False Spring??

We are now well past mid April and still waiting for spring.  Last Friday and Saturday we had two very warm days with temperatures in the 80s.  Terry ran the rototiller through six of our raised beds and we finally were able to plant a few of our onions. He still has two more of the long beds to rototill in addition to the six square beds.  The square beds will be done last because we are going to move one of them and stack it on one of the others.  Yes, another one of my ideas. That is why we call our blog "Trail and Error Gardening".  We are always trying new ideas.  We will post more about the proposed trial at a later date.

The asparagus is beginning to peek through the soil and will soon be ready to pick.  These shoots are in the newer bed and have more of a red tinge. We won't harvest many from this bed until next year but the older bed will give us plenty of asparagus for meals.  The asparagus roots in this bed only cover an area about four feet by five feet.  We still have an additional three feet to plant an annual - probably a tomato plant.  The original asparagus bed is four feet by sixteen feet and has been producing for a few years and the yield increases each year.

The photo above shows our main "trial" for the 2018 gardening season.  We started cabbage seedlings in the basement under grow lights and planted them in a garden bed last Saturday.  We are using the greenhouse buckets to protect them from the un-spring-like weather.  The plan is to see if we can grow cabbage very early in the spring and have it form heads before those nasty white butterflies arrive to lay their eggs.  We want to have the cabbage plants well established by butterfly season.  We will then either lay netting on the plants or spray with a garlic and soap spray.  We don't use chemicals in our garden.

The greenhouse buckets are (in our opinion) a wonderful invention. They work like mini greenhouses and have a four hole opening on the top with a wheel like device.  To help regulate temperature all you do is turn the wheel to allow more or less air to circulate in the buckets.

The best part is the buckets are made in the U.S.A.  A veteran run company in Montana called WryCo Internationl makes the buckets.  We have been using them for a couple of years and now have at least twenty buckets.