Happy Spring everyone! As Alaskans, we do always have to chuckle a little bit on this day as we are clearly not there yet. At least for us, we’ve probably still got about a month of actual winter left. But, this does “springboard” us into a topic we’ve been wanting to breach this season!
Bad puns aside, many of you northerners have experienced a rather mild winter this season. You might be wondering if that should affect your sowing schedules?
Overall, we would say no. Our average last frosts are still months away at this point. Even a Nostradamus-tier meteorologist will have almost zero insight into what the weather will be like in April or May. Even a mild winter can still bring late snowfalls and other oddities. As we like to say, the north will always north.
In years past, we’ve tried to “seize” what we thought would be an early spring by getting ahead on our sowing schedules. Only to be met with conditions that weren’t suitable for actual planting when we thought it might be possible. This put us in a position of having to care for plants indoors that were far too mature and couldn’t (yet) be planted outside.
We like to teach the concept of “plan for your climate, but act on your weather.” Meaning that climate is fairly predictable through averages, but the weather for any given day, week or month is not. We always plan and initiate our garden based on that climate data. Then, we decide what to actually do once the weather can be more reliably predicted.
The truth is, plants can be hardened off and placed outside at practically any point in their maturity. Even if you don’t actually put your plants in the ground, your plants can still enjoy some time outside when the conditions are suitable and they will obtain all the typical benefits of being outdoors. We do this as a matter of practice, if anything to save a buck on our indoor lighting power bill.
Smaller plants are simply easier to take care of, which is one of the reasons we “tune” our sowing schedule for the home gardener. The more mature the plant, the faster it will go through water and the more it can induce additional labor like up-potting. It’s just not worth this additional labor just to (maybe) push your harvests a couple weeks sooner.
Hope you all are enjoying your “Spring” and you’re as excited for the growing season as we are!
