I probably should’ve put this post in before winter started. I live in zone 6 and we’ve had a hard winter. Lots of snow, cold, below zero temperatures, little sun, etc. Throughout the winter I continually add kitchen scraps to my compost bins . One of the tricks to having compost early in a zone such as ours is to not water your compost at the end of the last season. When you do that and have the kind of winter that we’ve had, your compost pile will be frozen solid. It’ll eventually melt, but it’ll take a lot longer to be able to work the pile. By not watering-in your compost additions the previous fall, your pile won’t be frozen and it’ll look like this. Totally workable. You can still chop things up and mix things around. It won’t be doing any true composting during this time but the minute the weather start to change and you start getting sun and warmer temps, your compost can start to be worked. If you had dumped water on it last year you wouldn’t be able to do that for several more weeks. Just a little trick that I do so that I can some finished compost a little earlier.

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It’s all about bed preparation for me right now.  This shows my SFG beds covered in plastic.  The first bed in the foreground, which isn’t covered, is my asparagus bed.  No need to cover that.  Then you can see my 2X16 bed on the left, my 4X16 bed on the right, followed by my covered leaves.  You can’t see what’s behind that-an uncovered 3X3 strawberry bed, but then you can see a covered 4X4 box.  If you look hard enough you’ll see a tomato tower in the back.  That’s a 1X4′ box that I use for 8 heads of lettuce and vertical crops like tomatoes, pole beans or squash.  That’s covered too.   I’ve got a bunch of things ready to go out into the garden, but a few of the boxes aren’t quite ready yet. These were the boxes that were in the shade all winter and have been de-thawed in the past week or so. I’m holding off on putting anything in the garden right now. Starting tomorrow(Tuesday)we have snow in the forecast for seven days straight. I was starting to get bothered about this, but I have to remind myself, it’s still February. What a bummer. I’m thinking after that we should see a marked improvement in the evening temperatures. So right now I’m sprouting all kinds of lettuce seeds, pac choi, arugula, radicchio, and swiss chard. My two early tomato plants are about 8 inches high right now and looking very good. They’re especially made to grow in greenhouses, which these will go into later this week. In a couple of weeks I’ll be starting to post youtube instructional videos. I’ll start at the beginning and move on from there-how to construct a good box, gathering items for the compost bin, making the perfect soil, making a grid, etc. I hope you’ll come back to visit.[ois skin=”below post”]

I’ve been using a different weighted plastic this year to get me through the winter. Usually I’ve used a 6-mil plastic but now I’ve got a heavier duty commercial plastic covering my square foot gardens. The sun came out early today and it was 43 when I got home from work. I’d been used to plastic covers increasing the temps about 30 degrees warmer than the outside air. The thermostat showed about 82-a 40 degree increase. There’s a lot of things that can grow at that temperature, and the things growing under there right now probably aren’t the ones that can. I had to make sure that I vented it-in this case I just pulled the plastic off about half-way so it stayed fairly warm underneath but protected from the wind. So far things are growing nicely under the plastic-regardless of the harsh winter we’ve been experiencing.[ois skin=”below post”]