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In My Garden Granny Era - 2025 Spring Garden Kickoff (Zone 6B-mid Missouri)

 


Garden Granny Era  
2025 Spring Garden Update 
(US Hardiness Zone 6B-mid Missouri)

I am now in my garden granny (Mimi) era so I thought this meme was perfect, although I'm not nearly as hip as the person in the photo.  Yes, I still work in an office but being a garden granny is definitely where my heart is!

(Obviously I must not be cooking much from scratch lately because all of my posts have been about the garden and here goes another one.)

I love my garden!  I love mothering my seeds and plants, and  most of all-watching them flourish as spring turns into summer.  As winter came to an end, I enjoyed learning new things like starting seeds in jelly rolls (the internet knows this as "snail rolls") but they seem more like jelly rolls to me.  This worked REALLY WELL for starting quick seeds (marigolds, cucumbers, squash, and even carrots) when I wanted lots of plants and needed to maximize space under my grow lights.


I used packing foam from Amazon packages.  Worked great!



Overall, I have not been impressed with starting seeds under grow lights.  My wintersowing results in much hardier plants.  I struggle with starting seeds in seed trays.  Not sure I will do that again.  What a pain!  Plants started under lights are little plant divas in every way as far as I am concerned.  

Here are a few of my wintersown plants- snapdragons and Valencia onions.  I was worried the onions wouldn't get big enough outside, but they did and were perfect in my mid Missouri garden.




I attended a workshop on drip irrigation at the local public library.  Seems easy enough although I haven't decided yet to invest in drip irrigation.

Here are a few pics of my 2025 Garden.  My little granny garden is just getting started.  New gardens are the stuff dreams are made of.  I have high hopes for mine.  


First harvest was some nice radishes.  They are perfection!


The spinach already bolted but the flowers are so lovely that I left them.  I think I'll wait until the seed pods give me some spinach seeds for next year before I pull these plants.


This is a David Austin rose that I bought in 2021, "Princess Alexandra of Kent".  She is so pretty and the blooms are as big as peonies. We have her growing where our little dog, Rosie, loved to chase squirrels.  💗


I planted this "Music" garlic (from Baker Creek) last fall (10/31/25).  This is my first year growing garlic. Doug thinks I have overdone it but a girl who loves spaghetti needs a lot of garlic.  He's a potato lover.  What would he know about garlic?  😎


Doug built two new raised beds for our garden. Bringing loads of soil up that hillside nearly killed us both. I hammered in a few of those t-posts with a sledge hammer and nearly took off my pinky finger.  No pain no gain in the garden! 

I have planted a variety of peppers in the bed on the right and indeterminate tomatoes in the bed on the left.  There is the teeniest Sweet 100 growing under the wire basket. I have two Luffa vines growing on the cattle panel with a couple of Teddy Bear sunflowers planted at the front.

In the beds behind the new raised beds are my metal beds.  I have a huge pile of oregano that comes back every spring, some carrots, beets and snap peas back there.  I also have some strawberries in one of the beds (where my asparagus didn't come back after three years of waiting to cut it) :( along with a sprinkling of chaos lettuce to fill in the spaces.  That lettuce is so delicious by the way!

I have a few grow bags of regular potatoes (for Doug, the potato lover) and my sweet potato slips are now planted in the red tubs.  Definitely starting sweet potato slips laying in soil is the way to go.  I learned all about this from The Millennial Gardener HERE.  The sweet potatoes started in jars were started a MONTH EARLIER than the plants in the soil.  I won't be fooling with sweet potatoes in jars of water again!




In closing - here is my spring 2025 garden.  
Doug took the picture from the roof while up there working on the chimney.  Not my best side but it will be fun to compare the garden as it gets to cranking later this summer.  We started this garden a few years ago and just add a couple of beds each year.  We are turning a very steep hillside into our garden and I'm loving it!




I shared this post for Harvest Mondays at Happy Acres Blog HERE!  Special thanks to Dave for hosting his sight and inspiring me to grow my very own salads!



Happy Gardening 2025!


Gina








  














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