My indoor vegetable garden continues to do great, except for the cucumbers and spinach. I'm most impressed with the cilantro, since I've never even been able to grow it very well outside. I added broccoli and green beans. They both are doing well, but really needed to be transplanted into larger containers. Tomatoes are doing good do, but no flowers yet.
The cucumbers flowered, but I wasn't able to figure out how to effectively pollinate them, since there are no wind and bees indoors. I read that using a paintbrush would work, but I didn't have any luck. I had a hard time distinguishing between male and female flowers. The flowers all looked male to me. It seems like you have to time the manual pollination just right. Pollination makes you really appreciate mother nature.
Based on my experience, I may just stick with growing vegetables indoors that do not produce flowers.
Now that we are on the upswing towards spring, I'm going to focus on starting seeds to plant outdoors. The last frost date in my area of upstate New York area is around the 19th of May. I use a chart on the Victory Seed Company website to calculate the frost date. Some seeds should be started indoors about 8 weeks before the last frost date.
The new vegetable I'm going to try growing this year is celery. Conventional store bought celery is on the dirty dozen list - fruits/vegetables containing the most pesticides. I bought celery at the farmer's market last year and home grown celery is so worth it. The farmer said celery likes to be kept moist. I may also add pumpkin and butternut squash.
I normally buy my seeds at Walmart, but am thinking of ordering them online this year. A couple of good websites for buying seeds seem to be www.rareseeds.com and Mike's Vegetable Gardening. Mike has a seeds of the month club. They both sell non-GMO, heirloom seeds.
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