For me, growing a kitchen garden is rewarding especially during these times of empty aisles and shelves at the grocery store or sad looking produce. Many like yourselves have taken up gardening either indoors, outdoors or both during the pandemic, and are now hooked at how much you save on grocery bills.

With February’s generous serving of dreary, cold weather behind us, March has been generous with it’s sunny, yet wet forecasts in recent days. Just glancing outside the window at work, the cherry blossoms are starting to bud from the cherry trees, signalling the countdown to spring. This countdown started with racks of seeds at the garden store starting to appear at the end of February and all those gardening posts of people starting to plan for their spring/ summer gardens in the coming months.

Here in western Washington, not all plants are being planted outside for fear of the dreadful last frost. It usually comes around the end of March early April. Instead started a few of my kitchen garden plants indoors to plant later this spring.

For the past few years I sit down and go through my notes from the previous year to see which plants grew best and which did not. From there I draw up a list of ones to grow from seeds and which to buy as already plants.

In the month of March these are the seeds I started for the kitchen garden.

• Sage
• Cilantro
• White Lavender
• Chili Peppers
• Walla Walla Sweet Onions
• Roma Tomatoes (seeds from a grocery store tomato)
• Campari tomatoes (seeds from a grocery store tomato)
• Bok Choy

One garden chore I always do around this time is transplanting any orphan lavender that has come up in the gravel path or other planters. I replant them in pots for other people to take home and enjoy.

There are still a lot more prep to do in the kitchen garden before the beginning of summer. In April will be cleaning up the planting beds, and getting them prepped for planting the seedlings in, and sorting out the other plants.

You will have to stay tuned in what comes next in the kitchen garden.