Pushing spring? Come on, admit it, you all do it. I know we
do here on Chickadee Hill. I hear and see all the expert advise about
waiting until after danger of hard frost is gone. Or how about the one
about planting AFTER Mother's Day? Who can wait that long?
Not me that's for sure!
Course, pushing spring has some risks. Complete failure being one
of them. Been there, did that last year.
The failure? Sure ... you had to ask.
At 52 yrs old I was a first time gardener. If you wish to explore
my beginnings and incompetence, please see an accompanying piece,
"The Incompetent Gardener".
Yes, I am still incompetent, but surely needed to change the subject a bit.
Who can resist the winter seed catalogs that start coming in December?
When the garden stores put out hardy pansies, who are you not to buy?
I mean, honestly, when they put out the seed starter kits so early in
February, how are you supposed to NOT get started.
Last year around February 1st, the granddaughter and I could hold back no
more. We were at Menards and saw a self-watering seed starter kit.
There were little compacted pellets that grew like a sponge on water.
So we loaded up the cart and moved on home.
The first thing we did is add water to the compacted seed starter things
and watched them grow. Now THAT is cool! It is awfully like those
little sponge in a pill things that grow into shaped figures when you soak
them. But these come up as dirt.
It took us a whole afternoon to grow up the pellets and poke at them and
giggle about them. Then came the seeds. Alyssa had picked an eclectic
mix of flowers, vegetables, fruits, melons and more. As instructed, we
put two to three seeds in each wet, bulging seed starter. Then we sat
there and stared. I kid you NOT, in only two or three days we had a
combination of seed explosion and little bitty plant starts.
The indulgent husband and grandfather of the family sighed and shook his
head as the dining room filled up with seed starter trays. We watched
them, tended them, made notes about them all.
By the end of March, some of the seedlings were getting a bit long and
leggy. They were starting to wrap around each other. April 1st
came and in honor of my sister's death day (April 1, 1994) we dragged all of
our seedlings out to the newly turned and roto-tilled garden space. We
hoed out perfectly straight lines and gently planted our precious seedlings.
Guess what? They continued to grow! We watered and fertilized
and genuinely pampered them beyond belief.
If you have ever had the pleasure of living in Indiana you might know
that the weather can be in the sixties and seventies for weeks on end and
then a freak ice and hail storm comes at the end of April along with seven
inches of rain. This will kill anything growing in the garden.
It is particularly devastating to tender young shoots.
So what is an over-indulgent grandmother to do? Why she grabs her
over extended credit card and rushes right out to the corner garden center
and runs around like an idiot hollering, "I need a flat of green beans, a
flat of tomatoes, got any Asian melons? What are these? Can I
plant them now?"
I got to know Janet at the "Backyard Garden" in Fruitdale, Indiana pretty
well in 2007. She understood that it wasn't WHAT I was gardening
or necessarily HOW. It was more like what I could shove in the ground
to fool granddaughter into thinking she had planted it. Makes perfect
sense to me and if your garden center doesn't understand you, move on down
the road.
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