the garden project, year two

After a week or so of snot-freezing-cold temperatures hitting -45°C/-49°F with the wind chill, we’re having a heat wave. As I type, it’s only -7°C/19°F! Shorts weather! It gives me hope that this winter thing may one day come to an end. One can only hope.

Before my (failed attempt at a) run yesterday, I traipsed into my back yard to have a peek at how deep the snow is over my garden. I know there is a LOT of snow back there, but I haven’t been in my back yard since October, besides to walk the path that goes to the garage.

The snow is deep. The furthest my leg went in was past my knee and half-way up my thigh. I’m pretty sure it’s deeper, though, and that I wasn’t getting through the bottom layers of ice and snow.

All this is to say that I will not be planting any time soon. Obviously. But planning what I shall plant in four to five months makes it a bit easier to get through the six to eight months of winter we have here in Saskatchewan. I have no use for winter. Unless, of course, you count my apparent love of photographing it.

I’ve been thinking for the last few weeks about what I’m going to plant this spring. One the many super-awesome people I had the opportunity to meet at Blissdom Canada last October was Gayla of You Grow Girl. She’s been tweeting gardeny things lately and has been inspiring me to start planning. I opened up the spreadsheet I’d drawn up last year, renamed the file, and started playing around with what should go where. My garden is 480 square feet, 190 of which is paths and four of which is usually flooded by the garage drain pipe, which leaves me with 286 square feet in which to grow things. That’s 18 four-by-four foot squares.

I’m using the same methods I used last year: square-foot gardening and the Back to Eden method. They worked so well, why do anything different? I mean, I’m sure I’ll learn new things, but I’ll stick by those two.

I was reading through my garden posts from last year and figured I should have them accessible so I put them on their own little blog since I blew up the one they were originally posted on. If you click on over here, you will find a very plainly-designed site with twelve whole posts. I apparently sucked at writing about the garden after the fact, but most of what I wanted to read is there. I won’t be adding to that site, it serves only archive purposes.

Since the snow fell half-way through October and has not melted once since then, I didn’t get a chance to completely eradicate living things from the garden. I guess I naively thought I’d have more time. There wasn’t much left, just a few things at the very back, but I can’t wait to get in there to prepare it for planting in … June. That seems so far away.

Last year I used a combination of seeds and starter plants, but this year my goal is to do everything from seed, starting the seeds inside in April or so. The site uharvest.ca was recommended to me for seed-buying, so I think I’ll start there. I kept all the containers I used last year, so I should have enough to start seeds. Noah will just love it when I take up half our tiny house with soil.

Forty-two days till Spring!