The sun is so amazing! It is so great to work in the garden in a tank top and be sweating at the beginning of April. Though the thermometer says 40 down by my house, up at the garden--in the sun--it says 80. Inside my hoop house it says 88 and I'm blasted with that greenhouse heat and smell when I stick my head in. The soil is up to 48. The seeds I planted mid-March are starting to make appearances: Peas and spinach are an inch tall and the turnips and onions have started to sprout. No word from the chard, kale, radishes, or lettuce yet. The crocuses, tulips, rhubarb, strawberries, sorrel, gooseberries, garlic and chives have all waken to greet spring. It's such an exciting time! |
| spinach in hoop house |
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| sorrel - outside |
I built 7 new raised beds this spring and have 2 filled, ready to plant. Filling the beds is a slow process of collecting and hauling many ingredients up the hill and mixing them to form a semblance of soil. For this batch I used leaves, seaweed, rabbit manure, sand, muskeg muck and one bag of potting soil. I really need to find a bulk "topsoil" provider! I've been digging out a wet area of the garden and drying out the resulting muck to use as my base, hoping the other ingredients will balance it all out. I'm mostly digging the stuff out because I'm trying to make an amphibian habitat though. The area is like a shallow muskeg pond with a seeping trickle of a creek. When it rains there's actually a decent flow. I've been making the whole thing deeper, and I'm going to transplant some aquatic vegetation . I'm hoping that if I build it they will come...meaning toads, salamanders, and newts. I'm not sure how they would know about the new habitat, but I'm hopeful. In 2003 Discovery Southeast put together this interesting report.
This week I raked the paths, collected fallen winter debris, and removed winter mulches . I stabilized my pvc hoops with actual conduit brackets and cinched up the plastic. I'm still hauling brush and rounds from the downed trees.The garden is looking good. I have 5 of my annual beds planted to vegetables. In the next few days I hope to plant three more and get the greenhouses going. I'm going to line the greenhouse floors with flat rocks to act as heat sinks, which should help the nighttime temperature drops. I'm also trying to design a new greenhouse on posts with a grated floor to build over my heat-radiating compost bins. I'm going to have to step my carpentry skills up a notch for this one! Get out and enjoy spring!
