Although it is still February, I am beginning garden prep.
A few locals urged me to start seeds a couple of weeks ago, but now I'm thinking they were jumping the gun. At this point I'm just going to run with it.
I was going to take some gardening classes offered at an old school house down the road from us, but they lost their master gardener last year, so no classes. They were kind enough to send me the PDF files to get me started though, so I'm going to share those in this post, but be forewarned they are geared specifically to Colorado and the elevation in the county we are in... So probably 7000-9000+ feet in elevation. Keep that in mind while reading these.
So I purchased 2 grow lights, 2 seedling mats, garden tags & some seedling fertilizer from Amazon (links will be listed below along with the PDFs)
I purchased some seed started greenhouses from tractor supply for $9, and I purchased my seeds from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds.
Right now I have a set of seedlings and have thinned out the plants, I'm waiting for the organic fertilizer to show up from amazon, and we're currently planning the raised beds and placement for the garden. Since my compost heap is frozen solid, I'm going to try a variety of growing techniques this year from hay bales to creating soil using some of the decaying granite as they've specified in the pdfs.
As far as equipment goes, I'm happy with the grow lights and seed mats thus far. The Burpee seed starting sets we got have worked well, and I purchased the jiffy coconut fiber pellet plug refills to re-use those seed starters once I transplant my seedlings into solo cups and such. I will likely be doing that in the next week or two, but I need to do a little research to sort out when the best time is for transplanting those. I don't have any feedback on the fertilizer yet, as it is still in the process of traveling to the ranch, and the tags are just blank tags that you write the plant names on. Nothing crazy.
I hope someone out in Colorado finds this useful!
For transparency, these are amazon affiliate links. If you shop through here we get an itty bitty payment from Amazon. It helps us keep this all going.
Seedling Mat - https://amzn.to/2GUPk2H
LED Grow Lights - https://amzn.to/2BL9pVY
Plant Tags - https://amzn.to/2V9d0Va
Fertilizer for Seedlings - https://amzn.to/2EkaBRD