Ah... The Fun of Minnesota Spring

Here's the weather pattern for the past few weeks:

Early April: Cold. Wet. Icky. 30's.

A Day Later: Beautiful. Sunny. Warm. 60's.

A Day Later: Snow. Sleet. Wind. 20's.

Later That Afternoon: Snow is gone. Warm wind. 40's.

In Minnesota, April is fickle. There is the dichotomy of hundreds of beautiful seedlings laying in wait in my basement and the tricky weather outside. Late Winter and Early Spring require a lot of faith as a gardener, trusting that the weather will eventually turn warm enough to plant all the seedlings we've been lovingly caring for.

I walk downstairs to my basement seeding area and I see hundreds of beautiful seedlings laying in wait for their time out in the sunshine. It's full of promise down here... the bright green sprouts, the smell of moist soil, the colorful seed packets. But at this point in the year, I am tired of *potential* ... I want to get outside and get moving!

The Insanity Behind the Madness

It all started out as a way to eat fresh organic foods throughout the fall and winter. I was a long-time member of a CSA and really loved the fresh vegetables - the variety, the flavor, the healthy benefits of eating more veggies. But I was also interested in preserving the harvest for the fall and winter, so in 2009 I decided to try my hand at gardening again. Not to replace the CSA (which I still wanted to support), but to have more fall harvest. More about that process here.

Long story short, we ended up not getting a share in the CSA that year and ended up with a ton of great vegetables. We had such a great experience in 2009 and organic vegetables have become so expensive, that we decided to go whole hog in 2010. It's now become a huge part of our lives and I really love it. It's a great hobby - we're outdoors, active, connecting with the small little ecosystem behind our house. Not to mention feeding ourselves great food ... all while using less fossil fuel in the process.

So that brings me to WHY we are doing this big expansion. We certainly had enough harvest to enjoy fresh vegetables all summer long last year, and some crops even lasted well into the fall and winter.

With the addition of the hoop house, it is finally possible for me to realize a dream of mine: to grow food year-round here in Zone 4, without heat (in the traditional sense... e.g. no heater in the greenhouse). As if the year-round food challenge wasn't enough, my husband and I decided to issue another challenge to ourselves:

Grow ALL our own vegetables and herbs for an entire year, starting June 1, 2011.

That means we'll not be heading to the grocery store for a head of lettuce, a sprig of rosemary, or a bag of potatoes for a full year. Well, that's the idea anyway. Hence, the big expansion. We'll be freezing, canning, drying and root cellaring. We'll also be using the techniques (modified) laid out in Four Season Harvest by Eliot Coleman. The author lives in Zone 5 and harvests year-round. I'm a zone colder and not as experienced, so I'm excited and intrigued to see if this little experiment will work.

Although not vegetarian, my husband and I eat a lot of vegetables and definitely don't want to go without. It certainly won't do anyone any favors if we abstain from eating veggies just to make a point. I will do my best to eat what is in season, but if an entire season of crops fail and I'll be without lettuce or anything fresh for more than a month... I think I will give in. One can only live on frozen broccoli for so long. :)

However, I'm hoping it won't get to that point. After the massive amounts of reading and research I've done, I feel pretty confident in my ability to produce some kind of fresh crop year-round - using a cold frame, hoop house, floating row covers, and some other tricks of the trade.

I'll keep you posted :)

Early Spring 2011

And now on to 2011:

We are expanding.

My dad built me a hoop house for the most awesome Christmas gift EVER. After some leveling and laying some sort of foundation, we can install it in our backyard. It was assembled in my dad's garage in Northern Minnesota, disassembled after I saw it during Christmas, and is now stored in my dad's garage until he trailers it down here to install it. I'm hoping we'll get it installed sometime before July 1st. That is the perfect time to start some winter vegetables, which I'll be able to try for the first time this winter! I'm excited. :)

Even before I knew he was building me a greenhouse, we had planned to expand.

