Hi, Beth -- Welcome! Your photos were lovely!

I hope you'll enjoy this forum -- I enjoyed your enthusiasm in your post!

Wishing you every success with your "entire yard" garden!
Sunny

This gardening thing is addictive. Your plants should be nicely hardened off if you are taking them out for some sun. Mine are under the stairs in my dog's favorite place. Every window sill is also full and I have recently put up more lights in my basement. I have more tomato plants then usual but at least we got a rain or two. I am paranoid because years ago when I worked (briefly) in a greenhouse, I had a million little plants and we had a drought.

Beth, welcome to the forum!

I want to congratulate you on getting the 'gardening' bug. I also applaud that you realize that planting a vegetable garden can save money on the food bill.....next you need to preserve what you raise...you may already be doing that. If so, good for you. The fact that these veggies taste so great is an added bonus.

Bless Okiedawn for supplying you with seeds. I know in these bad financial times, the cost of seeds can seem very high. I raise mostly heirlooms so I can save seeds both for
flowers and vegetables ( beans, tomatoes and potatoes). That is something for you to think about too.

All those plants need is some warm weather! and you will be off and running.

Please do post pictures; we love 'em.

glenda

Joann, Glenda is right about saving seed and what a good endeavor growing your own is for us all. That Okiedawn must be some generous woman --

Helen, you are a gal after my own heart --- I just love to propogate plants, start seeds, etc. Really good idea to have lights in your stairway space, even thought your dogs were inconvenienced. My little parsleys and cuttings are smiling at me under the lights -- they don't know it's pretty wild out there today.

I hope everyone will post photos of their gardens this spring/summer, as we sure enjoy looking at them.
Sunny

Thanks for the welcome gals! Yup, I'm an enthusiastic person... LOL! I'm just super glad to find people to talk about gardening with!

YES, Miss OkieDawn is a very generous person. She said I was doing her a favor, taking these seeds off her hands. Here's a look at what all she sent me.

I felt like it was Christmas! Fourteen different varieties of tomatoes! WOW! Their all heirlooms, so saving seed is definitely gonna be a thing with me. I'm trying to do this as cheaply as possible. Storing and preserving came into play a little bit last year... this year I'm gonna be doing it more so. Freezing and canning! Last year I just did water bath canning, with pickled green tomatoes and salsa.

Here's how my seedlings are growing... my light set up isn't what it should be.

BUT, it's all about learning what works and what doesn't, huh? Next year will be much better. I'm repotting my leggy guys way down on the stem... just gonna have to wait for it to get warm out to put 'em in the ground!

I'm ready for the beauty of a nice, big garden... considering we've had to look at piles of branches like this since the ice storm!

{{gwi:50611}}

We live right by the highway, that's why there's tons of trash around our limb pile. Most of those branches came from my poor pecan tree! It'll be a few years before I get pecans again... :(.

Okay! I've babbled enough... LOL! Thanks for the welcome again!

Beth

Beth -- Oops. Called you Joann. Sorry. Senior Moment.
Sunny

I think Okiedawn made a good investment in you. It is fun to see someone get started in gardening. I wondered how you fit plants in your bathroom. Did your husband put up the brackets for you? It sounded like he is supportive and I'll bet he likes to eat those tomatoes. The shop lights are pretty cheap and I buy the cheapest fluorescent bulbs. If you could get some one at a time, it would be easier on you. But you have lots of enthusiasm and taking the plants in and out to get sun and air is working.

Sunny... you can call me Joann if you wanna... LOL! But Beth would work better. :)

Helen,

I'm HOPING Dawn made a good investment in me. I'm even sharing some of the seeds she sent me with friends, so we all can have the gardening bug. YES, my darling husband put those brackets up for me. It ain't purty, but it's working! He wants me to be a stay at home mom, and by gardening we're gonna make it work... so YES, he helps as much as possible. Next spring I'm gonna have a totally different set up, out in the storage building we have. Just gonna gather my lights a little at a time, whenever possible.

OH, btw... ANY AND ALL advice, ideas, thoughts are WELL APPRECIATED BY ME. From gardening to storing, recipes, seed saving... you get the idea. THANKS EVERYONE!

Beth

Welcome Beth! I'm glad you found the Ozarks forum.
Pat yourself on the back for being a stay-at-home mom and finding ways to save money. It's really hard and I wouldn't criticize anyone for working but you CAN save a lot by staying home.
Have you tried to grow melons yet? Those are somewhat expensive to buy at the grocery store and garden melons would be an excellent way to impress your guys. : ) I have some Moon and Star watermelon seeds I could send you if you like. Just email me. Watermelon seeds need planted around mid to late May here. I've planted even later though so you still have plenty of time.

