I’m beginning to wonder if spring will arrive before the end of spring. There are a few tepid signs of the season around my home: the robins and redwings have arrived, the rhubarb heads are peeping up from the dirt and there’s a barely perceptible haze of green on the various bushes. But with nighttime temps still in the 20s, the grass is too frosty to really green up, the garden soil remains dank and my warm jacket is a necessity most mornings.

I throw on that jacket as soon as the temperature gets above freezing in order to haul all my seedlings and transplants down to the greenhouse. My March enthusiasm has been tempered by cold reality – how am I going to keep all these sprouts going through what forecasts say will be an unusually cool May?

April midday temperatures have been mostly in the mid 40s to low 50s, with a few rare excursions into the 60s. So at least I’ve been able to work the dirt in the greenhouse and have slowly turned over one of my large troughs of soil. Since my outdoor compost pile is in nasty shape, I’ve been mixing in peat moss, ashes and store-bought nitrogen and then filling my large pots.

I’ve got some tomatoes that must be potted, so despite cold nights, they will soon be living full-time in the greenhouse. For protection, I’ll use my water cooler bottles with the bottoms removed, along with frost blankets, regular blankets – and if worse comes to worse – lightbulbs and heat lamps. But the greenhouse usually manages to stay 5-7 degrees warmer than the night air, so keeping my plants above 50 degrees shouldn’t be too arduous.

I also have cucumbers that are ready to go, so I will have to transplant them again, three to a pot, and keep them in the greenhouse a couple of weeks. Then into the garden they will go, tented with plastic if temperatures continue stubbornly chilly. My peppers and eggplants are still quite tiny, so I’ll continue to  haul them back and forth to the house.

I planted radishes and spinach in my other greenhouse trough, and they, at least, are coming up nicely. These plants will thrive even with 25 degree temperatures, so May should bring at least a few eatables to the table.

My grow bag experiment can so far be rated at “blah.” I filled five 3-gallon bags with dirt and planted three with lettuces and two with scallions. Although these do well in cool spring weather, they do need the soil to be somewhat warm to sprout. They are sitting in my greenhouse and so far there’s no sign of activity. I’ll wait another week or so, and then I will probably replant them. If they get going, I’ll move them onto my deck where there is good morning sun and partial afternoon shade.

Outside, along with the rhubarb making an appearance, my strawberries are showing a little green underneath last year’s bedraggled remains. A few days ago, I took off their winter covering of pine needles but left their containers buried in the garden. As soon as there is even a slight improvement in the weather, I’ll hoist them out of the soil and move them to their summer home near the asparagus. Then I’ll loosen up the soil, remove the dandelion opportunists, trim them up and spoon in some fertilizer. Sometime in June, there should be enough berries to combine with the always bountiful rhubarb, and we will treat ourselves to fruit crumbles and pies.

The dandelions are just as fond of the asparagus bed, along with that devil weed, quack grass. It’s always a race to dig through the bed before these pesky plants gain a permanent foothold. Adding to these seasonal difficulties, my asparagus usually pops up and then freezes off a few times before it manages to survive. But in a normal year, we can look forward to a breakfast of scrambled eggs and asparagus by mid-May.

As I maneuver my way through another capricious Hills spring, I often think of my old-time neighbor’s sage advice from many years ago: “Never plant anything until June.” I know I’d do well to follow it, but I guess I just like gardening the hard way.

Laura Tonkyn has spent 40 years becoming as self-sufficient as possible with her jack-of-all-trades husband, Art, on their eight-acre homestead in the Black Hills of South Dakota. She has written/edited for a number of local/regional papers, including the Rapid City Journal and Faces Magazine. Reach her at laura.tonkyn@gmail.com.

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Laura Tonkyn has spent 40 years becoming as self-sufficient as possible with her jack-of-all-trades husband, Art, on their eight-acre homestead in the Black Hills of South Dakota.

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