Early spring garden baby photos
I promised you some more baby pictures from my Friday planting,
and I also wanted to see for myself if I'd been nuts to set out
week-old seedlings. So I poked back under the quick hoops and row covers
three days later...and discovered that everyone was not only holding
steady but also putting out new growth! I'm sure it didn't hurt that it
was warm and rainy during the intervening period, so both top and root
shock was minimized. We'll see how well the babies do when the weather
turns cool later in the week.
Some of those babies are
under the quick hoop closest to the camera. This spot is new ground
created in the last six weeks by broadforking sod, laying down a
one-thickness layer of corrugated cardboard, then shoveling good garden
soil on top from beds that were in a shady spot and thus weren't
providing peak vegetable growth despite high soil quality. I go into
this sort of no-till practice in much more depth in my upcoming soil
ebook Small-Scale No-Till Gardening Basics, so be sure to preorder a copy or mark your calendar for March 8 if you're interested!
Closer to home, the cold frame
is still plugging along. We've been harvesting one small salad's worth
of lettuce and/or greens per week from this area all through the coldest
parts of winter. I consider that proof positive that soil temperature,
not day length, is what keeps greens from producing in the dead of
winter.
How's your winter garden growing?
Or explore more posts by date or by subject.
About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
Want to be notified when new comments are posted on this page? Click on the RSS button after you add a comment to subscribe to the comment feed, or simply check the box beside "email replies to me" while writing your comment.
My snow peas did great this fall/winter in a sheltered spot of the garden, developping flowers and fruit beyond our Persephone day. We harvested snow peas up to January, when real cold began. However, my Swiss chard under fleece completely stopped development on my Persephone day and has started to grow again when the next Persephone day arrived. I'm thinking that different plants have different day lenght requierements, and that snow peas need less light than Swiss chard. Any htoughts? Lucía
Lucia --- I suspect you're entirely right that different plants have different cues to stop growing in the winter. I don't have enough data yet to figure out who needs what, but I definitely buy your light/temperature observations for Swiss chard vs. peas.
Ken --- Not all all. We buy these big rolls from Johnny's. They're not cheap, but even on our scale of growing all of our own vegetables, a roll lasts at least three years. (Actually, when I bought it last, the roll was half that big, which is what lasted three years, so I guess this one would last six.)