Spring Garden Catchup
Spring is in the garden --- we've eaten our
third salad of the season, are eying the asparagus shoots we're not
allowed to eat this year, and are watching the first peas twine up out
of the ground. Meanwhile, I transplanted the broccoli and cabbage
seedlings we
started indoors
into a cold frame, wishing I'd started them there from the beginning.
Our sunken cold frame
experiment is ready to analyze --- no hard data, but these
photographs speak for themselves. The lettuce in the normal
height part of the bed is about a week ahead of the lettuce in the
sunken portion. I guess that light, not temperature, is the
limiting factor for lettuce in the early spring.
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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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Hey Anna,
I'm slowly working my way through the archives. I don't have any experience with pit gardening myself, but while the sunken bed may indeed shelter your lettuce from harsh winds, it will actually catch and trap cold air (whereas cold air will flow off of a raised bed). I imagine the lower light in a sunken bed is also a factor, like you said, but temperature is probably still playing a role.