The Winter Garden

In honor of upcoming temperatures that promise to rise above 15F, I did a little bit of garden prep work this afternoon. 

I've read quite a bit online about winter sowing, which plants seeds in little "greenhouses" made of milk jugs and takeout containers and lets them freeze and thaw outside until seeds germinate on their own.  It's good for cold-hardy plants, and those who have tried it seem to have had a lot of luck.  I started small, with two 2-liter Coke bottles planted with alpine strawberries - Yellow Wonder in one, Ruegen red in the other.  These seeds actually call for cold treating, so I figure a few months outside is just as good as a couple of weeks in the freezer, right?  I used about a third of the seeds I have in the winter sowing containers, and will start the rest indoors as a back-up.   

My little vegetable patch is looking pretty pathetic these days, but such is the lot of the Minnesota garden in February.  There is garlic hiding under the snow, and its scapes should be the first thing we get to enjoy come spring.  We'll be building a few more raised beds this spring, and I'll be following a somewhat modified Square Foot Gardening method, since I don't have much sunny space. 

The other gardening project of the day was putting up a fluorescent light in the basement for starting seeds later this spring.  We used an old fluorescent fixture from my parents' kitchen, and I rewired it so it has a plug, rather than being hard-wired.  (This sounds much more impressive than it actually is.  They make cords specifically for this purpose, so all I had to do was match white to white, black to black, put on some wire nuts, and recognize that GND means "ground."  Now you know my secret.) 

There's not much extra space in the basement with all the renovations going on, so this gives new meaning to the term "rigged up."  The chains hanging from the joists didn't quite match up with the work surface, so the light is held where it needs to be by leftover metal ties from our chain link fence.  All the junk that used to be stored in the main basement room is shoved into the furnace/laundry/work room where the seeds will be.  In order to get to the light, you need to slide between an unused bed footboard, many old cans of paint, the furnace, and the freezer.  But it should do the job, and the space will hopefully soon be full of tomato, pepper, and herb seedlings.