Mid-March is the perfect time of year to start seeds for your garden.

• Seeds: We purchased our non-GMO seeds from Johnney’s seeds. Seed Saver’s Exchange is another great seed source if you’re looking for heirloom varieties.
• Soil: My all-time favorite potting soil is Purple Cow Organics.
• Lights: You can find grow lights on Amazon. I’m trying out the ViparSpectra for the first time this year and am eager to see how my plants do with it.

We recently attended a two day community composting workshop taught by Rust Belt Riders in conjunction with Hamilton County Recycling. One of the main reasons we attended the workshop was to learn how to save the food scraps from Life Food Pantry in Loveland from being buried in a landfill. Throwing organic material such as food scraps or yard trimmings into landfills is a huge waste of our limited natural resources and something we’re passionate about at Timberidge Farms. As a result we’ve been rescuing food scraps from the pantry for several months. So far we’ve been feeding them to our chickens and haphazardly composting them. This has been working in the short term, but we figured we needed a more long term sustainable plan. We knew this hands on workshop was just what we needed and a great opportunity for us to learn how to compost more and better. One of the key takeaways from the workshop was the idea of a pallet pile. Pallet compost piles are extremely easy to set up, very mobile, and have just enough mass to hot compost. Over the course of 6 weeks, one wheel barrow of food scraps and two wheel barrows of wood chips will turn into a pile of finished compost. Pretty cool…