Whether you have an established garden, are making a new garden, or are gardening in containers. Spring is gardening season, and these spring garden quick start ideas can help you get quick spring wins.
I live in a warm zone four, or a cool zone five. With a yard that has been used for gardening, but not by me. These ideas are what I’m actively doing to get my garden running and producing as quickly, and easily, as possible.
With spring springing, the spring garden is one of the most intoxicating times of year. The soil is damp and warming up after the coldness of winter, and everything is just bursting with the urge to grow. Weed seeds get the earliest start in the garden, but even dandelions can be a quick food win. Dandelion salad is delicious.
These tips and tricks are part of ninja gardening, with the aim for bountiful crops with a minimum amount of time investment. Not that you can ignore your garden, but that with little minutes and small moments, you can successfully produce an abundance of fresh food for your family.
For more information about ninja gardening, check out ninja gardening 101.
Warm the Soil:
The wait for an in-ground spring garden is simple, the soil needs to be warm enough to work. You can accelerate soil warming in a few ingenious and simple ways. For seeds to start, you need to have the soil workable down to 4 inches.
The first, put a row cover or small, plastic covered hoop house over the soil you want to warm up. Wait three or four days, particularly if you have sunny weather. Then, check how far down your soil is thawed.
Second, set up in-ground containers with black plastic edging, or a plant pot with the bottom removed. This raises the soil above the level of the ground, and the black plastic collects early spring sunshine to warm the soil faster. As a bonus, this method also gives you a hot seat for heat loving plants like basil, tomatoes, and peppers for later season planting and transplanting.
Third, and my least favorite, you can simply cover the ground with black plastic when the weather is going to be nice for a few days. The black plastic heats the ground, and when you remove it after four or five days, your soil is warm enough to be worked and some of the weeds have sprouted and can be tilled in.
Note that you will have to keep some protection over your early spring beds if there is still danger of a killing frost. This brings us to the spring garden ninja tactic number two.
Short Rows:
If your normal planting rows are the length of the bed, or plot, it will be challenging to protect the whole area from re-chilling in the spring weather. Short rows are rows that are 12-24 inches long, that’s it. They will fit under a low grow tunnel/mini green house, and they’ll fit inside a cold frame.
Today, I planted a mini hoop house with 10 short rows of five cold hardy vegetables, two short rows of each. In a week or so, they will germinate, and by the end of March I’ll be able to harvest some salad greens from that mini hoop house. These greens will be ready to harvest right when I’m direct sowing my regular greens, with a three week jump on the gardening season.
Preparing and planting my mini-hoop house took 10 minutes today. While I also did a few other gardening tasks, like starting to prepare a new bed, the planting itself was a “little minute” extra task that I added based on how warm the soil was. This is a perfect example of ninja gardening in action!
This brings me to the third ninja gardening tactic for the spring garden.
Succession Planting:
Short, environmentally protected rows are great for getting a jump on the growing season. They also lead directly into succession sowing. Succession planting is where you plant the same seeds, in new rows, every few weeks as soon as the ground is right for them to grow. Favorites to do this with include the cold hardy crops, radishes, lettuce, peas, bok choi, kale, and spinach.
Using short rows, it is easier to create efficient succession planting, without being afraid of overwhelming your family with early lettuce and too many radishes to handle. Another version of succession sowing is to simultaneously plant two or three varieties of the same plant, with a different number of days to maturity. For example, three types of carrots with 50 days, 60 days, and 80 days to maturity. Or, for tomatoes, some determinant and indeterminate types at the same time. The determinate types will produce around the same time frame, while the indeterminate tomatoes will keep growing and producing until frost causes them to die back.
Weeding:
What does weeding have to do with ninja gardening? Everything. Nothing is worse than a garden overwhelmed by weeds because it was ignored, except for watering, for a month. Spring is the best time to get a jump on weeds, so grab a cultivator tool, or hoe, and take two or three minutes to run it over the surface of your garden beds. Any young or newly germinated weeds can be ousted with minimal effort and time, as long as they are caught early.
Weeding can be minimized by the third ground-warming tactic, of putting black plastic over the ground. As long as you don’t have perennials in your garden, you can cover the ground with black plastic when a sunny week is predicted. The plastic will heat the ground, cause the weeds to sprout, and smother them to death, removing the first crop of weed seeds from your ground, ninja style.
Back to You:
What tactic would you add to this short list of ninja spring garden attacks?
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