The Walden Effect: Farming, simple living, permaculture, and invention.

Quarter-inch thaw

Early spring gardening

A cold winter is proof that we need to plan our spring planting schedule by soil temperature, not by the calendar.  For example, my garden spreadsheet says it's time to seed lettuce under a quick hoop and start onions in a flat inside.  But, although the latter will be feasible once I thaw the stump dirt I hacked out of a tree in the woods, the former needs to wait.  Despite preheating the lettuce bed, my thermometer is still reading below freezing just beneath the surface there.  The beautiful weekend just past only managed about a quarter-inch thaw. 



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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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The lake at Steele Creek Park froze over for the first time in years this year. There was at least 3 inches of ice on the top. It's frozen from the Nature Center shore all the way down the holler to the dam. It froze once in the 90's, and then before that it was the 70's. Apparently some very lucky idiot walked all the way across from one shore to another!

Comment by Emily from Bristol Tue Feb 4 09:30:54 2014





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