Well, it’s official. We have started our 2024 gardens for the year!
Fortunately, these first few weeks are pretty chill for us. We start a few things this early, like our allium. Onions simply take a long time to grow, upwards of six months, so if you want to grow them from seed you have to get going quite early in the season like we do. Alternatively, you can also use onion sets to grow onions, which allows you to direct sow them around last frost.
We’ve also started our peppers for the year. Honestly, unless you’re a bit cuckoo like us, starting peppers this early is a bit of an undertaking. We generally recommend folks wait for 8 to 10 weeks to last frost to sow peppers. (Which, for us is 2-4 weeks from now.) But, we have the means of handling some larger pepper starts. We up pot them twice during the early season to keep up with the expanding root structures. We can also accommodate this expansion in our growing spaces, which we’ll admit does take a bit of dedication.
And we do know that there are some people that start tomatoes this early. Honestly, we think that’s insane. (And usually the mark of inexperience growing indoors in northern climates.) If you do so, you’re going to be wrestling with five foot+ tall plants come last frost. It will drive your patience to the wall, between watering them frequently and trying to make sure they don’t snap in half. The absolute earliest we do tomatoes is 10 weeks to last frost, and even that’s challenging. Most people can do 8 weeks without issue.
Really, other than these two things, we’re coasting for the next couple of weeks. We kick off another phase of sowing at 10 weeks to last frost and it severely ramps up from there. We’ll be talking about this stuff all through our early season, so be sure to stay tuned if you don’t want to miss anything! We’re also going to be producing a two-part video series on our growing from seed process, so look for that soon!
We’re wishing you all a fantastic 2024 season, whether you’re getting started now or waiting for more “normal” sowing times in a few weeks.
