OK, since we’re on the eve of preparing our 2025 gardens, let’s generally talk about our garden implementation strategy. Many of you know, we use a multitude of gardens, both at our home and at our local community garden.
Our first priority is our raised beds. This garden largely focuses on cold climate friendly crops and a ton of direct sows, all very intensively grown. Our goal is to refresh the soil and prepare the long term nutritional profiles to support highly intensive growing techniques. We want these beds ready to accept seeds and plants over the coming week or so for things we can plant or sow up to two weeks to our last frost.
Our second priority is preparing our large community garden where we grow most large plants. We grow a rather diverse set of plants here, but we want it ready to start accepting our cold hardy plants like brassicas around two weeks to last frost. We’ll begin planting this with cold hardy plants after it has been prepared, with any frost sensitive or warm loving plants sunk into the ground sometime around or after last frost.
After this, we’ll start focusing on our container gardens. We use these almost exclusively for frost sensitive and warm loving plants, so the objective is to knock out our various container gardens by sometime around last frost. Planting here is rolled out based on plant sensitivity to cooler conditions and perhaps obviously, potential weather conditions.
Our last priority, perhaps surprisingly, is our greenhouse. We still need our greenhouse for continued seedling growth as it’s the staging point for all of our transplants. Since most (if not all) of our plants will be in there anyway, especially as we get closer to last frost, we can afford to have this be a lagging priority.
The work doesn’t end there! Inevitably, we’ll have some straggling plantings we’ll need to deal with, like extra plants we need to jam in somewhere. We also have a fair bit more work to do this year to complete our subarctic rose garden. Oh, yeah, and that whole hydroponics project needs to go somewhere, too.
We are excited that we are finally getting to “go time” and we’ll get to talk about more than just seedlings, transplants and growing indoors. As you can see, we have many hundreds of plants ready to go in the soil! It’ll all be happening very soon!
