Cold Weather Gardening In Early Spring
If you’re a rookie gardener like me, you might think you can only plant seeds during warm weather and/or that your seeds always have to go right into the ground. However, there are many options for cold weather gardening in early spring, and you can even plant “started” seeds! (more on that below) If you’re curious about starting a cold-weather garden, read on for my personal experience with an early spring garden!
I'm new to this multi raised bed gardener life. I’ve always grown tons of indoor plants. I didn't have a yard with space to really cultivate a huge garden until last year. In being new to gardening, I didn't realize I was making a very rookie assumption by thinking there was one "gardening season" as opposed to the reality that there are several times during the year that you will want to start your seeds or plant them right into the ground.
You might be wondering what the difference is between “starting” a seed and putting it right into the ground. Isn’t planting it the start of growing?? Yes! However, when you “start” a seed, you are just letting it sprout and grow a bit in a container before transplanting it to its forever home to mature. Some plants like this method and others just don’t do as well with it. Fortunately, I had a successful first harvest regardless of that knowledge, but I really wanted to turn up the heat this year! I want to beautify the space with lots of florals that will attract pollinators and add in techniques that will help me maximize my harvest.
This is where my good friend Hanifa comes in. Hanifa is the owner of Guided Gardens you van follow her instagram here. We met through a mutual friend and hit it off. She is fortuitously a horticulturist and landscape designer! (I mean, is there anyone better to help me with my goals??)
I hired her right away to help me with my garden plan. She provides garden consultation as a service in the greater Salt Lake City area, so if you’re around, definitely give her a call!
I learned from her about the early growing season that several plants don’t give one single crap if they get snowed on. These are mainly root veggies and leafy greens. The root veggies need to go straight into the ground. They come out in weird shapes if they are started in the greenhouse. (This would be an example of a plant that doesn’t like the “starting” method we talked about before.) So, we planted carrots, beets, and radishes right into the ground again, knowing full well that it was likely to snow in the weeks ahead. It's all good, though, because these guys don't care about the snow!
I wanted to make sure I had more than these hardy root veggies to harvest, so Hanifa and I found some great additions to my early spring garden! Here's a complete list of the seeds I started in the greenhouse. They will be planted in two weeks, right into the ground, with no worry about really cold weather:
My root veggies on the other hand, are going directly in to the ground. When you do starts with root veggies they end up taking weird and strange shapes, if they take at all.
Heres my complete list of rood veggies that went right into the garden bed.
Isn't it exciting that we can still grow our food even when it's cold outside? I hope this blog has been helpful to you and shows you that you can garden pretty much all year round! Let me know if you have any questions or if you just wanna swap seed ideas! I’d love to hear from you!
Compost is always amazing for any garden, I wrote an ebook about indoor composting with worms. You can snag it here.
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