Although late in the game for Tennessee weather, my son Ben and I went ahead and started some seeds in April. He also had a sustainability course for school and was able to choose a project: he decided to choose growing plants from seed! Since he really wanted to grow tomatoes, he chose several varieties of tomatoes, but we also included peppers, nasturtium, chamomile, sunflowers, lettuces, and a few others. We started some trays both indoors in our Gardener Supply Grow Light Stand, some in the greenhouse, and others direct sow in the garden. The seeds that fared the best were the ones in the grow light stand in our barn. The others were moved in as space allowed. The photos below here are all of his photography for his school project!
I have never built benches before, but after studying some videos on youtube, I figured how hard could it be? I went and bought both cedar and also pine and built three long benches (not in a greenhouse yet as the side of our barn worked even better!). Same style, slightly different measurements and I'm pretty happy about how they turned out! Will be getting a Miter saw soon to help with projects like these in the future!
We built some 4x8 6" cedar beds several months ago near our driveway and really had not done too much with them yet. They were neglected during the hectic time of kidding season and as I would be bring in organic starter plants from different places, I would just bury the pots down into these beds. Well, tall grass and wild weeds grew up around the pots and kind of formed a sort of forest around them. It actually worked really well and the plants are thriving in there as it mimics a forest system! I'm not sure they want to move, but they are going to! LOL. We have loads of mint and herbs in there, various fruit bushes we've bought (including loads of bare root berry bushes for an orchard that are tamped down under one of our massive black walnut trees), black raspberry plants I propagated in Vermont and brought down, and a beautiful fig my mom brought me. We are ready to transplant a lot of these soon once the beds and areas are all ready!
