The Approach of Gardening Season

 

A couple week ago, while eating a quiet lunch with my wife, we started musing about garden season approaching and after checking the weather app on my phone, determined that we had a fair chance of not seeing below freezing temperatures at night in our unheated greenhouse. The highs were forecasted to be well into the upper 50's which meant that during daylight hours, our greenhouse might be approaching temperatures in the low 80's, warm enough to grow something. So we rustled through our leftover and saved seeds and each planted some things. Above is my contribution, six Amish Paste tomato plants from my saved seeds of last year. I've never planted any tomatoes this early before but I have about a thousand seeds so I'm calling it an experiment with minimal repercussions for failure.

About five days after planting the seeds, we got a blizzard with fairly low temperatures. The water in the greenhouse wasn't frozen but it certainly was pretty chilly when I checked on it the next day. I decided to continue on with garden preparations and give the handles of my restored antique furrow maker a coat of boiled linseed oil. We use this tool to make furrows in which to plant our seeds directly into the prepared garden bed.

I used the opportunity to also oil the never been used handles of a new apparatus that I purchased over the winter. Above, they are resting on my small parts storage bins to keep from falling over while they dry in-between coats of linseed oil.

Above is the business end of the new tool. It is similar to the furrow maker but comes with a variety of tools that can be changed out for various garden tasks. It has mini plow bottoms to hill potatoes and corn, cultivator tines to loosen the soil and on the back, already installed for now, metal sweeps for weeding twelve inch swaths at a time. Because I foresee that being the biggest use of this tool, that is why I installed them for now. The wooden "handle" you see stuck into a hole is actually a brace that goes between the previously shown handles once fully assembled. I just stuck it there for now to allow the linseed oil to dry between coats.

Still on my list of preparations, I need to install some metal fence posts in the corners of my garden. Last year my electrified deer netting sagged a lot in the corners, encroaching quite a way into our garden area and inviting deer to jump over. This year, I am going to pound in metal posts, carefully to not concuss myself as I did last fall, and then insulate those with some plastic conduit so that the electrified netting can wrap tightly around the post fully supported and without shorting it out to the earth through the metal post. The snow from the blizzard is nearly gone as I write this, a day later, and I am hopeful that maybe come this weekend, we might till up a strip of our garden and seed in some salad greens and perhaps some early peas. We will most likely soon start planting more warmer weather seeds in our greenhouse for transplantation later when the frost is unlikely, which in this part of the world, is usually around mid-April.