More progress! We’ve completed a little over half of our raised beds this weekend. We’ve also got our very first plants into actual soil now!
As we often discuss, we generally use a “safe and smart” sowing and transplanting strategy for our cold climate. We’ll transplant superbly cold hardy plants this early, typically starting with our allium crop and celery. If we get an unseasonable temperature dip or even a late snowfall, these plants will be completely unphased. As we get closer to our expected last frost date, those frost intolerance plants can start going out.
We also drop in almost all of our direct sows around this time. This includes things like carrots, beets, turnip, rutabaga, parsnip and peas. These seeds will come up when the conditions are right for them, plus all of these plants are rather cold tolerant as well.
It’s ideal to get your radish in early in the season like this. We have a rather limited window to produce radish as once the summer heat kicks in, usually mid-to-late June for us, the season is done. We’ve found somewhat marginal value in succession cropping radish, so we typically diversify our radish varieties with different maturity times ranging from 24 to 60 days.
We’ll follow up our direct sows with an additional sowing or two, once the bulk of our seeds have germinated. This helps us get more complete growth across our beds, otherwise germination failures create a patchwork of plants across the beds.
We use these beds very intensively, basically leveraging the “square foot garden” method spacing guidelines. Unlike many SFG gardeners, though, we leverage multiple gardens and techniques that are better for certain kinds of plants. For the most part, our raised beds focus on small to medium sized plants exclusively. Large plants get different treatment. We’ll put a link down in the comments that better describes our strat.
We’re glad to have another major task crossed off the list. And, we’re gardening “for real” now! It feels good to be putting in the hours outdoors, those winters are long and we’re refreshed and ready to hit our short growing season with all we’ve got!
