It is, almost, time. We are so close to our last frost date it’s tempting to get ahead of the weather. We are still one week from our last frost date here in zone 5b. The date this year is supposed to be May 10th. But, just be cause we pass that date it doesn’t mean there will be no more frosts.
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We learned that the hard way last year when we got a pretty hard frost on May 17th. We had prematurely planted out our garden with all our tomatoes and some squash the week prior. Everything died during that frost. This year we are waiting until 2 weeks after our last frost date to start planting outside.
Another thing to consider is that there is a full moon on May 23rd this year. Some old farmers knowledge is that there is a greater chance of a frost on a full moon. We will be keeping a close eye on the forecast to determine exactly when we will plant out our garden.
If you’d like to follow along with how we navigate this major gardening milestone this year you can subscribe below and get the article directly in your inbox. You can also catch up with everything we’ve done so far in this 2024 gardening season here.
Seed Starting:
We started a couple of more trays worth of seeds this week. This is the last of the seeds that we start indoors. Everything else will either be direct sowed or we won’t plant it this year.
This week we started two varieties of cucumbers, two varieties of Watermelon, Pumpkins, Brussel Sprouts, and two varieties of Cantaloupe.
In total, we started another 36 plants indoors this week.
To go along with all of those veggies, I got the flower garden bed finished. It’s about three feet wide and twenty feet long. We started seven varieties of flowers from seed this week. With plans to start a couple more after our last frost date.
This will be interesting to see how it turns out. There’s a mix of perennials and annuals, as well as a mix of blooming times.
Update On Seed Starting:
Our Goji berries are in need of a transplant so that’s what I did this week. Doing a little more research on them, they should be transplanted when they have their third true leaf. That happened a little while ago and the biggest one has had it’s growth stunted.
There were three planted in one four inch pot and luckily the roots came apart fairly easily. Five Goji Berry plants were transplanted into bigger pots in total. Ideally two or three will survive to make it into the ground.
Another vegetable that we started a long time ago was our sweet potato. It’s been over three months since we put it into some soil to get slips to grow.
We are about three weeks away from when we could conceivably transplant sweet potato slips outside so this is perfect timing. One slip is big enough to start rooting with two more right behind it.
We’ll keep the sweet potato in the soil and keep harvesting slips for as long as we need to fill out our garden bed.
Transplanting:
The Goji Berries weren’t the only thing that got transplanted this week. I built two hoop houses and transplanted our broccoli and cabbage into one.
We also bought two more blueberry bushes, and three pear trees. We already had two blueberries so they were easy to deal with, but the bare root pear trees were new to me.
In the end they were fairly easy to get into the ground and give an initial prune too. Here’s hoping for some fruit next year.
Pruning:
The usual task of pruning suckers off of our tomatoes was done again this week. Another task that has become a more than weekly occurrence is trimming our onion seedlings. They will likely get transplanted to a garden bed this week so this might be the last haircut.
Harvesting:
Like the last few weeks, we have continued to harvest lettuce, radishes, kale, and spinach. This week we were able to harvest something new.
Our first harvest of asparagus, and broccoli rabe (rapini). The best part about this harvest was that the broccoli rabe was a volunteer plant that grew in the floor of our greenhouse from seeds that fell two years ago.
These were oven roasted as a side dish to our burgers with a little salt and pepper and they were the best veggies we’ve had in a while.
Weather:
The weather this week as ideal for our spring garden. The lowest the temp got was 7°C and the high for the week was 22°C. The week also had a nice mix of sun and cloud with enough rain mixed in that the garden didn’t need to get watered.
Next weeks forecast is to be exactly the same. There is no freezing weather and nothing higher than 21. If this continues we will be off to a great start for our garden in 2024.
Upcoming Next Week:
Next week will be one of transplanting and cleaning up garden beds. We have a few things like our onions that will need to be transplanted next week. Other than that we have a lot of garden beds to get ready before the real transplant rush starts in about three weeks.
I also need to build some new trellises for our tomatoes this year and move our cucumber and cantaloupe trellis from where they were last year.
Conclusion:
This concludes this entry into our gardening this week series. We hope you enjoyed it and we hope you will subscribe and follow along with us on our journey. Also, be sure to check out our other blog entries where we have growing guides, seed saving guides, and recipes. If you have any questions or comments please leave them below.
