Guess what time it is…
It’s SEED STARTING SEASON!!!
That’s right my fellow gardeners – time to break out those catalogs and allow your dreams to do their happy dance in your planning notebooks. Oh, the colors! Oh, the flavors!
Allow me to be a bit candid, if you will… It’s been a struggle for me to adjust to gardening where I live. I spent most of my adult life growing plants in the 6-ish hardiness zone and had nearly perfected some hacks to get the season off to a great, early start. (Hello, greenhouse with a heater!) Then, I suddenly found myself gardening in zone 8b 9a! Specifically, the gulf coast portion of Mississippi.
At first, this prospect excited me because, without a “real” winter to kill everything, I could technically garden year-round! Couldn’t I? Well, no.
The first wall I ran into was bugs. I mean…not just bugs, but O.M.G. BUGS. Warmer weather means that nothing really dies off in the soils and trees here – things just sort of hibernate. And, if it’s a warmer winter, they barely even do that! Hungry bugs and hungry gardeners are going to run into some conflict to say the least.
“The first wall I ran into was bugs. I mean…not just bugs, but O.M.G. BUGS.”
The next wall I ran into was the Sun. Yes! That nuclear reactor in the sky which is ultimately the source of all energy and chemical life on Earth had a big lesson to teach me. When it’s out….it…is…OUT. Up in the mid-west and northeast where I was accustomed to gardening, my heat loving plants would lap up the 80 and 90-degree rays in July. But, in Mississippi? They literally just wanted to die most of July and August. The gardener in charge (me) also had no desire to be in 100-degree heat with 100% humidity, either. So, instead of year-round gardening, I was best off expecting early spring and early fall to be my go-to timelines for success.
Finally, the literal tilt of the Earth had something to show me about my “year-round” gardening delusion. Just because the sunlight reaching my region was hotter than other regions, that didn’t mean I’d be blessed with the satisfactory number of sunlight hours I needed for my plants. In other words, I was still getting winter darkness even without the winter temperatures. As reiterated in my biology classes, a good number of plants rely on the number of daylight hours to trigger their internal growing systems. This, of course, was rather inconvenient for me and the kinds of, say, onions I wanted to grow and so forth.
“Experimental” Seasons
The first gardening season I took on in Mississippi was spring, and right out of the gate, I was making mistakes in leaning on my 6B routine. I got my seed babies into their trays inside, set them up with warming mats and grow lights, and promptly watched them become leggy. Okay, I thought. This has happened before. I had assumed the sun blasting into my kitchen for half the day would supplement my seedlings’ needs.
Wrong. Apparently, the Sun moves across the sky during the course of the year, and what it did in fall and winter would not be what it would do come February through my kitchen window. I knew about this celestial factoid, of course, but I also was running on autopilot with bad training data fed from my memories of the last warm season of which there are now three for me to sort through in 9a vs. one (ish) in 6b. A 70-degree day in February is much different than a 70-degree day in November, according to my plants and other things/people with better garden sense than me. Also, the tree in front of the window had grown most of its leaves back, and the leaves block the sunlight that had been unobstructed in the winter.
I really think this one was on the tree. Hmph.
I’m not sure if I’m sparing you the boring details of the rest of my stumbles or sparing my dignity of the recount, but I’ll just say that the rest of that season was filled with little one-off “you should know better” mistakes like those. Oh, and the bugs waking up in spring really, really, really like bean and tomato sprouts, and bug netting does not work. Side note: Amish Paste tomatoes will put out handsomely even if you plant them too close and grow a jungle!
The second gardening season was that fall, and I decided to try my luck at fall veggies plus potatoes. It turns out that southern fire ants really like mounding on potatoes and pumpkins, and hurricane season (which also coincides with early fall around here) doesn’t like me growing greens anywhere but my Aerogardens. I don’t know if it was the torrential rain flooding my pots or the saturated air that offended the germination sensibilities of my seedlings, but those suckers wouldn’t grow taller than a thumbnail. Seriously!
You know what I could grow, though? Cucumbers. I grew more cucumbers than my entire family could eat or can in just a tiny space next to the porch that was highly neglected. In all of my 6b garden days, any sort of squash-ish vining plant was my white whale because of the dreaded powdery mildew. That scourge got my plants every time (if the rabbits didn’t beat it), and the pickle-lover in me always died a little inside every failed season. Not anymore. You’d think that a humid place like the gulf coast would have a huge mildew problem, but…mother nature works in mysterious ways, I guess.
