Midwest Gardening 2025: Prepping and Planting in the Greenhouse

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Well, we have a few temps moderating...today is a balmy 70 ish....nights are still quite low, and the heater goes all night long in the Greenhouse. Our average frost date here is listed as MAY 7 which is a long ways away.

My goal for April is to get everything out of the kitchen and into the greenhouse by April 11th, so I can get my house in order for Easter.

This week I Prepped a bunch of containers for planting after I watered and cleaned out the greenhouse to make more room for more starts.

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We bought quite a few on sale LARGE POTS 

last Fall at the end of the season.

This is a 20" double walled pot 

that we needed for PEAS. 

My Peas and trellises blew over several times last year...so I will have to dolly this monster out of the greenhouse later. 

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Here's my hand to give you scale, and that's a 7" wide pot upside down to eat up some of the space in this huge pot. 

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I stuffed a bunch of old stems, wood and dried garden waste in the bottom and then

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Stuffed dried leaves into it also.

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Two 8" pots full of dried leaves. These were tamped down, and then two more pots of leaves.

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Then a thick layer of a heavy potting soil. 

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Then alternating layers of my bin potting soil with peatmoss and vermiculite. This is getting down to the bottom, but the compost pile is still frozen. I have a few pots around the yard I can add to the bin and then modify the soil.

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The layers were stirred around...mixing the damp hard soil with the loose starting soil from my bin.

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I then stuck in my 6' bamboo sticks in and wire tied them at the top. When the PEA Sprouts begin to come up I'll add some fabric trellis around. This will be kept in the greenhouse until it has 3' tall plants.

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Another 14" sale pot was started with two Canna bulbs. I will split these later. Hopefully it is warm enough on the floor in the greenhouse to get them started.

UPSIDE some of my Dahlias in small pots are up about 2-3"---YAY!

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I had to move lots around in the greenhouse to make room for these big planters on the floor and some on the shelves.  All will be started with flowers/vegetables/herb seeds and watered. I have a paper record and sticks to put in for Identification.

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This one I will use by the fisher kids pond...Nasturtiums, Allyssum, some Cosmos and a few Peppermint Zinnas. Some are old seeds, so I plant those heavy.

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I planted 4 of this size railing planters with veggies a few weeks ago, but now we will be starting with flowers.

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I made a second 16" pot for Peas with bamboo. Then I had to rearrange the greenhouse some more.

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Tomorrow I will plant Evening Sun sunflowers in these pots, and some more

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This sad little railing pot will be to be transplanted with  coleus eventually and maybe some bought Impatiens. I think I will move it off the desk to outside--the rim is cracking off from the UV rays and the heat we have been having the last few years. These railing planters I've been using for up to 10 years, so as they die, we replace them. This will be the last year for this one and it will be designated for shady. plants. That's it for Wednesday. I'm all out of water, so planting will have to begin tomorrow. 

What are you Prepping for Planting

 in your neck of the Woods?

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Sandi