If you really want to start the seeds cheaply, it would save some heating costs if you could set up your plant lights in the house. It is kind of messy, but I have mine on the back porch so all they get is the house heat and it is a bit cool out there nights, but I don't have to heat anything extra that way.

Just another thought that crossed my mind.

Christie,
THANK YOU! I will be emailing you after I type this. I do have a couple of types of melon seeds, but I love those Moon and Stars ones! I did try to grow some melons last year, and they only got as big as a softball... I just tried to find the picture of them and CAN'T. I gotta get my photos organized better... LOL! They were edible, just tiny! Don't know where I went wrong there... :/.

Gldno1,
THAT'S what I'm talking bout... I need feedback like that! Makes perfect sense too. I don't really mind having shelves of plants growing in my house. My bathroom smells awesome right now... LOL! Any other thoughts that cross yer mind... lay em on me!

Beth

BTW, any thoughts on preserving watermelons, or melons in general? Do they freeze up well?

Beth

Beth, when my children were little, I froze both watermelon and cantaloupe. The secret is to eat them while they are still frozen, because as they thaw they get mushy.

Congrats to you for gardening, and being a stay at home mom. I am a lifelong gardener, learning from my parents and grandparents, and got into it in a really big way when my four children were still little. I was a stay at home mom too for a very long time since I had a preschool child at home for almost 20 years. (Oldest was 14&1/2 when youngest was born.) The problem is that when they grow up and get married and have children of their own, they will be spoiled to the taste of homegrown veggies and if they don't have space or time to raise their own will beg you to still provide for them. And this at the same time that elderly parents get too old to garden and there we are, raising for parents, children and grandchildren. But the taste is worth it--and so is the savings. Both at the grocery store and at the Dr's office.

Mulberryknob,
Thanks girl! I'm trying to think of a bunch of ways to store everything, for varieties sake. Ya know? I'll freeze a bunch, bet my three year old will love them!

And thanks to you (and ALL of you guys) for the congrats and cheer you've given me on being the sahm! And gardening... :). It was a very important decision for us. My husband's mom was all the time out of the house, and I grew up with a sahm... so we both saw the benefit in it. I've got a fifteen year old AND a three year old... twelve years apart! Makes me a tired old woman... LOL! I've decided since this is "what I'm gonna be when I grow up", I might as well do it the best that I can. So I'm a penny pincher and a tightwad... and I think of ways to make something outta nothing. Gardening has been THE BEST part of this experience. Not only can I DO SOMETHING finally, food is the new gold! The more I can make it to where we don't have to go to the grocery store, the more money we can save and spend on other important things.

:) I'm just preaching here... LOL! Thanks again everyone!

Beth

p.s. I helped my Grandma in her garden for years when I was little, but my Mom had an aversion to that way of life... LOL! So I didn't do it for many, many years. Last year we just took a shot in the dark on 6 tomatoes and 8 pepper plants... one squash and a few other packs of seeds... and WHAMMO... I'm addicted! :)

Wouldn't frozen melon chunks be good for smoothies? I've never tried to freeze it but should. I know I've seen in bags at the grocery store in the freezer case.

Love your enthusiasm Beth. Bet you can get your 3 year old to eat more veggies by growing your own. My 11 year old daughter loves onions of all things and I thinks it's partly because I let her help me with them in the garden.

AHHH! Frozen melon smoothies! That'd be a good way to use them. My husband said we could make watermelon martini's with them too... LOL!

YES, I'm grabbing his interest in what I'm doing with the garden and running with it. He watches me watering the plants in the bathroom, and I tell him what each plant is and what they're growing for us. He pretends to eat tomatoes and peppers now... LOL! The main things he loves is cucumbers and watermelons... so when I told him we're going to have some of them, he was tickled! This is also good for my fifteen year old... he's doing some work for me, getting the ground ready to plant. GOOD FOR HIM. And he KNOWS that he's gonna be eating lots of veggies this summer!

He told me the other night that he wants me and my husband to move out to the country, so when he's got kids... I can be the Country Grandma! LOL... like Mulberryknob said! I am teaching him what I'm doing tho... he's gonna be able to do this himself too. Whether he will or not, that's another story! :)

Beth

Beth, when my oldest daughter was a teen, she hated to work in the garden, so she did housework while younger daughter and I gardened. Then she got married, moved to Denver and had a baby midMay. I flew out early June, expecting to be grandma to 1st grandbaby. No sooner did I get there than she asked me if I would help her plant a veggie garden in the back of the rented apt they were living in. I said, "What gives? You don't like to garden."
She said, "No, but grocery store veggies taste like cardboard." When they returned to Okla 10 years ago, DH and I started raising veggies for the grandkids--now 3 of them. And they love broccoli, so it's worth it.