Outsmarting Mother Nature

While I am an avid gardener I am still only slightly advanced from a beginner in many respects but one thing I do know, you cannot outsmart Mother Nature.  That is to say, no matter how good the weather can appear we gardeners in Southern Alberta know that we cannot put out bedding out plants before the May long weekend (and many won’t until June 1^st).   Generally I go with the May long weekend unless we have had an unseasonable long, cold winter.  This year I am very tempted to put plants out earlier than that as we have had an incredibly short and mild winter but I am not going to let Mother Nature outfox me.  Instead, I am using my greenhouse to cold frame many of the vegetables that I hope to grow this year.  I am having success with tomatoes, peppers and pumpkins of all things.

Southern Alberta is a very challenging area to grow anything out of the ordinary but things that I seem to have had good luck with are raspberries, gooseberries and asparagus.  I am leaning towards planting more items that are perennial in nature rather than a lot of small vegetables that I cannot handle in large quantities.  One of the challenges that I experience is watering the garden since it is a fair distance from my taps.  This means multiple hoses which have to be unscrewed at intervals to accommodate the front flower beds and then extended to reach the back garden.  One certainly gets a lot of exercise in walking and bending when gardening in a large area.

I attempted to over winter some miniature roses in containers by placing them in the garage where they would have consistent temperatures and yet wouldn’t experience a hard freeze.  That unfortunately did not seem to make any difference, they do not look as though they have made it.  The year before I had then in the sunroom but they didn’t like that either as they seem to require to go dormant for at least a few weeks.  Gardeners can read up on a lot of facts but it really comes down to experimenting with your own area and figuring things out.

But that’s part of the fun of gardening, discovering what you can grow that no one else can.  I’m still waiting for the lightbulb.