Start Your Spring Garden

As the main growing season winds down and fall gardens are being planted across much of the country, you might think it would be time for me to post on fall gardening.

Fall gardens are well-worth doing, but instead of jumping on that train I’m going to focus on what you can do right now that will make your spring gardens better than they’ve ever been.

Gardeners, like most people, tend to think of their gardening in terms of one season. When you step back, however, and see how building up your plots and planning ahead will benefit your gardening for years to come, a whole new window opens.

Having a long time horizon benefits you in more ways than just making money and investing wisely. In homesteading, it may mean you

Fall is also a great time to save seeds, provided you’ve planned ahead by letting at least a percentage of your crops go to seed. I raise my own seeds for some crops (beans, sorghum, mustard, amaranth, pumpkins) and just buy them for other crops with hard-to-save seed (I’m looking at you, cabbage). In a crisis, seed-saving will be vital so it’s good to start practicing now (if you sign up for my newsletter at www.thesurvivalgardener.com, you can get a free copy of my little survival crop comic book which contains info on saving seeds. It also contains drawings of a demented camel).

When you harvest seeds, make sure they’re good and dry, then pack them in mason jars sealed tightly and stored in the fridge. Don’t open those jars right away when you pull them out in the spring. Instead, let them sit on the counter until they hit room temperature, otherwise the resulting condensation may cause problems for the ones you put back into the fridge after taking out your spring seeds.

Fall and winter are also good times to buy seeds from catalogs for planting in the spring. There’s nothing like sitting on the sofa with a cup of tea and dreaming of the sun-warmed melons and juicy tomatoes you’re going to grow next year.

Conclusion

Feeding the soil, opening up the ground and getting your seeds ready now will mean there’s a lot less to do in the spring when most gardeners are flying into a mad panic trying to get lots of tasks done all at once. There’s nothing better than letting Nature do the work for you over the winter… allowing you to reap the benefits in the spring… and often for years to come. Good rich soil and great gardens don’t happen overnight. Start your spring gardens now and you’ll be way ahead of the curve.