Our current gardens:

• (4) 46" square raised beds (15" tall)
• (2) 4' x 12' rectangular raised beds (8" tall)
• (3) cedar planters with one blueberry bush each
• (2) 24" square raised beds (4" tall) for strawberries

Our expansion plans:

• (2) additional 46" square raised beds
• (4) raised cold frames - approximately 2' x 5' (you might remember from a previous post that we purchased windows for this purpose in 2009 - we are finally getting to it!)
• (1) raised mound bed (raised soil, but no lumber supporting it) - 7' x 12'
• (1) raised mound bed - 4' x 32'
• (1) raised mound bed - 4' x 6'
• (1) bramble patch - approximately 12' x 12'
• (1) pole support system - for beans, peas, anything else that vines
• (1) trellis system for grapes
• (1) trellis system for hardy kiwi

Plus of course... the greenhouse.

You may wonder why we are doing all of this... It's a great question. Why in the world would someone want to do this while attempting to enjoy the lakes of Minnesota over the summer, renovating a house, taking care of two dogs, and owning her own business ... especially with the availability of fresh food year round at our lovely local co-op.

The answer to that question coming up in my next post!

Two Years Have Passed!

The summer of 2009 was pretty rough for our family... and although my garden continued, my blogging did not. Suffice it to say that we went through some tough times, but we hope the worst is behind us. We are expanding our garden in a huge way this year and I want to have record of it for myself, and also keep family and friends updated.

We are also vegetable gardening in Zone 4, which has it's challenges, so maybe this blog will be helpful to others with a short growing season and a penchant for feeding their families from their small backyard gardens.

First, a recap of 2009:

Our first crop from all those new raised beds totally made up for all the work that went into building them. We harvested over 1,000 lbs of vegetables from our small plot. And we didn't even start to measure our harvest until September 6th. Yes, you read that right! Our fall harvest was over 1,000 lbs (at which point we stopped measuring). My husband wasn't convinced that we should spend much money and effort on the garden - lumber for the beds, seeds, soil additives, etc. So not only did I find much of that for free on Craigslist, we decided to take a serious look at the finances to see if it pays off. Suffice it to say... It does. In a big, big way. I knew that going in but my hubby wanted proof that all this hard work was worth it. I don't blame him - gardening isn't his passion and for much of the year it just seems like hard work. But after that demonstration of return on investment, he's totally in.

The crops that stand out from 2009 are: tomatoes (oh my god, the tomatoes!), peppers (beautiful!), squash (wonderfully flavorful), and melons. The melons are a stand out because they took up so much room and weren't that flavorful. They were good... but they all ripen approximately at the same time, I don't think it gets warm enough to really make them super sweet, and we came to the conclusion that it didn't make much sense for us to plant them again. DH wasn't crazy about the squash either, so we skipped the vines altogether for 2010.

Totally cool fact from 2009: We grew long-keeper tomatoes and stored them downstairs. We ate our last fresh tomato in February 2010. And it still tasted great! Yes, we threw many away that had rotted during the October - February months, but I still liked having "keeper" tomatoes to use throughout the winter. Totally cool.

And 2010:

We had plans to increase the size of our garden again in 2010, but we never had time to do it. So using the same square footage (aside from the melon/squash patch), we planted much of the same thing, except less tomatoes and more peppers. The stand-outs from 2010 are: tomatoes (explained a bit later), carrots (HUGE - I finally had the heart to ruthlessly thin them and Wow, what a huge difference! Big, but still tasted amazing), zucchini (they got really big without much care).

We basically neglected the garden in 2010 except for planting. We didn't weed, especially in the spring, and we were overrun with weeds all year. However, we still had a huge yield for the year and we were never without the veggies that we wanted. One cool thing that happened because we didn't weed: we had over 40 tomato plants sprout all over the garden! I gave some away, kept a few where they grew, and pulled up and composted the rest. All in all, it was a really fun experiment, but I wouldn't do it again because 1) the garden was really messy because of all the random plant placings, and most importantly 2) our Minnesota summers are too short to really get a good harvest from naturally sprouting tomato seeds. They just didn't have time to mature. Indoor seeding is still the way to go. This year I'll pull any that I see, and just use the ones that I've already started downstairs under lights.

So last year I learned that once you get the plants established, you can do very little weeding and still get a ton of vegetables. However, it was a huge mess and we had more problems with insects and pests than in years past. I will definitely weed this year.

