Starting My Seeds, Starting a New Garden

On March 27 I started sowing my flower seeds. Some are annuals but most are perennials. I also included four different chile peppers. It’s a little late to start the chiles, but I’ll get a late season harvest with them so I can dry them. The ones I chose are good for ristras and I’m always looking for good ones to put into wreaths.

We’ve been at our current house for three years now and I have established a nice bunch of perennial flowers here. However we are renters, for a few more years, so nothing is for certain. Housing prices have skyrocketed lately (especially in our area) and the owners of our house have decided to sell, forcing us to move. Even with an extremely slim rental market, we’ve been able to find an absolutely beautiful, hand-crafted house to rent. It’s surrounded by forest with just a few patches of what I think and hope will be adequate sun for a garden.

I’ve barged ahead with my seeding determined to continue with my most passionate hobby. And on April 4 I sowed more seeds. For annuals I have started statice, strawflowers, Sweet Annie, gomphrena, and chiles. And I’ve started Fibigia, a biennial, and for perennials, goldstick, Armenian basketflower, pyrethrum, and Sea Lavender.

I’ve also started digging up some of my plants to move them and I have many more to go. Some of my flowers, such as my Alstroemerias, have been a part of a carefully curated collection. Many others have been propagated from the many plants I have purchased for my cutting garden over many years.

This move allows me to demonstrate the whole process of starting a new garden. I’ll start with determining where the sun is best. Many flowers and vegetables need full sun, but some of my perennial flowers are fine with a little shade. (Which is what I’ll have the most.)

Along with the challenges of adequate sun, I’ll be starting from scratch on soil improvement and bed formation, and erecting a deer fence.

My methods involve no heavy equipment, only hand tools. And no box building, I love working directly with real soil.

I’ll be planting the deer resistant varieties outside the deer fence to have as landscape plantings.

I hope you’ll join me in this journey and I hope this helps anyone who wants to learn how to start a garden from scratch.

For more seasoned gardeners I hope this website introduces you to some plants that you may not have known much about before. My flower palette includes many pants that use less water, many are deer resistant, and many double as good landscape plants. And many require a fairly low level of care. But I grow them because they make wonderful cut flowers. And many of them are excellent sources of pollen and nectar for our precious insect friends.

For more on my seeding process, see my tutorial on starting seeds