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.