My daughters are gardeners too!

I still have much to write about our visit to Baker Creek, but for the last two evenings my time was occupied with spring planting. The best part about it was that my daughters helped.

Tonight my 14 year old helped plant the third and final wave of the early tomatoes. We planted "Siletz" and "World's Earliest". It was a big help having someone help me remove the plants from the recycled CD spindle containers that they were planted in.

We put crushed egg shells in the planting holes to give the tomatoes added calcium.

My 11 year old daughter is great with a rake. Last night she worked up the soil in several of the existing raised beds.

I have different sized beds but I think my daughters like the 4'x4' beds the best. Just like Mel Bartholomew of Square Foot Gardening says, it is easy to reach any part of the bed from all sides. Here my daughters are planting green beans in one 4 foot by 4 foot bed:

Another great thing about raised beds is that you can sit or kneel in the grass and reach in to work the bed. Below my daughter is planting red onions next to the first early tomato batch. Onions are great companion plants for tomatoes.

Gardening with my daughters is great fun. I love when they want to help, but I never make them. When I was a kid, hoeing the garden was part of my chores and I hated it. It took me many years after that to actually like gardening. That is probably also why I don't like hoes (sorry Carol).

I want my daughters to enjoy gardening, and I think they do. They have grown up playing in the garden and helping as much or as little as they want. Now that they are getting older, when they do help, it helps a lot! Why this is great is not because more work gets done. This is great because it gives us some wonderful quality time to talk and be together in nature. I'll gladly take as much of that as possible, even if nothing we planted together grows at all.

Gardening with your children is a priceless gift indeed.

The Baker Creek Spring Planting & Heritage Festival

It has been a whole week already since we were at the Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Spring Festival. We went both days and had a great time. It was fantastic! We took several extra days and made a family vacation out of it. We also visited the Laura Ingalls Wilder Home & Museum, The home of the "Throwed Rolls", Lambert's restaurant, and the Gateway Arch in St. Louis.

As for the Baker Creek Spring Festival, it is pretty hard to explain so I will show it to you instead. Following are many pictures taken at the festival.

There were lots of great farms selling plants and other vendors:

There were at least three areas with fantastic live music and entertainment going on constantly. This was my daughters' favorite part of the festival.

There were also great speakers in the speakers barn. I was too busy listening to them to take pictures but my favorite was Len Pense. The day after the festival, we went to his farm to visit his revolutionary garden. I will be writing an entire post about him soon.

In addition to the speakers, the music and the vendors at the festival, it was fun seeing all of the buildings that make up "Bakersville".

Of course the most important building at Bakersville is the Baker Creek Seed Store where you can get seeds of hundreds (maybe thousands) of common or highly unusual top quality heirloom varieties!

I only bought a dozen or so seed packets because I had already ordered from Baker Creek by mail. Next year maybe I'll go back to the festival and buy all of my seeds there instead of by mail. I strongly recommend any serious gardener to do the same. If you don't want to wait a whole year to visit Baker Creek, they have another big festival in August and smaller ones every month.

I loved our trip to Baker Creek. In my next post I will let you know about some of the cool things I bought at the festival and about some of the people I met. And then I have to give a big update on my gardens here in Kentucky. We are now in the busy gardening season. Isn't it great?

Busy potting up tomatoes and getting ready for Baker Creek

I have been extremely busy potting up over 100 tomato plants this week.

I had to transfer them from cell packs to individual peat pots or plastic cups. I wasn't planning to transplant so many, but lots of my friends and family are interested in my crazy heirloom varieties. I should have stopped saying "sure you can have a few of them" a long time ago. I was hoping to be able to speed things up this year by using soil blocks, but abandoned that effort early on. I don't have the larger 4 inch block maker yet which I would like for these tomatoes. I try to give these precious little tomato seedlings a lot of room to develop into strong healthy plants. I hope to get the larger soil block maker for next year.

As for this year, I have a few more varieties left to transplant today before we leave for the Baker Creek Spring Planting festival in Missouri that I wrote about in the last post.

I'm taking my laptop with me so I may still have Internet access. Email me or comment here if you will be at the festival too. My family and I are looking forward to it. See you in Bakersville!