The 2020 Season is here!

The day was February 8, 2020 and we planted our first seeds for the 2020 season. Not only were we super excited to get going, but we were also a bit nervous as you know, we’ve extended our garden at home by about 1200 square feet AND we are also leasing a plot of land up in Sussex County which we’ll be growing on, so we knew we need A LOT of plants.

We figured for the land up in Sussex County, we needed at least 2,000 plants to fill the space to the max. There is a good chance we don’t plant all that many this year, as we are just getting our feet wet with a larger space but we also don’t want to have empty space that could be potential growing space for the medicinal herbs we use for our products.

Our gardens at home are getting a bit of a makeover. We are going to re-introduce more produce into our original garden as we’ll be moving some of the medicinal perennials out into the new garden area. We are also introducing cut flowers into our garden, something we’ve never grown so it will be so lovely to go out and pick fresh flowers for the house!

This here is the new space at our home:

So now you may be wondering, how in the world are just TWO of you going to plant all these seeds to grow. Well, that’s where our new volunteer program comes into play. We’ve been growing our community of like minded folks, so we reached out early in the year, asking if anyone would be interested in helping us. We can’t believe the overwhelming response we got from people willing to give us two hours of their time, on the weekend, to get their hands dirty and help us start our gardens by planting hundreds and hundreds of seeds. Over our first two volunteer days, we planted 1,152 plants. Will they ALL grow, most likely not, but we have enough planted that we’ll find out what may or may not germinate and it gives us enough time to plant more if needed.

We start all our seeds at home, on metal wracks with grow lights. We keep the lights on for about 16 hours a day and rotate the trays around to make sure each of the seedlings are getting enough light and heat. We also grow with heat mats under the trays to keep them nice and warm. We need to mimic nature and because our ground is still frozen, and most likely be for a few more weeks, we get a head start indoors!

We have one more volunteer day for Seed Planting, and then we will be announcing our next series, which will be transplanting into 4” pots so our little baby plants get to grow more (indoors) before being moved outside, into the greenhouse, hopefully by mid-April. If you’d like to join us for our Volunteer Series 2, please sign up for our newsletter and keep an eye on our social media pages as we’ll be announcing the dates soon.

If you have any questions on how to grow indoors or start seeds, please feel free to reach out to us, we’d love to chat!