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A lot of the seeds I will be using this year are leftovers or saved seeds from last year, but I am adding a few new things and new varieties from my past year’s selection. From this trip, I picked up the following:

• Packman Broccoli
• Apollo Broccoli
• Lime Crisp Cucumbers
• Fairy Tale Eggplant (growing eggplant is entirely new for me)
• Cherry Belle Radish
• French Breakfast Radish
• Early Wonder Tall Top Beets
• Sugar Sprint Peas
• Oregon Giant Snow Peas
• Oregon Sugar Pod II Peas

As I like to put my broccoli in the ground before the frost date (it tends to get wiped out when the weather warms up), I already have that started in my garden window. I went with one row each of Packman Broccoli, Apollo Broccoli, Purple Sprouting Broccoli, and Broccoli Rabe. Last year, I used large plant bulbs in domes to produce light and heat for the seedlings, but I had a lot of problems with the bulbs burning out every 3 weeks. This year, I am trying out seed heating mats with my standard seed trays and little peat pots — the mat can’t be seen in the picture above, but it is inside the base which the seed tray sits in. For lighting, I am using a hanging fluorescent lighting fixture with a full spectrum plant light for the second year in a row. So far, so good — my broccoli came up in only a few days! The whole setup has a plastic dome on it to keep it warm and moist, although I do remove the dome twice a day to pour the condensation back on the seedlings and check on them for any problems.

With the frost date so early this year, I will probably be dropping my tomato seeds into the other seed kit in the next week or so. The melons, cucumbers and pumpkins will wait until about 3 weeks before my estimated planting day. I also have a tendency to pick up other seedlings here and there, so the window collection will definitely grow in the next few months.

Tip: To get a general planning guideline for the timing seeds and planting, see this tool from the Farmer’s Almanac. Your mileage may vary though — I found that the multi-harvest broccoli I grow (broccoli that produces side heads after the main head is cut) does great in cooler weather but either flowers or gets wiped out by cabbage moths in later spring, so I plant it earlier than the suggested dates to get the most out of it.

A few weeks ago, I answered an ad on Craigslist for someone who had cut down a cherry tree and had a bunch of the wood laying around. I asked them if they had any of the branches left, and they did. When I went to pick it up, they also had branches from a curling willow they had chopped down. I had wanted to use the cherrywood for the fence trellis, but the curling willow just looked so cool.

The other day I decided it was perfect for some freestyle pea supports. You don’t need a lot to make this happen—just some gloves to protect your hands, something to cut the branches with (loppers and pruners), gardening wire and snips to cut it, and the branches.

The idea is to fashion little teepees in each container, and then secure places where they overlap with the gardening wire. I like to snip mine pretty close to the joint to prevent anyone getting scratched, but you may want to leave yours longer if you want to reuse the wire later.

With the peas, I had let them overgrow too long, and so I had to lift and pull them back into place, separating some of the tendrils in the process. There were also some casualties, as the pea plants snap rather easily, which is also why I should have done this earlier.

The end result makes a nice conversation piece and supports your plants!

The peas were trellised this week (a bit too late, but I’ve been busy!) and the evergreen blueberry bush has been planted in a wine barrel container.

The baby peppers were dropped in their coconut pots into 4 in plastic pots, while the taller ones got a bath in the sink to remove aphids from their tops. The peppers will be heading into the outside garden soon. I also harvested the top of some of my basil plants.

My peas and strawberries are blooming though, as we’ve had some nice sun in here recently. So I hope those are okay through this colder night. They both seem to be pretty hardy.

I do have to laugh at myself for how scared I feel to send all my little "babies" into the world, worrying about how they will do in the cold. On one level, they are a representation of all the hard work it took to get to this point, and they are an investment in our food. On another level, they are just so cute and I don’t want to lose them after all the love and care I poured into them!

Enjoy the pics of the pea and strawberry blossoms below.

I still didn’t have legume innoculant for this round again, so we’ll see how they do. For the next round, I do have the innoculant, so I’ll be curious to see if it makes any difference in my germination rate or growth.

To prepare my half-barrels for planting, I originally had washed them out well and drilled 4 holes in the bottom. Before filling your barrels with soil, decide on what sunny location you will put your wine barrel garden, for a fully-loaded wine barrel weighs a ton and can only be moved around by dolly. For this round of planting peas, I put a bag of Rexis Potting soil in each barrel, and then finished off the top soil with a mixture of Rexius Chicken Compost and Rexius Garden Mulch. (Rexius happens to be the local green recycler in my neighborhood—it is so close I can smell that wonderful compost from my house when I walk outside. I encourage you to support your own local green recycler when you go to buy your soils and materials because the work they do is important!) Each barrel takes about 1.5-2 bags of dirt.

For the initial planting in this area, the Territorial Seed Company told me to get the peas in the ground by President’s Day (Feb 16). I was a few days late in planting, but I think they will still be okay. My pea mix is a coffee cup with Territorial Oregon Sugar Pod II Peas, Territorial Sugar Sprint Peas, and Ed Hume Oregon Giant Snow Peas. I chose all “bush type peas” because I wanted them to be able to grow in the wine barrel planters without any major trellising. While I wanted to try some legume inoculant for the first time (a coating you roll the peas around in before planting that is supposed to increase germination rate), everyone seemed to be sold out of it so i went along with this batch without it.

For this round, I just placed all the peas in big circles in the barrel, a few inches apart and a finger poke down.

Note: If you would like to trellis in a wine barrel, you can. You can either get something free-standing that goes into the barrel with stakes, or you can use a trellis netting. To use a netting, you’d need to place the wine barrel next to your roof or another structure. In the past, I have put a screw in either side of the barrel and attached the net on both sides with garden wire, and then used the screw/wire combo to attach it at the roofline or patio cover.