Who's YOUR Farmer?

I saw this bumper sticker yesterday, in the middle of tailgate of a Ford pickup. Who's your farmer? I am my farmer!! Now that spring is actually here -- not that season which, according to the calendar is spring, but since there's still several feet of snow on the ground, it's really winter -- the snow has melted, so I can finally seriously start thinking about my garden. Okay, I have been doing a lot of thinking already, but now I can put those thoughts into action. And get my tomato plants off the hearth in the living room, and out into the greenhouse!

Although we live on a farm, and I have been known to "whisper" the hay into growing taller than our kids, I'm not really a farmer. I'd say, more of a wife-whose-husband-owns-the-farm-his-grandparents-homesteaded-on-back-in-the-1930s kind of horticulturalist. In short, I don't farm, I garden. In the garden and the greenhouse. Or rather, I attempt to grow stuff in the greenhouse. I've had a few issues with that in the past couple of years.

However, 2011 is going to be different! I hope.

Last year, I managed to successfully grow cucumbers in the greenhouse - much to the surprise of one of the ladies at our local garden centre. How did you tie them up, she asked. I used a tomato cage. The sticks and string apparatus wasn't working, so since my tomatoes were clearly stunted and not going to need the cages, I just popped them around the cucumbers and tied them up with survey tape. Fabulous. Until the frost got them in September.

This year, now that we finally live on the farm, within sight of the greenhouse, things are going to be different. For Mother's Day, my husband built a two-tiered growing bench for the greenhouse, so now I have 16 feet of growing space (in a 10 foot long greenhouse), and last night, we hooked up a heater and tested it to see how warm it would keep the greenhouse overnight. It went down to 2C last night and there was a frost. But the greenhouse, at 5:30 a.m. was 8C, with no frost. Excellent. Just have to goose the heat up a wee bit, to make it 10C overnight, and my tomatoes can move off the hearth and into their proper home.

I'm not totally sure if this is what one is supposed to use a greenhouse for, but I'm also giving my other garden plants a head start. I have planted lettuce, cucumbers, beans and peas in little peat pots and they have all sprouted in the past 10 days. My intention is to grow them in the greenhouse until the end of May, when one can finally put stuff out in the garden without too much worry of frost. In theory, this will give me a head-start on the veges, which usually come ripe all at once, and I have a heck of time getting them all harvested, eaten or preserved at once.

I'm also going to kick-start my "deer resistant" perennials this way. I have several peonies, ferns, bleeding hearts and irises ready to plant, which I would love to plant in the garden in early June as actively growing plants, not tubers. Especially since their garden is not quite ready yet.

Who am I kidding? It's not ready at all!! I have two big rocks and two big piles of topsoil (one of which is in the wrong location) and a general idea of how big I want to make the garden. It will, when completed, provide an awesome view from our living room windows, with the native bush behind as a backdrop for the pink, blue and white blooms I've chosen.

Provided, of course, that these plants really are deer-resistant, and Madame Deer and her baby leave them alone. Boris the moose appears only interested in eating the leaves off trees, especially willow trees, so theoretically, she won't eat them. Yes, I know, Boris is a boy name, but the kids thought that would be an excellent name for our resident moose - who, when the house was being built, thought the garage made an excellent moose shelter! She has no antlers, therefore she is a girl moose. I believe her middle name is Princess though, hahaha.

So, today begins Tomato-growing-in-the-greenhouse experiment #3. Experiments #1 & 2 were dismal failures. I actually grew the tomatoes better in the dining room in the past 2 years, than I did in the greenhouse. More on that in my next post.

Thanks for reading - and happy gardening!!