I just watched this video from Maritime Gardening and wanted to share.
The next seeds I plan to start will be quite large, and I plan to let them soak overnight first. The next time we’ll be starting smaller seeds, I might experiment with this method. Not that we have had much problem with germination rates, but that waiting until they show, and wondering if any will germinate at all, is the thing. Right now, in the tray with early peppers, two varieties have start to emerge, but one still has not, and we still have just one Butterfly Flower seedling.
The thing will be to remember to start the seeds like this, about a few days, or even a week, in advance!
I just had to share this excellent piece from the Maritime Gardening Newsletter, Failure is the Best Guru.
This is the video included with the newsletter.
I highly recommend signing up for his newsletter and subscribing to his Substack.
In regards to failures, I heartily concur. We’ve had a couple of really bad years in our garden, and learned the most from both of them! We now know how our garden spaces respond to heat waves and drought, flooding, and that we’ve got a major problem with slugs to figure out!
Welcome to my “Recommended” series of posts. These will be weekly – for now – posts about resources I have found over the past while that I found so excellent, I want to share them with you, my dear readers. 🙂 Whether or not I continue to post these, and how often they are posted, will depend on feedback. Please feel free to comment below, and if you have a favorite resource of your own, do share, and I will review them for possible future posts.
I hope you find these recommendations as useful and enjoyable as I have!
You’d think that, having grown up on this farm and with my family being subsistence farmers, I would already know how to garden here. And I guess I do, really. The thing is, I want to do things differently than my parents did. Some simple things, like trellising, which my parents never did. One of my jobs as a kid was to flip the rows of pea plants, so the sun could get at the other side. We also want to grow new things I have no experience in, use no-till methods my parents never used, and eventually have raised beds.
So basically, I’m learning how to garden, all over again.
Part of this learning curve is figuring out how to grow what we want in our climate zone, which is a zone 3. It takes extra measures to produce food in our short growing season. We can’t even take advantage of any urban heat island effects.
With that in mind, I have been looking up resources for cold climate gardening. In my searches, I have found many sites and YouTube channels dedicated to cold climate gardening. How wonderful, I would think, as I eagerly began to explore them.
Right up until I discovered that these “cold climate” gardeners were in…
Zone 5.
Really?
Just about everything I look at that I’m interested in growing is rated to zone 5. How is zone 5 considered a cold climate?
Okay, okay. I realize that these sites are almost all based in the US, and northern states are rightfully considered cold climates compared to the southern states. But I’m in frikkin’ central Canada. To us, zone 5 is almost tropical. :-D
All joking aside, it did make my searches frustrating. It turns out there just aren’t a lot of active Canadian gardening resources out there.
Maritime Gardening is run by Greg Auton, in Nova Scotia. It’s basically one person and 2,500 square feet of back yard garden! He’s been making these videos since 2016.
The only down side?
It’s still a zone 5 climate region… but it’s far closer to our situation than anything else I’ve found! There are lots of videos on how to lengthen the outdoor growing season, like getting the soil to thaw out faster, or dealing with high winds.
There are also a lot of videos on specific crops, such as garlic, onions, potatoes, and strawberries, and techniques, such as no-till gardening, using cold frames, different types of mulches, and so on.
There are videos on planning out your garden spaces, dealing with weeds and insect problems, saving seeds, harvesting and preserving.
There are even cooking videos, fermentation videos, videos on how to make tool handles, and so much more.
There is just SO much to learn from here! I highly recommend this channel as a resource.
The Re-Farmer 