So, garden season number two taught me that I could be a pickle farmer someday. I think there’s a market for that? I don’t know. I really don’t like canning very much, so that career venture is probably out of the question. Oh, well. We will, however, have every variety of pickle in the fridge and pantry for as long as we stake out this 9a region!
My third gardening season was this last winter, and I tried the potatoes again (in pots this go-around) along with Raab, cabbages, more lettuce, and carrots. Would you know that nothing would grow in those pots? I was so frustrated. Every Zone 8b/9a account I followed on social media was telling me to plant, and I was listening diligently. I used fresh organic potting soils, and I was very careful not to neglect anything per usual. Zippo. Nada. Not a thing grew. It didn’t matter if I seeded them direct or used starter trays.
Okay, well, the potatoes grew until we had a hard frost one random morning where we didn’t cover them in time. I’ll take that one as my fault (I still would like a word with the weather people around here, though).
The rest of the failures may have been the seeds. Some were older packets, and the rest were purchased off-season and marked for the following spring. Is it possible the seeds weren’t matured enough for planting yet? I’m not really sure if that’s a thing despite having taken college courses that should have taught me as much. I find that my internal dialogue turns into an Agatha Raisin narration if I wander down that questioning rabbit hole – my inner snob defensively argues it couldn’t have been my fault. What a notion! Oh, well, again.
A New Season in a New Year
Now, it’s time to get ready for the 2024 spring season, and I’m honestly very mixed on how I feel about my garden plans. On the one hand, I know I should be done with my “sit back and see what happens” approach to learning about gardening down here, and I know that a little more TLC + neem oil would probably go a long way towards more garden success. On the other hand, I know myself to be very much a Libra in that if I can’t make something efficient and a natural, enjoyable part of my day, I’m just way too lazy to give it much effort. Interpretation: I always start garden season strong, but the weather and bugs have great veto power over my stamina.
It is what it is. I am who I am.
I do love gardening enough to want to continue trying to overcome the 9a obstacles I’m facing. Thus far, I have decided to abandon the pots for vegetable use and hand them over to flower seeds. If I can’t eat what I’m growing, I should at least be able to collect things that beautify my house and have something to smile at when spending time at the back window.
I also have several Aerogardens in my kitchen which will keep my lettuce supply going enough to not worry about those particular frustrations on the porch. Further, my dad bought me a GreenStalk vertical planter for Christmas, and I’ve got my sights set on using it for salad tomatoes. I figure, if it’s really as worthwhile as all the Instagram and YouTube influencers say it is, I’ll have wild success and buy a porch’s worth of them come their Black Friday sales in November.
The cucumbers will definitely still make a show – naturally! Our pickle supply is pathetic right now, so I’m looking forward to that along with applying a bit more patience to growing peppers that can spice up the pickle jars. The bugs (hee hee) aren’t big fans of those seedlings, and if I wait long enough before mourning my ineptness at growing peppers before they’ve had a chance to take in the summer, perhaps I’ll have another good garden win on my score board.
Oh, and perhaps my most exciting garden plan this year…. Wait, you know what? I’m going to save that plan for another blog post. You’ve read long enough, I’m sure! And I’m very grateful for it. So grateful, in fact, that I’m dropping this printable here for you:
FREE PRINTABLE – Garden Journal Template
If I’m being completely honest, I have a million journals that I started with some grand plan in mind. I’m always thinking of story ideas, researching interesting history or science tidbits, or trying to gather my thoughts on particular topics (aren’t we all?). As an organization-minded person (please don’t look in my car), I always think I need yet another new journal to sort out that “one thing” over everything else. You can probably guess the outcome of this effort – journals, journals, everywhere!
So, I’ve moved into a new era – single template pages over new bound journals! I have found that just printing off a few cute or useful sheets that are relevant to what’s on my mind in the moment is far more effective to getting my thoughts worked out and organized than starting a whole journal I end up abandoning in two weeks like clockwork. Instead, I just pop the sheets into a binder as I’m done with them, and if they become journal-worthy, I given them their own binder.
If that sounds like something that could work for you, then I’ve got a template for your collection! Here’s a Garden Journal sheet for planning out the next season. It’s what I’m using to nail down my successes and failures over the seasons to plan my garden this year. If you use a digital notebook, then it’s even easier to use by importing into your app. (I also use Goodnotes for things like my family’s Victory-Garden-themed weekly planner – free to download as well!)
I hope this Garden Journal template is useful to you! Let me know in the comments if there’s any other type of garden or journal template that would also be useful to have.
As always, thanks for reading! Talk to you soon!
– Daysha
