Well, we are now 10 weeks to last frost. Things are starting to gently ramp up here at Frosty Garden! It’s still a bit in our “early season” here, but the seeds are getting thrown down one by one!
It’s really our flower gardens that start to put pressure on our sowing efforts at this point in the game. We’ve bumped quite a few flower sowing times to this time frame to ensure we get bountiful blooms during our short growing season.
This is one of the nuances of growing flowers in the far north. We’re not solely concerned about getting our flowers to proper transplant size, we’re also aiming to ensure we get that full bloom maturity at the “right” time during our short summer season. We’re constantly shifting our sowing schedules, especially with flowers, to reflect this.
For example, we grew Lace Flower for the first time last year. We found with the traditional “lower-48” timing of sowing 6-7 weeks before last frost, we got blooms around early to mid August. That would be fine if we could still grow into September, but that’s not in the cards for us northerners! We’d like to see them come in a bit earlier, so we updated our timing to 8-10 weeks to last frost. Which should translate to the blooms coming in closer to peak summer like we’d prefer.
It might not be apparent to many growers, even the experienced among us, just how malleable seed sowing schedules can be! It took us a long time as growers to realize we could just make our own seed sowing schedule. Shortly after that, we also realized that effort might benefit all of you, so we started publishing our schedules and you’ll find them on our website.
Making your own sowing schedule, and tuning things for your specific garden and circumstance, is definitely a more advanced way to grow. But, it allows you to accommodate things like your specific micro climate, coastal influences or whatever else you’re dealing with. You can even shift things “just a little bit” to fine tune those maturities!
This process of “owning” our seed sowing schedule is definitely one of the steps we took in becoming advanced growers. It has helped us iron out some of the general issues we’d consistently encounter, especially as we translate things from “lower 48” experiences to our far northern garden!
