Start your garden now, with cold weather veggies
May 3, 2012
Conversations with Sod….notes from the field
Mulch, mulch, mulch. Seems that’s all I do these days besides plant a few HUGE trees here and there. Definitely keeps me in shape (and mighty dirty I might add). The landscaping crew continues to be super busy trying to get everyone’s yards ready with the early warm weather push. The garden center ladies are continuing to arrange and reveal our perennial selection and vegetables as they become available. They’ll begin receiving more and more annuals over the next few weeks as well. The Blind Horse Restaurant and Winery construction continues to reveal more and more of the new beauty within. Besides the completion of the screened in porch with fireplace, new dark hard wood floors and bar have been installed and deep, bold, earthy colors and artistically designed imprints landscape the walls. Our open house weekend May 19 & 20 (during normal business hours) will be quite the spectacle with restaurant tours as well as our container planting party – Thrillers, Fillers and Spillers where you can pick a container at the shop or bring your own in, purchase your favorite plants onsite and put your pot together at the garden center (no mess at home!) with the help with our expert garden designers. Also enjoy 20% off giftware, statuary and pottery at both locations. The weekend before, celebrate Mother’s Day with the kiddos on Saturday, May 12 from 10-3PM, have them plant up a pretty present for mom while parents receive a 20% off a single item coupon as an additional gift.
Enough with the updates, now on to the main topic. We thought it appropriate to do a blog on starting your vegetable garden! With our early warm weather tease, it seems as though spring is lasting forever! Well, there are plenty more things you can do these days besides even planting your perennials that have weathered through the winter – for instance, our perennials have been tempered in the weather so they are pretty stable in their pots and soil and can be planted in the ground now.
As for the veggie garden here are a few of the vegetables that you can plant before the last frost weekend as the typical starting date for your garden:
- any of your root crops such as carrots, radishes or beets
- peas
- lettuce
- spinach
As well as some of the locally grown heirloom vegetables that we offer at our garden center:
- kale – lacinato and dwf scotch blue varieties
- broccoli – romanesco, de dicco, calabrese varieties
- cauliflower – early snowball variety
- cabbage – caraflex, mamouth red rock, copenhagen market, primo
We soon will also be selling brussel sprouts which can be planted now as well.
When you start planting your vegetable garden, here are some tips to remember when beginning this early with the cold weather veggies. First off, don’t get too overzealous on the watering in the early weeks. The cool soil right now doesn’t allow soil to dry out as well so there is a risk of plants rotting off. Secondly, this is the time to add your organic matter such as earthworm castings, organic compost, etc. A nice prepping and preparing of the general structure of the garden will get it ready for the next shift in planting – tomatoes may even be started just after Mother’s Day.
Thanks again for reading! Another exciting thing I might point out is the Restoration Farms program with the Sheboygan Falls High School Food Science class that aims to grow, maintain and harvest vegetables at Restoration Farms and then bring the food via a “mobile farmer’s market” with veggie truck year round to over 600 impoverished community members in desperate need of good, healthy food. The program/cause was chosen as one of 100 finalists (out of thousands through this national contest put on through State Farm) to compete to be one of the top 40 vote getters through Facebook. We need your help to win a $25,000 grant! Through Facebook, vote as many as 10 times a day to help End Food Injustice, the name of the cause (search under Wisconsin), win the big prize! CLICK HERE for the link to the starter page of the contest Cause An Effect, then search under Wisconsin for End Food Injustice. Thanks for all your help that will help us help others! Happy planting!
From the field,
Rachael
