beds we will be adding Mexican poppies, baby snapdragon and Rocky Mountain penstemon, all of which are drought tolerant and easy to grow locally.
As the season wears on and Colorado warms up, we can plant the remainder of our vegetables, herbs and flowers, so more to follow…
