As the maple syrup season dries up, the next season begins: we’re gearing up to garden. Friday we hauled in three loads of alpaca manure from our friends at Foggy Bottom Farms, just up the road. Saturday found us running circles around the garden with the tractor, using the blade in the back to spread nutrient-rich fertilizer evenly around the whole garden, sort of like an alpaca poop Zamboni. Normally, we’d let the manure mellow on the ground and compost for a few weeks, until we were sure we’d seen the last of the snow & freezing temperatures. But having missed out on the bulk of the maple syrup season this year, we are taking no chances with the garden. So today we put the main irrigation line in place and hooked up our first twelve rows of drip tape. Then today, March 18, we started planting the garden. Did we mention that it’s March 18 in Minnesota, and we’re planting? But it was also 80 degrees today, so we decided to be optimistic and plant most of our cold-weather, early-season crops: two rows of spinach, two of radishes, two of leaf lettuce and one of iceberg lettuce.
We’re also experimenting with two rows of onion seeds this year, since the frost is out of the ground so early. Normally we buy small onion plants which have been grown from seed in a greenhouse. We could also buy onion “sets,” which are small onion bulbs that were produced last growing season; sets are cheaper, but the onions don’t grow as big. Onions respond to the change in daylight and completely stop growing when the days start getting shorter. So plants give us a jump on the short onion growing season. We’ve already ordered ours for the year, so if our little seed experiment doesn’t work, we won’t be crying about it. At least not until we dice up our first pungent fully-grown onion!
