Prepping the garden for spring
Date: Sunday, February 5th
Blog Post by Louis Bubrig, MKG Assistant Coordinator
The season at Morven Kitchen Garden officially started on January 23rd. One look at the weather forecast might lead you to believe there’s not much work to do around here. But luckily for us, there’s never a shortage of work to be done around the garden, even in the cold weather and short days of winter. So what have we been up to?
Starting seeds
On average, Charlottesville sees its last frost of the winter around the first week of April. Most crops can’t be started in the ground before then. But instead of twiddling our thumbs and waiting for April before we start our crops, we can start them much earlier in our nursery greenhouse. Then, when the weather warms up a bit, we can plant out our greenhouse seedlings and have a couple weeks’ head start.
Some beet seedlings enjoying the warmth of the greenhouse
We’re starting our earliest crops first: beets, lettuce, kale, and chard. Soon we’ll be starting our summer crops like tomatoes and peppers.
Prepping beds
When the weather warms up, we will be planting nonstop, so the winter is a great time to make sure our garden beds are in tip top shape. First, we clear weeds out of the bed, which is made easier by our garden’s policy to cover all beds over winter with a tarp, mulch, or cover crop. Then, we give the bed some compost which will fertilize the bed and—over time—loosen up the hard clay soil we have in Virginia.
Jayna spreads compost onto a bed to give the soil nutrients and organic matter
Lastly, we use a low-tech tool called a broadfork which loosens the soil and gives our future crops lots of pores and cracks to send their roots down into.
Owen uses the broadfork to loosen the soil and reduce compaction
Working in the greenhouse
In addition to the greenhouse where we start our seeds, we also have two additional greenhouses that stay warm enough to grow some new crops and was warm enough over the winter to keep some old crops alive. We have lettuce, spinach, onions, and peas that need all the TLC we can give them. And on especially sunny days, our crops in the greenhouse are actually more in danger of overheating than they are of freezing, which is when we roll up the sides and let some cool air in.
Our red lettuce is happy in the greenhouse
Harvesting outside
Finally, there are a few crops here and there that can survive the winter outside. We protect them with row cover which keeps the wind off them and locks in heat during the day. They don’t grow much, if at all, during the winter, but they maintain the size they got to last autumn and are ready for harvest whenever we want them.
Kathleen harvests arugula that has survived the winter
The winter at Morven Kitchen Garden is a surprisingly busy. Our work now sets the stage for an even busier spring. Every day gets a little longer and a little warmer. Every week, we see new insects in the garden, new birds in the sky, and new blooms on the native plant species. And as we transplant weeks-old crops into the garden, battle weeds that are supercharged by the warming weather, and sweat through our clothes as we rush through our summer harvests, we’ll probably miss trudging around in our coats and hats, prepping the garden for an excellent season.
