One Hundred Dollars a Month

Have you started thinking about your fall vegetable garden yet?  Well you better hop to it.  Over the weekend I started a second round of fall seedlings for my raised garden beds.  The tray you see above is one I started a few weeks ago when I planted lettuces, bok choy, broccoli and a few other vegetables.

This weekend I planted a boatload of kale, and Swiss chard seeds from Botanical Interests.

If you live in Western Washington, and you haven’t started yet, don’t worry, it’s not to late.

Right now you should be planting the following seeds:

Root Crops – Carrots, Beets, Turnips, Radishes
Brassicas – Broccoli, Cabbage & Cauliflower starts {Check your local nursery, it’s probably too late to start from seed, so you’ll need to purchase transplants}
Legums – Short season peas like Ed Hume’s Sugar Snap Peas {Plant these asap!}
Greens – Lettuce, Kale, Spinach, and Swiss Chard

Earlier in the week, my friend and I took a class presented by the Seattle Tilth.  The class was held outside at Victor Steinbrueck Park which happened to be right next to the Pike Place Market in downtown Seattle.

The class was centered around fall and winter container vegetable gardening.  But as our Instructor Veralea started to demonstrate how to plant vegetable starts into a container I became distracted.

I noticed a guy, {I’ll call him Mr. Pants Half Down} ride up to a bike that was sitting unchained outside of a bar.  He was totally scoping it out. He must have checked out the bike for a good 2 to 3 minutes, and I thought for sure he was going to make a run {pedal?} for it.  But he didn’t.

Anyway, out of all of the things I learned from the class, the one thing that stood out to me was – Kale and Swiss Chard can be grown ALL WINTER.  Yep, so basically, you cannot kill it.  From what I understand, kale does just fine in snow. Lucky me.

So guess what I’ll be growing this fall to help me reach my goal of growing 2,000 pounds of vegetables. Kale. Yee-Haw!  I am sooooo thrilled {not}.

Oh, and lot’s and lot’s of Swiss Chard too.

Let’s just hope the nice people at the Rescue Mission in Tacoma know what to do with it, because we can only each so much of the stuff.

Need Seeds?

Check out the Botanical Interests site.  It rocks!

*If you live in the Seattle area and are interested in learning more about container gardening, the Seattle Tilth is offering a FREE fall and winter vegetables in containers class in downtown Seattle {right next to Pike Place Market} this Wednesday {August 29th} from 5:30 – 7pm.