I'm definitely planning to give away extra seedlings this year. It's my first year starting seedlings indoors and I've gone a bit overboard! Outside of that, I am planning to do a lot of freezing and maybe try my hand at canning this year. We're also looking at building some sort of root cellar. I'm not sure if we'll have a lot of extras, but I do imagine we'll share with friends and family to some degree.

Thanks so much for all the guidance everyone!   Sandy

Like many of you, I am thinking about my spring planting plan.  I'm just not sure how to approach potatoes.  It's not so much a question of what kind to grow (I'll figure that out) but more how I should grow them.  I mostly garden in raised beds.  I could just plant in a regular raised bed.  I've also seen methods from growing potatoes deeper than you would in a standard raised bed and then layering the plants with more soil as they grow.   What do you do and what do you think works best?

That first egg is terribly exciting.  We waited what felt like forever for that first egg and, yes, I did give the chickens some toothless threats about a stew pot.  I even wrote a blog post about this. http://10yearchallenge.com/2008/11/07/saved-from-the-stew-pot/   So far, only one of our Australorps is laying, so we are only getting one egg every other day.  Our Barred Rock is in the coop this morning squacking up a storm, so I am hopeful we'll have another laying soon.   Sandy

I often "cut and come again" harvest romaine lettuce. Sometimes I'll just cut some of the outside leaves.  Sometimes I cut the whole plant, leaving about 1/2 to an inch of plant above the ground.  They come back fine, although I've found that I can only two three or so cut and come again harvests before the plant goes kaput.  Depending on where you live, though, regrowth this time of year will likely be slow, unlike how quickly it will regrow in the spring.