I had meant to post this several days ago, but I’d offered to help in someone’s office for about a week, then had to catch up on all the stuff I hadn’t done while I was doing that, then realized I couldn’t find my plant markers from last year… and now it’s March Break! 

We do have large sections of driveway visible, and there are a few spots where we can see actual grass (not green). However, the snow out back is still up to or past my knees, which I know because the kids and I went for a walk to see what we could see. What we saw included turkey tracks, coyote scat, and a faded birthday balloon stuck up in a tree.

And though spring is just around the corner, there’s still some time before it will be possible to plant outside. There are basically four main starting points for growing seeds, two outdoors and two indoors. The outdoor ones usually get worded as “as soon as the ground can be worked in spring” (frost hardy stuff) and “once all danger of frost has passed” which here means early June. The two indoor start times are about 6-8 weeks before that last (June) frost, and 3-4 weeks before the last frost. 

Things like radishes, carrots, kale, spinach do just fine when planted early as seeds; they are cold tolerant enough that if planted once the ground can be worked they will survive the odd frost. Beans and corn, and flowers and herbs, generally fall into the second of the two outside planting times as they aren’t as hardy. Of course, if you want bigger plants sooner, and to be harvesting over a longer period of time, you can always start some of those inside too. For many, especially the more frost tolerant ones and herbs, you can do what’s called succession planting, which just means planting some every week or two weeks to extend the harvest season, rather than planting all at once (and later harvesting all at once).

I have started my first batch of indoor seeds, now that I have labels - those are very important, because while I do know what most of the plants look like, it's harder to tell when they're tiny, and I can't tell apart varieties of tomato or pepper plants. I will also discuss my awesome inexpensive greenhouse for them - next post!