Planning, planting, and growing time

April 17th snow

This is what I woke up to yesterday morning. It made me laugh. Of course, the snow didn't last. 

Spring is here, I keep telling myself, but like any Canadian spring, it's variable until suddenly it feels like we're in full summer mode. With things as dry as they are, we're keeping our fingers crossed for more moisture, and white stuff like this is welcome!

Those big pine structures are Lee's latest project. The original raised bed garden boxes are falling apart after nine years. We cobbled them together with stakes for the last few years to buy ourselves a bit more time, and now Lee is working on replacing them. He built fourteen of them in a day, plastered them with two coats of linseed oil last weekend, and dug two in while I was at work on Monday, though he was still digging through a bit of frost. He's a hard worker, and takes extra pleasure in his efforts when we eat food we've grown ourselves.

Our old raised bed boxes have meant that our soil generally thaws quicker in the spring, holds moisture better, and they keep the soil from compacting because we only walk the paths around them. Weeding smaller raised sections works well for me, too, and I plant the boxes quite densely so we end up with more produce than I ever did planting straight rows in more compacted soil. 

Unfortunately, the wooden 2x2s we used to hold the corners of our boxes together back in 2015 were the first part to rot out, so this time, Lee is using metal brackets to hold the corners together, and hopefully these boxes will last another ten years (with reusable brackets). Or maybe we'll just go back to planting in mounds again, if we're still gardening. 

It's hard to imagine what the future holds because of climate change and drought. I find myself wondering about planting a garden at all when our wildfire season started in February this year because we've had so little moisture over the winter. But I'm trying to be optimistic, and evidence of optimism can be seen in our greenhouse:

A few of my 64 tomato plants
(some to be given to friends and family)

Peppers and marigolds

Geraniums and nicotiana

For the last few years, I've enjoyed the challenge of growing my own bedding plants -- going through the garden catalog, picking a colour scheme, ordering seeds, and starting them early. When it comes to my tomatoes and peppers, whose seeds I save from year to year, I may have planted a bit too soon, but I was in the groove and couldn't help myself. Every year the tomato plants are a bit spindly by the May full moon planting time (my birthday this year) and I feel a bit embarrassed about giving them away to friends, but they've learned to dig them deep so that they build better root systems, and they usually do really well for all of us.

I guess we'll see what kind of growing conditions the Master Gardener Creator gives us this year. For now, I'm just enjoying this planning, planting, and growing time.

Another gardening season begins

We're in for a few really cold days in the next week or so, so it makes me happy to see these little guys -- my first heirloom tomatoes of the year (peppers are lazy louts -- still haven't roused themselves). I've started these on the early side, hoping that I'll soon be able to move them out to our almost finished carpentry shed transformed into greenhouse, which is coming along. Lee is just waiting for the humidity and temperature sensors to arrive this week, and there's some cleaning and painting to be done, but it won't be long before I'm organizing for our first growing season out there!

Today I'm planning to vacuum up sawdust and otherwise dream about what it will be like out there... and maybe study my greenhouse books...

Gettin' the itch

This weekend, my wonderful husband and I spent some Valentine's time together working on our greenhouse construction. We managed to get the north side's plywood walls mostly finished to protect its R-40 insulation:

(Lest you think we have no romantic bones in our bodies, 

we also managed to attend a Valentine's Dinner and Dance on Saturday night!)

It was wonderfully warm in our special sun room yesterday. 

I've spent a little time online trying to determine what colour to paint

those plywood walls. I guess it should be a full-spectrum white, somehow.

Time in the greenhouse gave me the itch to get my fingers into some dirt,

so in the afternoon, I decided to start my peppers, and a few heirloom tomatoes.

Yes, it's a bit early, but I always find that it takes forever for pepper seeds

to germinate, and hopefully we'll be able to use the above space soon...

but for now, they'll be waiting and warming on the window sill.

I received my order from Heritage Harvest Seeds last week, 

and couldn't wait to plant Ukrainian Pear, Martino Roma and Black Prince

heirloom tomatoes, as well as my usual Jalapeno and Blushing Beauty peppers.

It was a balmy 3 degrees celcius outside (37F) when I was planting. 

I have dirt under my nails, and I know spring is coming.

Feels good after all the cold winter weather we've had!