March Garden

Thank God, winter is over. I believe Spring-like weather has finally taken hold. This should allow for a major shift in my blogs away from long-winded opinionated soapbox oratory on various and sundry topics (yes, even I was getting annoyed and bored with myself… blame it on cabin fever.) I hope to now begin more realistically chronicling what I am doing out-of-doors.

February was unusually cold, but I did manage to get some brush cleared on our road bank and some trees cut down or pruned. Now the day lilies on the bank can come up unimpeded. I hauled all the brush and firewood to the section of the garden where I want to grow sweet corn and butternut squash. I built fires which I sat around and tended for a couple days. I was really surprised at my lassitude sitting by the flames, but hopefully my stamina and pep will improve as the warm weather progresses. Otherwise, I’ve just plain gotten old. Getting out of shape in winter is one of the downsides of being retired.

I’ve heard numerous people say that farming is gambling and I think gardening is too. My first two gardens after retirement were marginal successes at best, but like the gambler who steps up to the slot machine one more time, I’m convinced that this is my lucky year. I may be making a mistake by spreading the wood ash around my sweet corn patch but I am going mainly on what happened to another area of our sandy ground where we once burned a tree and the weeds grew twice as tall as those on the surrounding soil for a decade. It’s an experiment… but I feel lucky.

About a third of my compost piles are well-aged humus and ready to go. I rolled one compost pile forward and the soil underneath looked absolutely perfect, almost like peat. In this area of perfect tilth, I made a raised bed about 10’x4’ and planted my early salad garden of lettuce and spinach. The traditional day for planting early greens around here is St. Valentine’s Day, so I’m probably not too early seeding it in the beginning of March. If I were so tight for garden space that I could plant only one crop, it would be salad greens (along with a tomato plant.). Bagged salad greens are expensive in the grocery and tend to go bad and wilt quickly in the fridge. Salads are nutritious and one of the best foods for losing pounds. So I have the seed in the ground and watered and that’s a start.

I have put up a two-foot chicken wire fence around a 40'x25’ area to deter rabbits. I may have to go higher. I hope to grow everything within the fenced in plot. My idea is to have a small well kept garden rather than a sprawling one that I can’t keep up. I could plant edible pod peas this early in the year too, but we still have several bags of them in the freezer from last year. The cardinal rules of gardening seem to be: grow what you like to eat, grow what is expensive in the store, grow what is nutritious for your body, and grow the produce that does not keep fresh for long.

That’s enough for now; I will continue my garden journal on another day. It is nice to get out-of –doors, again. Hope really does spring eternal.