Sometimes, Aunt Toby is wont (yes, wont) to taking things into her knobby but capable hands and not taking ‘no’ for an answer. This year’s winter has been, for practically the entire Continental United States, one long sitting through of “Ground Hog Day”.
Awful. Miserable. Interminable.
And I looked at the calendar this weekend and realized that we have a yard full of snow (which at this point is not very picturesque at all) and the entire section of the yard that has the vegetable garden beds in it has had a huge amount of snow shoveled on top of it from the driveway. Which means that even with this week’s glorious weather (sunny, in the 50s every day), while we’ve had some major melting, I’m not going to have a garden bed warm enough to tuck cool weather early season crops into.
Snow is reflective like that.
So, this morning, when I spoke to The Boy, I asked him to do me a bit of a favor and try to unearth one of the beds from the snow. Somehow, the snow, in the melting and then refreezing, etc. had become very icy and heavy, so he only got about half of it done and I had to finish up when I got home. But as you can see from the photo, where he’d cleaned off the snow, the dirt was nice and soft and un-frozen and I dug and scraped off the rest on the bed (though as you can see, there is a bit of snow still frozen there on top of the soil). Depending on what happens to the weather in the next couple of weeks (I might have to put some clear plastic over the bed to help things along), by early April, it might be warm enough to plant things such as:
Lettuces
Kale
Chard
Broccoli
Cauliflower
spring onions
Beets
Chinese and other cabbages
Having something green pop up will be absolutely wonderful.
Wednesday Update: I stuck my handy-dandy extra meat thermometer in the soil this afternoon and it measured 32.9 degrees F. So, we’ve got a whole lot of warming up to do to get that bed to 50 degrees. I’m casting about for whatever we have laying about to use as a frame to raise up and put over the bed that I can cover with a big sheet of plastic to act as a green house. More to come!
