Slow Spring

From Garden Spring 2009

Well, it's June and you'd never know it by looking at my yard. Mike and I have embarked on an ambitious or insane (depending on your perspective) series of practices designed to reduce our environmental impact.

We began by using a grow table Mike got from a friend to start seeds for ourselves, James and Anna. Then we moved the seeds out into the greenhouse Dad helped us build last summer.
We were planning on getting the jump on spring to give ourselves a longer growing season and helps try some veggies that struggle to make it in Zone 3. In early April, we moved our tended plants out to the greenhouse only to see three weeks of temperatures 10 to 20 degrees C below normal. We planted our corn and had to cover it constantly to protect it from repeated snow and temperatures of minus 8 at night. Last week, it finally warmed up to be seasonal.

I was so excited to my plants start to actually grow (they'd been hunkered down just above soil level for 4 weeks) and we finally planted our garden. This year we are experimenting with square food gardening for the first time, so some planting is still to come.

New vegetables this year:

• spaghetti squash
• broccoli
• cauliflower
• soy beans
• rocket
• purple pole beans

Mike's experiments that I predict will die:

• watermelon
• pumpkin

All this exciting plenty has Mike and I touring the yard, ecstatically probing the dirt to see what is up. We have beans, carrots, peas, kohlrabi and beets all germinating just in time for the happy news. Great news this morning -more cold weather on the way and risk of frost tonight.