Getting Started

I apologize if you're bored of reading about the weather, but that's kind of all there is to talk about right now. I guess you can just take a break and come back in May? (I wouldn't mind doing that in life, thank you very much.)

Though today was cold and blustery as per usual this winter, yesterday was amazing: sunny and 55 beautiful degrees!

So we shoveled the remaining 32 inches of snow off the lettuce bed:

You can see by the way that Kirk's feet aren't sinking into the soil that the ground is still frozen. We've had a lot of melting in the past few days, though, and we are hoping to speed along bed prep by getting rid of the snow so the soil can dry out more quickly. We lose the insulating power of the snow in trade, but once the snow is gone completely we'll put the cold frames on that spot and speed up the warming through the magic of glass.

This snow is now heavy and icy, and there's still plenty of it. I'm sure this won't be the last bed we clear by hand this season to try to stick as close to our planting schedule as possible.

It's nice to see some brown after all that white. This photo is from yesterday, but despite today's cold temps, more of those icy bits have melted to reveal some clear soil for planting. 

Eventually.

In the meantime, lettuce seedlings that were slated to be planted outside this weekend in the aforementioned cold frames are popping up just fine on the windowsill. They'll be ready to transplant some time in April, as long as the ground is thawed out by then.