We have also learned over the past couple of years that the biggest work load comes in the early spring (with building new beds and seeding/planting) and fall (with the harvest and clean-up). Throughout the summer, we just water, weed a little bit, and harvest. Pretty simple.

Building the Beds

The garden is coming together, slowly but surely. We've been busy preparing the beds, so I don't have much plant news. My husband has been a trooper - building beds, shoveling dirt, lifting windows, and pretty much just being an all-around good guy. He's fun to be around when he's working... plus he's great to look at! ;-)

We now have four 4x4 raised beds (15" high). We stapled hardware cloth to the bottom to deter rabbits (and rodents) from coming up from the bottom like they did in my last bed. (Those little buggers!!!) We have an existing 4x12 bed that was badly in need of revitalizing. We removed the trees growing in there (yes, trees!!!), broke up the sod, and we're sifting all the dirt through hardware cloth (almost done with this). We also have plans for one more 4x12 bed. All told, we'll have 160 sq ft of raised bed gardening space.

The area entire area is tilled and ready to be organized into cute little gardens. The beds need a bit of leveling, since our site is on a small slope, which is why we made them smaller (4x4). So it's not as easy as just plunking them down as they are. I have two out of three leveled as I want them. Hope to get to the others tomorrow but work beckons so I'm not sure if I'll have time.

Also found some amazing free soil on Craigslist. Was expecting rocky "fill" with lots of rocks, but got black dirt that is almost like potting soil. No rocks, no sod, and decent aeration. Neutral ph. Testing for lead tonight. Will test for P, N, K tomorrow. DH and I have made two trips already, probably need to do at least one more to get enough. Plan to mix it with peat moss and horse manure (also a find on Craigslist).

Just an Update

It's been awhile since I posted, so I thought a short update might be in order.

General News: I purchased a few more utility lights for my seedlings and we converted a set of shelves into a better spot for my plants. We were getting sick of having to move the seedlings every time we wanted to do laundry. This new shelving system will work much better and be out of the way. It's not completely done yet but when it is I'll post a picture. We also picked up a couple of free windows for the cold frames today. They are beautiful 2'x5' casement windows and it's a shame we'll only be using them for a cold frame. We got them from a construction crew that was replacing all the windows in a whole house... Beautiful large, fancy windows... all going into the dumpster. What a waste. I'm glad we're going to be re-purposing a few, but it's a shame the rest will not be used. I also had a load of free wood chips delivered from a landscape company yesterday. It's amazing what you can get for free when you keep your eyes open (and you make good use of a feed reader!). We'll be working a lot on the outdoor gardens this weekend, so I hope to post some pictures. I meant to post my garden plan so we'll see if I can get to that before we actually have the garden built! On to specific plant news...

Leeks: They are still growing but slowly, but I think that's what they're supposed to do, so I guess that's a good thing. I keep meaning to move them to individual pots but I keep not having enough time. Maybe since they're growing so slowly I don't need to move them?

Pansies: They are also still growing but pretty slowly. I'm not sure if that's right so all I can do is wait and see. All of them have their first leaf set and some of them are starting a new shoot to form their second leaf set (the first "real" set). I'm impatient with these... I'd like to be able to plant them outside in a few weeks but I don't think that will happen. I will start these at least one month earlier next year.

Melons/Watermelons: Four out of five have sprouted and are looking good. I have transferred all the small plugs to larger peat pots and so far they are doing really well.

Others: I really want to plant some annuals for the business planters but I'm much too late, so I may just skip it. Also, I feel like I need to be planting something else but I can't remember what. I made a calendar based on days to maturity, time to harvest, etc. but I can't find it in the mess that is my house right now. We are redoing our home office so things are quite chaotic in the living room. More later...

Melon Baby

One of my melon seeds sprouted yesterday, so I have to move it to the light. I'm worried about it because it's much colder than the heating duct, but I'll have to give it a try.


I'm planting my melon seeds every two weeks, starting early, as an experiment to see if I can get fruit earlier in the summer.


I moved it from the plug it started in to a larger peat pot that I'm hoping it can stay in until I plant it. That may be wishful thinking though, because already the little melon sprout was pushing through the bottom of the small plug!