Doug's Blog

When I first started gardening, my mother would march us out to the garden on Memorial Day. We’d weed, turn over the soil and plant everything that day. On Labor Day the garden was finished and we ripped everything out.

Fast forward a few decades and now my garden season is almost year round, and yours can be too.

Choosing the right crops, giving them some protection and getting a little lucky with the weather can have you picking things before many gardeners have begun to plant.

Here’s a partial list of things that can be planted now-

Lettuce, greens, peas, beets, carrots, radishes, arugula, kale, Swiss chard and spinach. All of these plants tolerate frost and enjoy cool weather.
Don’t forget about pansies and snapdragons either for quick color.

It’s still pretty cold during March and April, so I protect the crops with a floating row cover. It’s a spun bound lightweight translucent fabric that acts like a greenhouse for the plants.

There’s a risk in planting some of these crops right now, it might stay cold enough so they wouldn’t germinate, but that rarely happens. We’re just risking our time and the cost of a seed packet.

Since the ground is still too wet to work, just get some compost from a garden center and pour it on the planting area. Now just spread the seeds out on the compost as detailed in the Digging with Doug video at this link.

Don’t wait until May to plant, get something in now to enjoy the first harvest of the neighborhood.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 22nd, 2012 at 4:13 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.