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| Rhubarb springs eternal in USDA hardiness zone 3 |
Usually on St. Patrick’s Day in northeastern Minnesota, the ground is frozen so solidly there is no way you can sink a shovel into it. Even after you shovel the 18 inches of snow off the top.
So when a record-breaking warm spell sent temperatures soaring 20 degrees above normal for nearly a week, the gardeners among us got all jazzed, as if the gardening sap in our veins defrosted and started running early. People were raking lawns, uncovering tender perennials and sweeping the sand-salt grit off driveways and out of garages about two months early. That must mean extra growing days!
At a fruit and vegetable seminar put on by the county extension service, 160 gardeners filled nearly every aluminum folding chair in a township hall for six hours on St. Patrick’s Day.
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| Yes, you can grow a Magnolia in NE MN |
“Success with Small Fruits: Blueberries, Raspberries and Strawberries,” and a new fruit called a “Haskap.”
When the presenter went over tomato specie trial results in 2011, you could nip the tension with a pruning shear. No simple Early Girls or Big Boys sent up from the southern headquarters of the Big Box stores for us. Many in this room nurture tomato plants indoors from seed. Many others comb locally-owned garden centers for species that are sure to bear ripe fruit in our short growing season.
We were waiting to hear what would work. Fourth of July and Celebrity and Defiant did well, and pencils and pens scribbled notes in the seminar handbook. But when he said a tomato named “Polvig” had produced as much as 20 pounds of fruit on one plant, a vacuum was created from 160 gardeners sucking in their collective breath.
Yes, garden geeks get their thrills in strange ways. Soil testing, then amending with peat, or compost, or fertilizer is popular. Different ways of constructing raised bed gardens or trellises for climbing vine plants get us all breathing faster. And then we move on to different ground covers (landscape fabric vs. plastic, green vs. black vs. clear vs. red) to keep weeds down and heat the soil, are always a conversation-starter. Perhaps nothing gets more people talking then how to cover plants set out too early, or plants that are trying to be protected from a killing frost in September to extend the growing season up to another four or five weeks! (I lost my basil last year in early September…dang, since basil is the most cost-effective plant.)
Gardeners everywhere share the health benefits of home-grown food and the incredibly better taste of fresh garden produce. Likewise, “garden therapy” of digging in the soil, coaxing something from a seed to a strong plant that produces an edible gift has helped many a stressed human find relaxation, or the opportunity to work through some rough patches, if not downright nirvana.
But those of us who toil and till in USDA Zones 2, 3 and 4 are a special breed.
We plant seeds outdoors during a soil-prep-and-plant marathon on Memorial Day weekend and then we cannot stand up straight for three days.
We have about 12 minutes on June 1 to get the entire greenhouse planted outdoors. We are so desperate for help we dare to enlist grumbling adolescents and any other available hand.
If we don’t get the plants we buy or the seedlings we grew indoors and have “hardened off” into the ground “in time,” we will spend all summer watering and weeding and get nothing but green tomatoes (and I don’t mean tomatillos, either) and red peppers that are still green. One nursery near my home closes by the second week in June. No point continuing, they must figure, it’s too late now.
Imagine our collective delight when a master gardener shared his method for getting cantaloupes and honeydews to mature in our area!! I had given up long ago after tending vines and seeing fruit form, only to have a frost ruin it. This guy assured us that – if you put your vines against a house in the hottest part of the yard, probably, and you set up trellises for the vines, and you pick varieties that mature in 75 days or less – AND HE NAMED THEM! gasp! – you could get plenty of ripe, luscious melons! This is like being given the Sparknotes of Melon Gardening in the Frigid USDA Zones. Hope springs eternal! We can try again!
We are not idiots. We know we are not going to be savoring the giant Honeyrocks that come from Indiana, or the sweet giant cantaloupe I recall purchasing as a child when my parents would stop at roadside farm markets in downstate Michigan.
But we also know that – even though the strawberries and raspberries ripen and rot in about three weeks here – there is nothing like walking out your backdoor before work and eating handfuls of fresh berries. Freezer jam lasts longer than it says it will on the package. And every spoonful, even in January, tastes like July.
Garden geeks we are, concerned with nitrogen levels and organic matter and what time of day is best for watering and whether staking and pruning are needed. I am guessing I am not the only one to go out of my way for free pine needle or wood chip mulch.
What a healthy obsession to proudly claim. We love being out in the sun, smelling and feeling the fertile earth in our hands, and finding ways to make it come alive for our benefit.
Even in Zones 2 and 3, there is nothing like a warm tomato, eaten fresh off the vine, juice dripping off your chin.
It will be difficult to hold back this year, to wait until June 1. We are being teased by the early spring, by dirt that can already be turned over, by the possibility of a longer season.
Polvig tomato, let’s go for 25 pounds in 2012!
By the way, the rhubarb is coming up, six weeks or more early!
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