Memorial Day Weekend 2012

I always have my personal help in the garden. Mousse is lounging under a beach umbrella waiting for play time.

Memorial Day weekend is the usual calendar signal for northern gardeners to begin their plantings. But with a little bit of effort and time, we can lengthen our growing season.

This year we installed inexpensive and movable hoop tunnels for a few rows to get a jump on our growing season. They will also be used to extend our harvests in to the winter.  This week the heavier covers came off and the lighter covers went on. They will remain on for a few more weeks until all dangers of those surprise late spring frosts have passed.

The corn started indoors from seed was transplanted two weeks ago. It is thriving and taking off like crazy. Starting it indoors also reduced the opportunity for the bugs and insects to attack those early seedlings, which routinely happens around here.  Another upside to this is that we will have a corn harvest 3 to 4 weeks earlier than normal!  The sweet pie seeds that I inter-planted in those rows are sprouting and will provide coverage to keep the weeds to a minimum.

I am an upcycler at heart and like to reuse anything and everything I can. When cleaning out the rafters of the garage, I found this wonderful contraption. I decided to use it to support my pickling cukes. This will also provide some shade for some lettuce so it will not bolt so early.

Watering is a breeze this year. The garden is quite large and the chore of moving a sprinkler around each section was always cumbersome. I secured a heavy piece of pipe in the center of the garden.  Approximately 4 feet is above the ground. It is the perfect place to secure my sprinkler now. This enables one sprinkler to satisfy the entire garden at one time. Was this a huge time saver!