Well, the time is upon is! We know it still doesn’t “feel” like gardening season, but it’s that time of year where we kick off our 2025 garden season!
We’ll start our season with discussing how we structure our general sowing strategy. We heavily use the “weeks to last frost” methodology, as opposed to using planting guides with specific dates. This is basically a countdown to our expected average last frost date and it’s kind of like a clock that gardeners can reliably use to prepare for the growing season.
The “weeks to last frost” methodology ensures we get transplants that are appropriately sized and that we achieve full maturity during our actual outdoor growing season. As of this weekend, we’ll be 12 weeks to our expected last frost.
We do grow a number of things that require that entire 12 weeks of indoor growing time. Plants such as onions, leeks, peppers, celery and a few flowers simply have very long maturity times. So, we need to sow them very early in the season to ensure that maturity.
Many gardeners may not need to get started with sowing as soon as we do. If you’re not planning on growing those super long maturity plants, you can typically wait until about 8 to 10 weeks to last frost to get started.
In case you didn’t know, we publish our entire sowing schedule! In the comments, you’ll find our exact sowing guides that we use and they’re perfect for zones 2a through 4b. We also provide date corrections for other far northern growing zones. For you beginners, we offer “super easy” downloadable sowing schedules based on specific dates. Together, these provide both beginner and advanced sowing schedules.
One of the things that is unique about our sowing schedule is how thorough it is. For example, we focus on a lot of subarctic hardy perennials you can grow from seed. You’ll also find rather extensive vegetable and flower schedules that reflect our diverse growing efforts & experience. We also thread in helpful, far northern growing information about most plants.
We’re T-Minus three days to getting started, so we’ll walk you through our brief ramp up in the coming days and then we’ll be back to talking gardening for this season! Our first couple months largely focus on the “from seed” process and then we’ll dig into actual gardening!
