The huge amount of snow we’ve received over the last two weeks left all of us ready to celebrate when it was followed by a week of bright, sunny 50+ degree days.
Warm sun rays, natural vitamin D, and a general longing to be outdoors after staying snuggled up inside for a couple of weeks has energized all of us. After spending the afternoon playing in the sandbox, my 6-year-old asked, “Mama, I know there’s still some snow, but can we plant our garden tomorrow?”
Now, we live in the Colorado Rockies. The frost date here is in May. In spite of the warm weather, it’s not time to plant an outdoor garden yet. But given my son’s enthusiasm, we’ll soon start planning. My son received several seed packages for his recent birthday gifts from friends who know that he loves to grow things. So we pulled them all out, took a look at the variety of seeds we already have, and talked about where and how we might plant those things.
My 6-year-old has big visions. He wants to plant an entire orchard (complete with bear resistant fencing, and a bee hive in the middle to pollinate all of our trees), as well as plant several other gardens worth of edible “crops.” I love this vision, and part of me enthusiastically says, “Yes! Let’s grow all of our own produce.”
Then a quiet voice in the back of my mind whispers the reminder that it’ll be a huge amount of work to get our normal plots going again, plus I’ll be doing the bulk of the gardening with a very active toddler in tow. So we talk about scaling back our plans and filling the garden areas that are already mostly prepared. I remind him that we’ll have a ton of weeding to do this year, as our garden plots haven’t been cultivated since before the big flood came through our home and yard 1.5 years ago.
In his excitement to help, he’s ready to dig. He’s charting where we’re going to plant a wide assortment of greens, strawberries, peppers, and squash.
We’re all excited to smell wisps of spring on the breezes blowing through our canyon. We’ll plan a special celebration to welcome it officially in another 1.5 weeks.
Part of the fun of gardening is the planning! Waiting until after the last frost date is hard. But maybe you could start a few seeds in small peat pots for transplanting after the frost date.
We’re thinking about starting some garden plants inside, but haven’t got them going yet. We’re also growing some sprouts in our indoor hydroponic ecosystem (I’ll post about that soon!).