Garden Intro

April fool waiting patiently for spring

I recently passed the 400 subscriber mark, thanks to The Good Citizen, Tereza Coraggio and Dr Paul Elias Alexander, all of whom have highlighted my posts. So much gratitude!

For new subscribers, Welcome! In case you are not aware, I am building a big garden and an orchard I will be documenting in detail here. This is the garden site.

My parents gardened here long ago, but there has not been a garden for many years as the homeowner, who I will be calling L, a very spry and alert 87yr old, no longer gardens - but you might imagine she is very excited about a new garden. If everything goes as planned she will never have had such a diverse variety of fruits and vegetables.

Most of the garden will be to the left of the Z (the camera is facing SE.) I might expand it to the right, into the pasture where her son brings some of his 300 sheep for grazing, as I am planting a lot of melons; but that means I would have to build a new fence. There is also a lot more sun right of the Z than close to those trees. Those trees were not so big when my parents gardened here. The tree on the corner is a junk box elder lording over the garden, so the area close to the far end of the Z will not be super productive, with no morning sun. L said I could drop it but it is leaning over a giant crabapple, one of the biggest I have seen, which I don”t want to harm, besides having to clean up the box elder mess.

Regardless, there is no shortage of sheep compost, so the garden should be very productive.

This is an antique farm, not much in operation, but very picturesque in a way and perfect for what I am up to.

I came to test if there is any ground frost. It was mild this past fall, there was a lot of snow on the ground by the time it got really cold around Christmas. Sometimes depending on conditions the ground frost can extend four feet down. This snow is about 2ft deep, it has been above 32F a few times so the melt has trickled down, turning the snow more to ice now that it has been below freezing for a few days. It took five minutes to dig this hole with this mostly inadequate plastic shovel.

Great news, I drove a wooden stake easily down. No ground frost, which is great because we have had two years of drought, so the soil will take up the snow melt very well, recharged ready for the veggies, and I won’t have to wait a week or more after the melt to work the soil.

This being a farm, I found some better digging tools. As you can see, it is chunks not powder. When I told both my dad and then L that I was planning to shovel off the garden they both looked at me like I was a fool.

That is about a 10lb steel transfer shovel. As I dug I started imagining the beds. That top one would be tomatoes, carrots and some early spring veggies. The lower one will be bigger but I didn’t want to pile up snow in the garden proper and it was too far to fling it outside the garden. As I dug I realized, this is a good workout for all the digging I am going to be doing this spring. Maybe this will heat up the soil a little sooner and give me a few days head start, or not - as you can see I am eager to start this garden.

I have five trays under lights. I will likely put up one more set of lights. I had hoped to put some trays outside in the cold frame, but nights have been way too cold, as low as -6F a few days ago.

I had hoped to be outside prepping garden beds and the orchard by this time, or within a week from now, but as you can see the forecast is not amenable to snow melt. Longer term forecasts don’t have 40+ days until well into the second week of April. It should be in the 40’s semi-regularly by now. It was 76F 250miles south of here yesterday.

Earliest you can plant anything this far north is about May 01. Fruit trees will be arriving sometime about the second week of May. My window for all the prep work is narrowing every day. Of course too, the garden center where I work is about to get crazy busy, and I am scheduled to be there at 5am Fri-Mon. Don’t expect too many thoughtful posts about archetypes and the like, mid April-Mid June, as I am not going to have any social life either. But there will be lots of garden and orchard pictures.

Orchard intro forthcoming in a week or so.

Happy April Fool’s Day.